Friday, January 14, 2011

To Watch the News or Not To Watch the News

That is the question-and at what age should you let your children watch the news? In our house, we don't watch the news because we don't want our kids exposed to that constant stream of negativity. When was the last time you watched the news and they said something positive or showed a human interest story as the main feature? I would venture to say that just about "nada".

So I am a bit ruffled that G came home from school talking about the man who shot all the people in the grocery store. The translation to this is the Jared Loughner/Arizona shooting rampage. This was just tossed into her conversation regarding Martin Luther King and how the white people shot the black people and why did they do that?

Is there a correlation between the two? am I missing something here? We have an educated, articulate individual working towards equality for all races and then we have a deranged, college drop-out who takes a gun to a grocery story parking lot and opens fire on a crowd.

I'm sure there is more to this story and how it became a topic of discussion in my first grader's classroom but for now, I am feeling aggravated that someone else brought that kind of violence into my home. G can become very anxious about discussions like this and we had to spend a long time talking about personal safety and going to the grocery store and why people do bad things to good people, etc. A discussion with her teacher is in order.

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