Don’t make kids miserable about the news

The other day, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, a neighbor I hadn’t seen in a long time said hello as she walked past the house. “I hope your family is doing well,” she said, and then looked concerned. “As well as you can do in times like these. You must be even more worried, with kids.“
“Uh, well,” I said, “The kids live in the present, and we try to enjoy the present.”

Inside I was thinking: “This is why liberals are so sad.”

Don’t feed a sense of powerlessness

Among my lefty friends, it seems the way you show dedication is to be grieved and outraged. This is often a destructive way to respond to the world’s problems!

From Matt Ygelesias’ excellent piece “Why are young liberals so depressed?”

“Stop encouraging people to catastrophize. I have at times in my life struggled seriously with depression. . . . one thing that strikes me about this discourse is how much the heavily political treatments of depression diverge from the practices they try to teach you in therapy.
For example, it’s important to reframe your emotional response as something that’s under your control:

• Stop saying “so-and-so made me angry by doing X.”
• Instead say “so-and-so did X, and I reacted by becoming angry.”

And the question you then ask yourself is whether becoming angry made things better? Did it solve the problem? Did the ensuing situation make you happier? The point isn’t that nobody should ever feel anger or that anger is never an appropriate reaction to a situation. But some of us have a bad habit of becoming angry in ways that makes our lives worse, and we should try not to do that.”

He quotes Jill Filipovic:
“Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response.”

Liberal teens are getting sadder

A large 2022 study assessed US 12th-graders on depressive affect, using their agreement/disagreement with statements like “Life often seems meaningless” and “It feels good to be alive.” Teens of all stripes are getting sadder, but especially liberals, and particularly liberal girls.

I have three daughters, one of whom is a bleeding heart by nature. Jeff and I didn’t set out to make them environmentalists, largely because there aren’t a lot of useful steps kids can take. But our oldest found and absorbed a lot of worries from school and children’s podcasts. At one point she panicked when she learned she produces carbon dioxide with every breath (despite our explanation that plants do the reverse). She recently told us we should never throw away styrofoam, lest it go to a landfill, and that we should instead store it in our house. She’s angry about invasive plants hurting butterflies.

Clearly we haven’t managed to prevent the zeitgeist from reaching her, but I don’t want to feed her more sorrow.

Some things we do

• Our kids haven’t done social media so far (our oldest is 11). Once they’re more online, I think social media is one of the last things we want them accessing.
• To the extent that Jeff and I consume news, we read it rather than watching or listening to radio. The kids don’t overhear news broadcasts at home or in the car. 
• I don’t actively try to keep up with the news, although we both see news discussed on social media and discussion sites. I agree with various takes on why most adults should stop following news to the extent that they do.
• Correct factual misperceptions. The area where this seems most common among young people is the belief that climate change will kill everyone.
• Don’t take as many cues from the broader culture about what  topics children need to hear about. This is coming from my experience communicating about the killing of George Floyd, which at the time my circle encouraged telling kids about. But I think this pretty clearly moved my six-year-old to viewing her classmates of color as a victim class instead of ordinary kids.
• I try to treat anxiety as an indicator about myself, not about the state of the world. My sadness and anxiety about the world fluctuate a lot, in ways that don’t reliably track what good or bad things are actually happening. I want to convey that to the kids when they’re distressed about their growing awareness of world problems.

Discussing hard topics

I see a lot of parents discussing “What to tell my kids about Gaza” “How to tell my kid about shootings,” etc. My guess is that in many cases, you just don’t need to bring it up. When I guess that something has been discussed at school, or if the kids raise a topic, I ask what questions they have. But often they just don’t have questions, especially with my less politically curious elementary schooler.

There are many sad things happening all the time that we don’t feel a need to douse our kids with. Other sad things that happened this week:

• Almost 50,000 people died from cardiovascular disease every day
• My tax dollars funded a lot of things I don’t agree with
• An earthquake in Turkey killed 35 people

As a society, we don’t think children need to be informed about these on a regular basis.

This doesn’t mean we have to avoid all negative or complicated topics. I want my kids to learn about history, economics, and policy. Things I talked about with them recently:

• How do forest fires happen, and why controlled burning can make sense (after visiting a forest that had partially burned)
• How does cancer kill a person, and the fact that cancer treatments are getting better (after our 4-year-old asked again how her grandmother died)
• Why are Israel and Palestine still fighting, and what the US’s involvement is (after our 11-year-old asked about a sign reading “not another bomb”)
• What were poorhouses / what is Social Security (while reading aloud a Terry Pratchett novel with an impoverished old man)
• Why the Jewish side of the family needed to leave Europe (after reading a picture book about Ellis Island — the book has a light touch, but I told them more about pogroms)

There will also be times when you must discuss a painful topic with kids: when a family member is dying, when they’re already aware and distressed, etc.

Watching my own media intake

Much of what kids absorb comes from what adults around them find important.

I want to understand many things about the world, but breaking news is rarely a good way to understand patterns. For example, Jeff is interested in plane crashes, but the day of a plane crash is the worst time to understand why it happened. The best information is available 1-2 years after a crash, when the full report is out.

I prefer following some writers/journalists I find thoughtful rather than general news sites. In the rare cases when there’s breaking news that I would want to quickly take action on, like when PEPFAR was being cut, some journalists I follow highlighted the situation. 

Is it neglected? Is it tractable?

A framework commonly used in effective altruism is looking at the scale/size of a problem, the neglectedness (is it already getting a lot of attention/work), and the tractability (the ease of making progress).

By the time any problem has come to the attention of children, it’s getting a ton of adult attention too.

Some problems like climate change have steps children can take, albeit very small ones (and somehow often focused on making birdfeeders out of trash). Other problems like armed conflicts are extremely difficult for anyone to make a dent in, other than by donating to relief efforts.

The problem Jeff and I consider most important is AI and the dangers it might bring in forms like war, terrorism, or takeover. We don’t talk much with the kids about this, largely because there’s nothing they can do about it. In the vein of Fred Rogers’ “Look for the helpers” advice, our kids know that some people are working on this as their job, like how Jeff is working to detect bioengineered pandemics. I expect we might start talking more about useful careers the kids could consider once they’re in their mid-teens.

I’m disappointed about how governance in my country is going. But that’s mostly because I’m worried about effects to other more vulnerable people; I don’t expect particularly bad effects for my family.

Americans are fortunate in many ways

You’ll rarely see these covered in the news, but many things have stayed good or gotten better:

• Even with higher prices recently, Americans spend a lower fraction of household budgets on groceries than in any other nation; in 2023 6.8% on average compared to around 12% in Europe or around 20% in Latin America.
• Child mortality and violent crime in the US are much lower than when Jeff and I were children.
• Air pollution in the US and other rich countries has also been getting lower over our lifetimes.
• Houses used to catch on fire a lot when more people smoked; house fires are much rarer now.
• Cancer survival rates have been getting better with time.

And my family is lucky in important ways:

• We have loving relationships with each other, and with family and friends.
• We have hot and cold water at the touch of a tap, central heating, a dishwasher, and many other things our ancestors would have envied. 

The fact that our family is lucky doesn’t mean we should be complacent about all the people who aren’t so lucky. This is why we donate a significant part of our income. I want my children to feel both that we’re fortunate and that it’s important to help make things better.

Related:
Stop telling children that climate change will destroy their world, Kelsey Piper
Semafor, a short news digest I find less overwhelming than full news sites
Conveying wealth and poverty to kids