AIBU to not expect my son to be exposed to so much shit at school?

[HadenoughnowFFS]

Son is year 1.
Sick and tired of him coming home with swear words the other kids have taught him, terrorism facts the parents have allowed them to watch on the TV, hitting each other as they're allowed to at home - the list goes on.
Teacher thought it nice to create a dog and diary.
Dog comes home with you and in the diary you find something from the newspaper to stick in and write a little about.
Comes home and the previous kid has an entry about the ivory tusks of elephants being taken off and more elephants being killed to death than being born.
Surely the parent can't have deemed this appropriate for a 5 year old to write about? And the teacher has just ticked it so clearly she does.
Aibu?

Oh, and stop mixing up real world issues like terrorism and ivory poaching with swearing. They are really not on the same level.

FertilityK nice spot of irony on the defending the right to post about the anti-ivory trade with your tale of pro-foxhunting clippings. Plots how to rile the local NFU families when child is the right age for this Dog and Diary lark.

Otherwise, swearing is the most trivial issue and most easily dealt with. The other things, yes, it's not nice to think of their heads already being filled with the weight of the world, in scary, depressing detail at 5 but sadly that's what you've now got to deal with. So, i suppose you have to figure out a way to equip them to process it so that it doesn't worry them.

SnorkMaiden, I'm not sure the Year 1's were actually poaching the ivory, they were just talking about it.

So I'd say they are on the same level as swearing, in that it's all about censorship and shielding children from the real world.

That said, I tell my kids off for swearing and can see why the swearing is a bigger deal for people on this thread than talking about the actual facts of the world.

I think the important thing here is how the school are talking about the bear and explaining it to the class. I'm assuming most five year olds aren't quite up to reading a newspaper article but I see this as a clever way to inform children of current events and to formulate a way to discuss them appropriately.
If the school has no follow up on the issues then I see it as a cause for a polite conversation with the teacher to establish the purpose of the exercise

Op you'd hate my 4 year old DS. He became obsessed with the topic of extinction when he saw a dodo statue in Chester Zoo about 12 months ago, and can now rabbit on for ages about poachers and endangered animals. He would definitely pick this topic to discuss in school.

He also doesn't miss a trick and despite my best efforts to shield him - I don't turn the news on when he's there etc - he has picked up on quite a few recent topics. I'm a police officer in GMP and he asked me if I was working longer hours because of the nasty man and the flowers where all the people had died. He then asked why he had done it - I'd rather explain it in terms he would understand than leave it to his imagination or playground gossip. Similarly, he became upset after the Grenfell Tower disaster when he heard a firework as he thought our fridge had blown up - should I have ignored these concerns as they're not age appropriate?

@LonginesPrime how on earth do you get from my post that I thought the children in the OP's post are involved in poaching ivory?

SnorkMaiden, your post seemed to be suggesting that the OP was lumping in terrorism and ivory-poaching with swearing, as if all these acts were on a par.

By saying that ivory-poaching and swearing were "not on the same level", I read your post as saying that ivory-poaching is far more serious than swearing, so my point was that the OP was complaining about talking about ivory poaching, not actually doing it.

(plus, it was a joke..)

Umm? I don't understand @LonginesPrime

The OP did lump them together in the original post which I though ludicrous, as in OP seemed to lump the mere talking about ivory poaching as reprehensible as swearing or thumping other children.
You did see both my posts, which appear together? Which clearly reference the fact that it's learning about ivory poaching?

Swimming against the current here but I agree with you OP. I'm a snowflake parent and I absolutely cherish childhood innocence.

I suspect your son is bringing home some of these behaviours to you as a way of re-setting or re-affirming boundaries. He's checking in with you, but 5 year olds usually "act out" when they do this, rather than verbalising their issues. Try not to react negatively to him - or to imply with your reaction disgust that he might think is aimed at him rather than at action or word he has used.
If you can be (or pretend to be) calm and detatched and say something along the lines of "where did you hear that word?" to open up a conversation with him. I tell my children that these kind of words are "grown up words" and not nice really for children to use. And when they are adults themselves they can choose whether to use those kind of words.
Equally they will hear upsetting or unpleasant things that will worry them. And again, by being the person that they can take these things to without worrying about your reaction, you are giving them a huge gift.
I think I have been a lot luckier in the school we ended up with, and in your position I'd be having a chat with the teacher to get a sense of how she deals with this stuff in school, and go from there. But honestly, I wouldn't be happy with the school environment overall.

