How old is old enough?

I follow only a select few blogs on a daily basis. One of them is the Anti-Racist Parent, where bloggers examine race and ethnicity issues and how to deal with them as a parent. This is something that is interesting to me - when I was pregnant with my daughter and we decided to move to northwestern New Jersey from a suburb of Newark and New York City, the thing that most concerned me was that we were leaving an incredibly rich and diverse community to live in an incredibly homogeneous and conservative one. We decided that the slower pace, the quieter surroundings, the friendlier neighbors and the ongoing contact with the natural world was worth the sacrifice. Recently, when we were at a local farm and my three-year-old daughter said "Mom, look at all the little black kids!" when she noticed a group of inner-city youth who were visiting as a field trip....well, suffice it to say, I wasn't so sure we had made the right decision.

Clearly, I need to try harder when it comes to exposing my kids to diversity of all kinds. The question becomes, how do we do this? The Anti-Racist Parent has some great ideas, such as binging our children to professionals (doctors, for example) who aren't all white and male, and bringing dolls and books into the home that portray diversity in terms of color, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and family structure. But the question remains, how do we bring real-life diversity into our lives if it isn't a part of our communities? I don't want to feel like I'm taking my kids on a "Diversity Field Trip" - and I doubt other people would appreciate being "Asian/Black/Latino/Gay/Lesbian/Transgender/Person With a Handicap Exhibit A".

A recent post on ARP got me thinking about this whole thing again. The writer was talking about some images her five-year-old daughter had seen on the the television coverage of the RNC - video of Muslim men with machine guns. The girl asked her mom (the author) why people who looked like her Muslim friend wanted to "kill America". The writer examined, in depth, what an appropriate response to that question would be - in the end, the answer is simply "I don't know". But one commenter seemed to feel that she should have delved more deeply into the issues, saying that she would have taken her three-year-old further, perhaps discussinfg the function of armies and war.

Let me just say this: YIKES!

On a couple of levels, five (never mind three!!!) is not the appropriate age to introduce these issues to children, at least in my humble opinion. Firstly, children are very egocentric until they reach the age of six (give or take). American Muslims versus Muslims in the Middle East doesn't mean anything to them. All they have to go on is what they, themselves, know from personal experience - a Muslim friend or the guys who attend the mosque two blocks away. A child's only concern in that moment is whether or not her friend's dad is going to show up at her house tomorrow toting an Uzi - so I think the author's response was perfectly appropriate. Assure the child that the Muslims they personally know do not want to kill America, and then wait to see where the child takes the conversation. If she's satisfied with the answer, then stop. There will be plenty of time for a more in-depth discussion later.

But, more importantly, by introducing these issues too early we may be actually doing harm. As David Sobel says in his book Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education:

If we prematurely ask children to deal with problems beyond their understanding and control, prematurely recruit them to solve the mammoth problems of an adult world, then I think we cut them off from the possible sources of their strength.

And later:

Tragedies are big, complex problems beyond the geographical and conceptual scope
of young children.

By exposing our youngsters to issues that are too big too early, we run the risk of having them become apathetic, which is definitely not what we want. Remember how hopeless we, as adults, often feel when faced with the issues of environmental degradation, human rights violations, unhealthy cultural messages and mores, or cruelty to non-humans. Then imagine how much more hopeless our children might feel when introduced to these very same issues! One of the main elements of Humane Education and Humane Parenting is to provide positive choices. But for young children, positive choices are extremely limited, if not non-existent. Therefore, I believe it is best to hold off until children are older and more well-equipped, both intellectually and emotionally, to comprehend these issues in a meaningful way.

This is an issue I have seen discussed quite a lot recently. Articles in both Mothering magazine and Brain, Child magazine have addressed them in recent months. Obviously different children are different, and reach maturity at different ages. Certainly, there are perspectives on this topic that are different from mine, and I encourage parents to think long and hard about them before your child asks you The Question, whatever that question might be for him or her, and for you. But, when you're thinking about Your Answer, I hope that you'll consider your child's needs and readiness in addition to your own agenda with respect to the issue at hand. I don't use agenda in the pejorative sense here - we all have them, and we should have them - but we need to be aware of what they are and who they serve in the moment.