Why our kids listen to the news

This summer, Eli and a friend attended a week-long day camp that involved car-pooling the 45-minute-one-way drive with younger siblings in the van.  Eli and his friend both have big interests in current events and weather, so we often spent our drives listening to and discussing the news.  The conversations that followed were part-hilarious, part-insightful, and completely my favorite part of the commute.

If we are in the van and it isn't time to listen to an evening baseball game, it is no longer unusual to have one of our kids (other than dance-party Julian) ask to listen to the news.  We listen to news from the left and news from the right, and we talk about why those two sources sometimes sound different.  We listen to specials on elections and natural disasters.  We listen to shows that have first-hand reports from war-torn countries.  We learn together, we question together, we laugh together, we hurt together.

As parents, we battle the idol of protection.  We want to protect our children from the bad news of the world.  We tell ourselves this is the right thing to do, because we don't want them to be afraid, or to have nightmares about hurricanes and poverty and civil war.  Kids hear little bits of the news and then want to be reassured that what they have just heard will never happen to them.  And sometimes, we parents pad their safety nets with promises that we can't ensure are ever kept, all in the name of protecting these ones we love from feeling pain (and honestly, protecting ourselves from seeing them in pain).  

Across the world, there are parents living in the midst of awful circumstances who love their children and are deeply working to protect their children - but they don't have the first-world privilege of protecting their children from hearing about bad things.  They are trying to protect their children in the midst of the bad things.  And I simply cannot get those moms and dads and their etched brows out of my mind when I hear the news, and I cannot imagine what they would think if they knew that we turn down the sound on their stories so that our own children sleep better at night.

Because with privilege comes responsibility.  I did not do a single good thing before I was born to ensure that I would live in the United States, and those parents did not do a single wrong thing before they were born to ensure they would live in a hard land.  Humbled by the reality that God placed me where I am for a purpose, I want to be part of leading a family who lives responsibly.  To ask as a unit, what can we do?  How can we be a part of the solution? 

We who know our children best have to find where the age-appropriate boundaries are, of course.  In our family, for example, we listen to the news instead of watching it because we have children who cannot yet maturely handle strong visual stimuli.  We show them pictures or clips that often have someone making a difference in the midst of the suffering - because, as Fred Rogers said, 'When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers.  You will always find people helping."'  And then we talk about how we can be helpers.  We also keep an eye on their faces to see when enough is enough, when it is time to stop feeding with information and move to taking our concern to the feet of Jesus.  

We don't do this perfectly by any means.  Life is full: sometimes debriefing from the events of school seems all that our family can emotionally handle at dinner.   But sometimes, we talk politics and campaigns and platforms.  Sometimes, we cry during bedtime prayers for kids who need to know someone cares for them.  Sometimes our kids can hold their own in conversations about current events, and other times they have no idea what is even going on in the world.

The kids are growing up, and the parents are, too; life is a journey.  As we journey together, we want to live with our eyes and ears open to others and our lives open to Jesus - even when it is hard.

So we turn up the radio.