How adults talk to children about distressing news stories has a big impact on their emotional response
It can be tempting to think children are immune from distressing world news and aren’t picking up on adults’ fear, sadness or anger about things like war or global politics.
But children “absolutely” know more than adults often give them credit for, says Sahra O’Doherty, a psychologist and the president of the Australian Association of Psychologists.
“We have to acknowledge that our kids, from a very, very young age, are sponges,” she tells ABC Radio National’s Life Matters.
“They are absorbing absolutely everything around them, and not just media and social media, but our opinions, tones of voice, emotions and reactions and responses to these big world events as well.”
Adults can help children process and deal with the emotions that emerge from the news they consume, but first they need to check their own emotional pulse.
Kids look to adults to gauge their response
“The adult has to put their own oxygen mask on first, before they help someone else,” says paediatrician and child and family psychiatrist Alberto Veloso.
In other words, an adult needs to be in control of their own emotional response to distressing news, before addressing the topic with a child.
“The parent has to check on their own reactions … because they need to be regulated to be able to help the child,” Dr Veloso says.
“Children will reference adults and the emotions of adults to gauge their own response.”
Kids watch their parents for clues about how they should respond to news stories, Dr Veloso says. (Getty: Oscar Wong)
He says adults need to create an emotionally safe space for kids’ feelings, and should not “be afraid of whatever emotion the child brings up”.
When a child speaks about something in the news, they’ll be watching the adult for subtle signs: “your tone of your voice, how fearful you sound, how angry you sound — and that will go a long way to modelling [the child’s] responses”, Dr Veloso says.
Ideally, adults model experiencing all difficult emotions, and then show children how they cope with them.
“That will teach [children] everything they need to know,” Dr Veloso says.
Take an emotion like anger, for example, or a conflict with another adult.
“There’s nothing wrong with fighting in front of your kids. You just need to also show them how you fix it. Most of the problems happen because the fighting happens, but the kids don’t see how it gets worked out.”
“It’s OK to show difficult emotions, but you also need to model how you cope with [them].”
Don’t be too quick to reassure
“Don’t fall into the trap of reassuring your child too quickly,” Dr Veloso says.
He says sometimes parents are quick to tell their child not to worry about something, often because perhaps it’s something they worry about themselves.
“Reassurance is important; however, if you say to your child ‘You don’t have to feel that way’, or ‘You don’t have to think like that’, you might actually be falling into the trap of leaving your child alone with their thoughts or feelings.”
“You might accidentally, without meaning to, invalidate the child’s thoughts or feeling,” Dr Veloso says.
If a child is scared about something and their parent says, with their heart in the right place, “You don’t have to feel that”, a child might think, “I’m not allowed to feel that — so I’m not going to talk to you about it anymore”, he says.
And that means that the child is dealing with the feeling on their own.
“I’d rather [parents] say, ‘Yeah, it’s really scary when [certain] things happen and we don’t know if it’s going to happen again. That would really worry you, and that would really worry me. And what I do when I really worry is I go for a walk or get a drink of water’.
“And then the parent says, ‘But we’re going to be OK, I promise. I’ll never let anything happen to you.'”
Messages like this help a child to grow, and to understand that they can feel difficult feelings and still be OK, Dr Veloso says.
Model healthy behaviour
When children see adults react with shock, fear or other negative emotion, they “take those emotions on board [with] a sense of immediacy and urgency”, Ms O’Doherty says.
“So they are going to feel as though this thing is real and [it] is going to be affecting me right here, right now.”
For example, with issues surrounding the US election, there might be confusion around whether President-elect Donald Trump lives in or represents Australia.
“There might not be that nuanced parcelling out of the detail,” Ms O’Doherty says.
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Mediating what news children are exposed to is trickier than it once was.
“The news isn’t centralised to the TV News at 6pm or radio news,” Ms O’Doherty says.
Accessibility to the news has increased with a proliferation of devices and through social media; it leaves anyone susceptible to exposure to more news, but also to falling down “accidental rabbit holes”.
“We try to shield our kids from what we believe is the worst of things, but they are going to have some level of exposure,” she says.
To mitigate some of the risk attached to news consumption, Dr Veloso says it’s important for adults to model healthy behaviours.
“Parents’ phone habits will dictate the child’s phone habits. [And] it goes the same for news consumption, given that most of us consume our news through social media,” he says.
He says it’s also useful to steer away from a “negative bias to news”.
“As parents, as part of modelling healthy news consumption, we should actually also highlight the positive news stories or acts of kindness. Because if all we ever talk about in the news is negative stuff, then that’s going to give our children a very skewed view of the world.”
Bring family values into the conversation
Bringing family or societal values into the conversation with children can help provide a frame of reference for them to refer back to when deciphering what’s happening in the news.
“A child of perhaps primary school age might come to us and say, ‘I’ve seen this very angry-looking person on TV, and he doesn’t seem to talk very nicely to people, and I know that it is important to be nice or to be kind to people,'” Ms O’Doherty says.
“So we can use that value of being nice and being kind and respectful to people as the topic of the conversation. We can talk about how in our day-to-day lives we can embrace [those values] and we can see that this person that we might see on TV doesn’t espouse those same values.
“They can see that some people are going to be different to us, and that’s OK, but we don’t have to support or align ourselves with people who don’t share those same values [as us].”
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