to be uncomfortable with young children learning about war?

[CleanTheFeckingMicrowave]

I have a Masters degree in History and I am a bit of a history buff, so I'll put that out to start with.

DC's school has been doing a lot of work on WW1, including the Reception and Y1 children. On one hand, I think it is a big cultural moment, but I don't find the slaughter of millions of people is appropriate for such young children.

This was glossed over in school, to be fair, but the result has been a very Disney-fied version of war. We shouldn't forget or dismiss the horrendous human cost of it.

Does that rambling make sense to anyone else?

Yes it's all age appropriate, but children can cope with much more than we think, and from a very early age.
Maybe it's because of where I live: my children look at photos and ask my parents who the people are, and my parents explain what happened to them. My uncles and aunts, their great uncles and aunts. In some cases we don't know.
However, we don't shield our children from that. They are surrounded with it all the time, as are their classmates.

Haha that made me laugh 

It still doesn't make sense though. You layer knowledge of all subjects, piece by piece, as you get older. How do you think it would work? Kids get to 13 and some teacher goes 'Right, WAR'  By that time it's been in their consciousness for ten years!

I did clarify that I think parents are an important source of education at a younger age.

The way that war has been 'taught' in my DC's school it all sounds a bit of a jolly- they could very easily get to 13 and get a bit of a shock.

Haha, how?? It's not all valour and medals until suddenly at 13 they go on a school trip to Auschwitz.

You have an odd perspective on this!

Look round the world this year. Look at the wars, the child soldiers, the displaced people, the dead civilians.

And start by being fucking grateful that your DC isn't living one of those lives.

I don't think that schools can or should airbrush out the legacy of these wars, or the human cost of war. And remember, it's Children In Need next week. Are you going to decry that too, because it has segments about children suffering because of war? Your DC are going to come across this, no later than the lower primary years. Better IMO to have something appropriate in the classroom and during assembly.

PS. I saw the SKY piece on Snettisham today. The DC there really didn't seem to have any difficulty grasping the key issues.

I don't think that schools can or should airbrush out the legacy of these wars, or the human cost of war
I think it is very easy to airbrush the image of the war and to plan lovely art activities about poppies to do with the EYFS children and lower KS1.

But painting a poppy does not make remembrance- that comes with understand of the graphic details.

But you don't want them to have the graphic details! Or you want to go from nothing to all the graphics in one fell swoop 

Yabu.

The earlier children learn about war and its consequences, the better for humanity imo.

It has been 100 years since the end of ww1 - the 'war to end all wars'. Yet technology changed that and will continue to.

Soon there will be no one who can give a first hand account of what it was like to be sent away from your family at a young age, not knowing when you would see them again, and that's from ww2. My own grandma was a WREN, born just 2 years after the end of ww1 and in her early 20's during WW2. She is 98.

The gentle way to talk about it is remembrance being a time to remember those who sacrificed their lives so we could live in a country where we can choose what we wear, where we go, who we can be friends with. As they get older they learn more about what happened through history lessons, talking to older relatives and so on.

My 6 year old twins can not comprehend that, at the age they are, their grandad got to meet his dad for the first time due to war. They cannot imagine having grown up knowing their dad as just a grainy photo on a sideboard, or that they might never have know their dad at all because of war. But it is things like that which teach them compassion for others.

My 6 year old twins can not comprehend that, at the age they are, their grandad got to meet his dad for the first time due to war. They cannot imagine having grown up knowing their dad as just a grainy photo on a sideboard, or that they might never have know their dad at all because of war. But it is things like that which teach them compassion for others.

There are many children now who don't know their dad- war doesn't need to be the vehicle for that particular learning curve.

With you OP war doesn’t need to be introduced so young. Fun, laughter, friendship, trust, giving, sharing, love etc need to be taught first.

Otherwise war is taken out of context into its own vaccum. People didn’t die for nothing.

My children have known since they were very small that myself, their father and both sets of grandparents have donated DNA samples to our equivalent of the ICMP. They know that families have great big holes where people are missing.
It sounds dark and scary but I would much rather this than keep it under wraps until they are teenagers.
They are not afraid and not traumatised, just aware. We don't have poppies, but very young school age children do do art projects at school which are similar. Art is supposed to be one of the best mediums for them to start to learn about these themes. It may not be Masters level accurate (and I don't mean that rudely, OP), but it is considered an appropriate start.

People didn’t die for nothing

Unfortunately they did, war achieves nothing and WW1 was a pointless slaughter house.

The OP is correct, far better to encourage life long interest in history and introduce the horrors of war at an older age.

It's a really hard one. I generally get a bit uncomfortable about the glorification of the armed forces all together.

On the one hand I completely appreciate the bravery and personal sacrifice made in WW1and 2. I also acknowledge the fact that without these mens sacrifice we could all be speaking German in a jew free world.

However I wish we could push more of an anti-war and pro-peace agenda in schools alongside this. I think it should be said like "in the circumstances of the time the action was necessary but if a few politicians could sort out their differences/stop being so hateful and greedy then millions of civilians would not have had to die".

In a few years children will learn all about Iraq - a bullshit was we followed America into for oil and greed. The British army had nothing to do with the agenda and conflict there and IMO should of left the USA to get on with it. I don't think we should be just learning and focussing on heroic soldiers, more like the glaring mistakes made by idiot politicians that lead to unnecessary deaths.

The best way to keep our soldiers safe is for there to be NO war!!

But isn't the bigger issue that wars are still commencing? That genocide is still happening? That children who are OP's kids age are actively caught up in conflict. Should we not inform children who are very lucky to be in countries where they are highly unlikely to die in the near future due to warfare? That tere are many children dying from that very fact? I don't think the issue is 'why wear a poppy and speak about a past bygone war'?... It's possibly more relevant to say why do we shut children's eyes to current conflict when they are the generation to change the future?

