The gory details

[columngollum]

At what age do your children accept pictures of African slaves in chains or seem ready for details of precisely why Crossrail are digging up plague victims in Central London? (And then there's the Edward II and the red hot poker thing.) It sort of goes on, really, doesn't it.

To this day, I still vividly remember (and feel uncomfortable) seeing a picture in my school history book of piles of naked, dead children's bodies whilst learning about the hiroshima bomb in history, plus reading about WW1 trench details. I reckon I was year 8 or 9....

It depends on whether they have watched Horrible Histories. The gory bits are really quite popular, certainly from year3 (age 7/8) onwards, and possibly younger.

DD was 4 when we told her about the Princes in the Tower and she saw a short clip there, showing the boys being smoothered. Hm, it caused one evening of questions at home.

DD, now nearly 7, is very interested in history and we have lots of books at home as DH and I both read about it and she is welcome to browse them. I normally try to skip over some details, I don't want her to see pictures of concentration camps but we saw slave pictures at the Museum of Docklands one year and she has children books about the plague, fire of London and other topics as well.

I would try to get her children suitable books, I think the English do a great job here making history interesting (I am German and struggle to find anything similar in German to teach DD about our side in history).

For some reason horrible histories hasn't gone down well, except for Charles II the King Who Brought Back Partying. He seems to be a big hit. And Prinny too, not because of HH, but because he was so fat that he didn't want to go out, which seems to amuse. (I'm guessing that phase will pass.) And because we know Brighton.

DS1 always enjoyed history - horrible histories etc but when he was 11 it really hit him that the Holocaust was actually 'real' and was traumatised when we watched the boy in the striped pyjamas together. DS2, also a HH fan, on the other hand was in tears at age 7 when he was reading about the war in his school reading book and it had letters from dads at the frontline, to their newborn children in the war, who then were subsequently killed.

DD hates HH but loves the proper factual books.

Have you checked your library? I found them great to hunt for books even if they are a bit heavy on just Romans, Tudor, Victorians and WWII.

Dd1 likes information, and is able to process gory stuff fine. She's generally calm about things, and never had a problem. She was very keen on the Roman Mysteries which get pretty gory at points, when she was about 7/8yo.

Dd2 scares easily. She doesn't cope well even at age 10yo with any hint of gore.

Ds (6yo) loves history. He's been very interested in WWII, and has seen a lot of information on that. We have talked about the holocaust, and it does have a personal touch in that we lost a fair amount of our family in it, as far as we know all our continental family. The only time he has got distressed was when we saw a photo of a child in Warsaw ghetto, who was the image of dd2. We did lose family there, and it had us all in tears.
He reads extensively about WWII, but also loves Horrible History books, and they don't exactly hold back on the gore, do they?

DS is going on a school trip to France soon and they are covering WW2. I was surprised the trip will include visits to three of the cemeteries as the children are age 9/10. The school has been running the trip for 15 years though so I guess they pitch it right.