To wish my DCs' primary school would stop putting on Newsround every day?

[minkfondant]

Every class at my DCs' school seems to watch Newsround on a daily basis. Today my 8yo came home excitedly saying "A taxi blew up! It was so cool."

On previous occasions, they've come home telling me about things like George Floyd's murder including graphic details of how he was killed and North Korea possibly having nuclear weapons. 10yo asked if I think we'll have WW3 caused by North Korea.

We deliberately avoid watching news with them around, because so much of it is alarming for people who haven't yet got adult perspective on things. News TV is deliberately curated to make it as arresting and attention-grabbing as possible, and obviously concentrates more on the bad stuff than anything else.

Can't they just have a childhood before they're confronted with the dark sides of human nature?

AIBU to wish the school would leave Newsround out of the lesson plans?

Well 8 pages of responses and OP only posted the once.

At 10 it is good to have an awareness of what is going on in the world. Newsround is age appropriate and school is an appropriate environment where they can discuss these things in a supprotive way.

Children shouldn't live in a bubble, at 10 they need preparing for life in this world which is only going to get more and more complicated as they grow up.

We just watched the normal news when I was a kid. Newsround wasn’t that interesting. I’ll let my DD watch normal news too, I also watched nature documentaries with animals killing other animals but I have members of my extended family who refuse to let their kids watch that either. Personally I haven’t been traumatised by it. I think Newsround is pretty inoffensive tbh.

@Wisewordswouldhelp

I grew up watching news in the 80s, as a child i saw the berlin wall come down, the challenger disaster, chernobyl, famine in Ethiopia, wars, terrorist attacks. It gave me an understanding of the world at large and although yes some of it made me scared or sad, those are perfectly normal reactions and not to be hidden from.

Same - I remember Timmy Mallett giving away pieces of the Berlin Wall as prizes on Wacaday.

My DD's school also watches newsround and I don't see the issue. They need to know about the world and newsround explains it in a certain way.

"A taxi blew up! It was so cool!" 😆 OP , is your child Ben from Outnumbered?

My problem with all this is that time at school for learning is actually very limited and schools are expected to do bloody everything these days ... so yes Newsround is only 8-10 minutes but school also has to fit in health and wellbeing, PE, bikeability etc, charity activities such as design a xmas card to sell, PSE and resilience activities, virtual assemblies, outdoor learning, arts. In themselves these activities don't seem to take up much time, but when put together it leaves very little time for key learning. I don't blame teachers I blame the expectation that schools do all of this rather than there needing to be some areas that are actually up to parents / need to be after schools activities

I think it's ridiculous to say a ten year old shouldn't be aware of the news.

By the time I was ten I'd seen the Ethopia famine, the AIDS crisis, the Challenger disaster, Chernobyl, the Lockerbie bombing and men being beaten to death for driving past a funeral in Northern Ireland. I watched newsround from about four or five, I watched the Six O'Clock News with Nicholas Witchell (and those cool blue shuffly card graphics at the start) from about six.

It's good for children to gain perspective on how horrible the world is, how cruel it can be. The stories never really troubled me because they were so far away (at four it's hard to give a shit about a famine in Africa, why didn't they just pop to Tesco for crying out loud). At that age you haven't travelled much so hearing about the Hungerford massacre didn't bother me, Hungerford may as well have been on the other side of the world for all I knew.

The irony about the comments about 'stuff that happens far away' is that DS (7 years old) watched NR this week about he. He was fascinated because it was Liverpool and he has been to Liverpool and some of his friends had been born at the hospital. He certainly wasn't scared by it - more fascinated because it is part of his world.

I can well imagine some parents complaining precisely because it is their local area and that might scare them.

You cannot win.

Thing is, what happens if something does happen to your bubble?

It did happen to me when I was a kid. I think being able to process it helps.

[quote Tillymintpolo]@rrhuth at no point did I say we watched it every day. I said we watched it in registration but I never said when or how often[/quote]
That's why I prefaced my points with 'if you do watch it every day' as I was aware you had not specified.

One of the reasons this country is in the mess its in is because people don't actually follow the news and see what's going on in this country and the world. It's how politicians and the wealthy continue to get away with protecting their own interests and to hell with everyone else and the planet.

It's Newsround. It's for children. They're being educated on current affairs in an age-appropriate way. YABVVU

My KS3 form ADORE Newsround. If I let them, they’d watch it every day, but we have a schedule of form time activities so there’s no time.