My DS has known about both world wars from being 3 or 4 years old. I had one Grandad who fought in WW1 & one who fought in WW2, my uncle was killed just weeks before WW2 ended, shot down in a Lancaster bomber over Germany, he lied about his age & joined up at 16, he completed hundreds of missions during the war & was only 21 when he died. My dad was only 10 when the war ended, like me & my brother, my DS has grown up being told about both wars by my dad & has read my Uncle's flight log & personal diary that he kept through the war & the telegram my Grandparents received when he was posted missing believed dead, he has seen all the photos & the medals my Grandad got in WW1 & my uncle in WW2, he was only 7 or 8 when we took my dad to see the Lancaster bomber at East Kirby air museum taxi down the runway & was able to listen to men who had flown during the war talking about their experiences, he was very respectful & was able to ask them about what they had done during the war. Our children are the last generation to be able to talk to men & women who fought in WW2 & have a real picture of what really happened, they will be able to pass on their knowledge to their children & ensure that the bravery & sacrifice of the people of both wars is never forgotten.

My DS'S ks1 and ks2 have learnt about remembrance in different ways this week. Yes I feel its very important lot of service families it's age appropriate and it's history. You can not lie to children my sons wear poppies as do I my grandparents went to war so we don't have too! It's one day lest we forget.

I learnt about WW1 and 2 from a very early age as my father fought in WW2 ( I’m 53), it really did me no harm and I think it helped me develop resilience and to understand that bad things do happen and that good people have to stand up for what they believe is right. I learnt about the holocaust aged about 7 in a fairly basic way and then built on the knowledge each year.
I taught my children about it too, we always went to a remembrance service from aged 4-5 onwards and they took part in the silence. Doesn’t seem to have traumatised them.

The problem is; that's it's all fine and dandy to teach it in a country that's well beyond the point of conflict for so many years. If OP would like to migrate to a country of current/recent conflict with her young children & her degree in history... Tell us how that works out for you please... I'm all ears!

And not to be disrespectful but I'm guessing you're mid 20's? You'll have missed the 10yr older generation of my relatives who did mass body recovery in Serbia and Bosnia? That's the outcome of recent war. Hopefully your children will never experience mass genocide

YANBU to be uncomfortable. It's hard, especially with little ones, to discuss how fallible, vulnerable, and nasty adults and the world can be. It's like discussing death, or violent crime, or major pollution. There are many topics - positive, negative, and mixed, that are uncomfortable and difficult to discuss with kids and certainly inappropriate ways to do it - but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.

There was actually a big clash in my wider family where some of my in-laws felt it was inappropriate for kids even up to 10 to discuss death and terminal illnesses and be involved in the care or funeral which I kinda get they're trying to be protective but I really don't understand how that helps anyone, particularly the kids, to dance around what they can plainly see it happening like upset adults and not being able to go visit certain relatives. I'm open about it - it's hard, it's uncomfortable no matter how many times you've done it (and we've had 5 close relatives die in 4 years and another with a terminal diagnosis currently), but I don't think avoiding it helps.

Personally, I don't see poppy art as teaching about war but about teaching about community and traditions. I didn't grow up in a community that really did poppies, it's still seen as a symbol of war deaths but it's not as commonly used outside of ceremony as it is here in the UK and easier to miss. I had to learn about it more when I moved to the UK. So, my kids learn about poppies because that is what the community we live in does to commemorate those that died in war and they see them everywhere. I agree that I would find it odd to do a full project on the details of WW1 or any other war in the early years or KS1, but community traditions, how and why we commemorate death and loss and tragedies, events in our family trees and our family's lives - those can easily have wars pulled into their topics even at early ages. I agree that families are likely the main source of knowledge and comfort there at those ages, I think schools and the wider communities have a role to play in teaching and helping kids figure these big uncomfortable topics out. It may not be perfect but it doesn't really need to be.

My grandparents fought in WW1, my parents grew up in WWII, there's no way I could have passed through early childhood without knowing about the war. Today's children are incredibly lucky that you can even pose the question - many children across the world are living a war.

We learnt about the crossing of the Red Sea, the Black Death in primary school so mass killings aren't unheard of in primary age teaching. I think understanding of the full horror is something which grows with age and experience.

While there are children at the heart of war zones, your pampered little child needs to learn about them OP. It’s absolutely not right that while the UK enters conflicts, potentially destroying non-UK kids lives, British parents protect their own kids from the ramifications of the foreign policy their representatives voted for.

Whilst knowing the ins and outs perhaps is too much for a small child to comprehend. It is important they know theres a day we remember etc so when they are older this tradition doesnt get forgotten and they can ask questions.

Ww2 is only just in living memory for a few elderly people still around.

Its not that long ago that children that age and younger grew up with grandparents who would recall stories to them. I certainly did.

I knew the reason uncle so and so only had one leg. Or that so and sos grandad hated loud noises as hed suffered shell shock in the war etc. And so so so many other simular stories. It was just accepted and was explained. Albeit sugar coted.

I think it is important and still quite modern history. So they cant just not mention it.

But I would object to that list being on the curriculum for any class under Y5. That's what I'm trying to get at.

What on earth should kids study in history then? Only "nice" stuff? You can't learn about history without learning about war, it's a huge part of our species' past.

What else do you want to sweep under your carpet or to sanitise? Children from an early age develop a very casual attitude to death through films, games and so on, they need to be able to distinguish between the real and the make believe. Unless we understand the horrors of the past then we run the real risk of repeating them.