Appropriate Material

[trainboundfornowhere]

DH and I are having an argument at the moment so who would you agree with?

I run a brownie unit so girls 7-10 years old. There is a book we were planning on showing them that has the age given as 6-10. The book discusses the Apartheid in South Africa, the slave trade, the worlds first known refugees the Huguenots, Kinder Transport and deaths in WW2 and Native Americans and what happened when Europeans first arrived.

I am trying to argue that as a parent you know what your own child can handle and I do not judge you for that but if you are showing something to other people’s children you have to be far more careful to make sure it is age appropriate. In this case I think 6 is too young and 8/9 might be a better age. Husband thinks we should throw age appropriate out the window. Who is right?

Hang on if the book is 6-10 and you have girls 7-10 it seems just right on the cautionary side doesn’t it? Yes you do have to careful and this is classified age appropriate. I can’t see the problem.

I’m not entirely sure I fully understand what you’re getting at, but all those topics can be handled in an age appropriate manner for 6-10 year olds.

Whether the book you have is suitable, however, is hard to say without knowing what it is!

I think you are both right, it should be fine because its from age 6 but equally, not all kids are the same. I would run anything like that past other parents first.

Not the point, but that is a very unfocused book. Maybe pick a topic or theme to go through with it, add in some other resources or activities, and just do that one topic to give it a bit of depth. Doing all of it at once is a massive info dump of horrible shit that happened in the past, and if you skate over some of that to cram in all the content, you could leave them very confused. Surely if it's that broad, the book must be an encyclopaedia, textbook or similar, to be dipped into when it fits with what they're doing on the curriculum?

Also the Huguenots weren't the "world's" first refugees, they were England's, and only since we started recording stuff again (so after the Renaissance).
The world's most famous (much earlier) refugees were the Jews fleeing Egypt and looking for the promised land.
Please check the quality of this book before using it as a teaching resource!
Here's a good journal about refugees and an article about them in Roman times: https://academic.oup.com/jrs/article-abstract/30/2/220/2890413?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

Can you link to the actual book? Some books would be fine with those topics, others would make a mess of it.

The book is A World Of Travels and Migrations by Martin Ward and Christopher Corr. We would never do it all at once as the material is too vast. I stated it all to give an idea of some of the topics covered.

Do people send their children to Brownies to learn about Kinder Transport and slavery?

I think if you have a group of kids, you shouldn’t be calibrating everything for the most sheltered/easily upset child, because then the other kids miss out on age-appropriate educational material. At school they will look at difficult topics as a whole class and the teacher won’t be restricting books to ones that are aimed at much younger children in the off-chance that one child might be scared.

I learned to strike a match and sew a badge when I went in the 80s!

We asked the girls for the following week to look at the person they most admire. They came back with

Connie Mark
Rosa Parks
Harriet Tubman
Jane Davison
Emmeline Pankhurst
Rosalind Franklin
Helen Sharman
Ada Lovelace
Margaret Thatcher
Mary Seacole
Malala Yousafzai
Amelia Earhart
Marie Curie
Mary Anning
Jacqueline Wilson

Do they come to brownies to learn about difficult topics? No they don’t but equally if they want to know should we shut them down or encourage them in an age appropriate way?

Yes! Wasn't lighting a match part of the 'Safety in the Home' badge? I also had to ring Brown Owl on a toy phone and report that my dad had fallen down the stairs 😬