I think it's great that kids are forming opinions about things that matter at an early age. When they're older, they might actually be in a position to help stop illegal hunting. And it's part of learning about the world.

The swearing is, in an odd way, also part of their education. I totally get that most parents don't want their kids to start effing and jeffing, but it gives them the opportunity to have the conversation about inappropriate language.

I have a 5 year old who travels in London regularly who has had to have a talk about terrorism and 'run, hide, tell' to make sure he is kept safe. We live up North. If any other parent objected to that they could fuck right off. He needed to know to stay safe.

The ivory - unfortunately children do have to learn distressing things as they grow up. It would be good when that was discovered to comfort them and tell them what can be done to stop it and conserve wildlife.

It's perfectly fine to be a 'snowflake' parent provided that you don't attempt to impose your 'snowflakiness' by running to tell tales on other parents to the teacher. If you want to censor what your child learns, maybe homeschooling is the better option.

Honestly for me it's not ignorance, it's retaining some innocence at such a young age.
Only a 1/4 of the class has done the book so far so goodness knows what else will end up in there and to be honest given the ages of the children I really don't see how it's appropriate to pick out an article for a 5 year old surrounding death of anything to be quite honest.
This isn't 5 year olds " just coming across it " as someone said - it's a parent, picking out an article for their child to write about.

When I taught Year 1, we looked at a news story every morning to start class with a discussion. They absolutely loved it and it improved oracy and confidence. Once a week at the end of the day, we would watch Newsround together, which would again generate discussion. We'd even use special question cards that operated on different levels of thinking. It's amazing to see a class of 5/6 year olds being aware of metacognition and world issues and discussing them.

Newsround deals with both fun stories and world issues such as the ivory trade. I think you are being incredibly precious and one of "those" parents.

You'd hate me - I tore down my class rainforest overnight. They'd spend months developing it and I left them to find it the next morning. It was to open a topic on the destruction of rainforests - blew their minds and I have pupils that are in uni now telling me they still remember that lesson and how fantastic it was.

So if not talking about the realities of the world around us. What should they be talking about?

Many households do watch the news. The parent may have found the article, but the idea may have come from the child.

Did you mean to post this in the " I am not being unreasonable so there!" topic?

Thats the world we live in. I know its fashionable to preserve innocence and bubblewrap but the reality is real people and real children live these horrors every day.

Do you never have a radio on (hours news updates) or the television with news programmes? The majority of us who are 35+ grew up with John Cravens Newsround where we would have seen this presented in a child appropriate way. We also grew up with a large terrorism threat in the name of the IRA ever presnt on our news.

Further to my last post, I seem to remember collecting milk bottle tops and tin foil for starving Africans (Blue Peter).

I can't see we are all psycologically damaged by being aware of the world around us and having some empathy for it.

Op I think you're underestimating 5 year olds. They can retain their innocence while still obtaining a knowledge of the world around them. My 4 year old will talk about death quite matter of factly, whether that be people or animals, but still believes that Peter Pan and Tinkerbell are real people. He can intelligently discuss poaching and the very real risk of extinction, then run off with his friends calling each other poo poo heads (not something I encourage but to make a fuss of it makes it taboo and he does it more). They are exposed to so much nowadays through news, other children, listening to the radio in the car etc, that I'd rather be able to speak to him about it in an age appropriate manner.

If I asked him to pick a news topic to discuss, he would probably pick rhinos being hunted and being endangered. I wouldn't discourage that.

Bloody hell reading some of these comments I'm glad we picked the nice quiet prep school we did for my year 1 son

Some of you clearly have no idea what is appropriate for 5 year olds.

Every family is different, and every child is different.

eg, in our family, dd2 has 2 older brothers and sisters, so round the dinner table when she was 5 her oldest brother may well have been talking about or asking about elephants and ivory.
We would have talked about it as a family and then if she had to chose something from the newpaper, she may have chosen the elephant article.

if your 5 year old is the oldest in your family, then he/she may not be exposed to this stuff yet.

Added to which, some kids are interested in this stuff, and others are content to stick with peppa pig for a while longer.

Just chose something form the newpaper that yourchild is interested in and move on.

I take it they've not started watching Newsround yet???

I'm glad we picked the nice, quiet prep school

I taught in a "nice, quiet prep school". That's where we watched Newsround in Year 1.

I also went to a "nice, quiet prep school".
It's where I learned the word "cunt" at the age of 7 and went home to ask what it meant, as I didn't believe it was real. It was also where I was horrifically bullied by children a lot older than I was and a psychotic teacher.