"My parents dont let me watch the news": reflections on 11+ interviews I have carried out

[hannaretch]

Over the past few weeks I have been carrying out 11+ interviews with new applicants to our school -independent day school, outside of London, thought of as the most academic school in our town.

I generally talk to the children for 20 minutes about their studies, hobbies etc and ask them to talk about themselves. The aim is to get an idea of who they are and whether they will fit in with the school ethos. We tend to interview almost all applicants as we feel that a good interview will allow us to get a better view of the individual even those with marginal entrance exam results. They get information on the type of questions they are likely to get before the day to allow them to prepare. We also ask them to bring in an item which they then talk about.

One of the standard questions I and others ask is along the lines of do you follow the news? Talk about a current news story/ what do think about Ukraine/ climate change? type thing. Nothing too major but it allows us to get an idea of their awareness of the world. Most are able to answer with basic knowledge and some understanding of the issues and it often leads to good discussions.

I was shocked that two or three of the ones I have interviewed this year stated that they werent allowed to watch the news and had no opinions/ ideas about the issues. Surely watching the news at 6 etc or online or even Newsround is basic preparation for life? (or school interview at least?)

When I was a child, my Dad always had the evening news on and I found it so boooooring. But I think it was far less sensationalist then, far less terrifying video footage - and I do remember when Lockerbie happened and I found my parents watching the news in a different room, they shielded me from it. My 10 yr old daughter watches newsround at school and she is aware of what is happening in the world to a wider extent. But the actual news and all its horrors? No.

So everyone is fine with an uneducated populace?
True, it works in North Korea .

@BigBadBoom It was just as many terrible things back then. But kids were more resilient.

@AllOutofEverything

Kids were not more resilient back in the good old days. Human nature doesn't change, and personality development hasn't altered its normal course over the intervening decades.

What happened back then was that nobody was bothered about stuff that worried children. It was acceptable that they would go around with fears of mutual assured destruction at the back of their minds, or be guilted into finishing dinners because children in Africa were starving.

It was acceptable to hit children in schools once upon a time. It was acceptable to call dyslexic children 'stupid' and to shout at and humiliate children in the classroom. Children took it all on the chin because they knew they were powerless to stop it, and sadly many of them experienced equally abusive treatment at home. It wasn't because they were more resilient that they put up with all that shit.

There are middle aged people walking around today who were well nigh destroyed by the treatment they bore in schools and homes - people with all sorts of medical ailments, addictions, and depression, who were never allowed to live up to their potential because adults took out their anxieties and frustrations on them all day every day. Children were far too often seen as a nuisance and a burden back then.

We know more now about what's bad for children.

Since we now know better, we try to do better.

Scratching my head here.

How, exactly?

And how is watching endless scenes of war, famine, and political dysfunction in Africa or Haiti or any other non 'western' theatre achieving any other effect?

You are talking about understanding in the cognitive sense and I am talking about emotional and psychological processing. These two things are not at all the same.

Yes, a child of 12 could tell you the basics of any given world conflict, if she were explicitly taught or if she read up on it, and she might glean some gist of it from watching a news broadcast. But her take on it all would likely be heavily influenced by the opinion of an authority figure who talked with her about news items. At 14-15 a child would have more capacity to produce an original opinion. The ability wouldn't be there yet but it would be starting to develop. That's all cognitive though.

In approaching a topic like the bombing of civilians, you have to ask yourself whether a video game with similar scenes would be a suitable item for your child to be exposed to on a daily basis, and if not, why not. Yes, the child might know something of the history of Russian- Ukrainian relations for the past 200 years and might even be able to identify Ukraine on a map. Bonus marks for knowing the name of the capital and that Lviv was once Lwow, and before that, Lemburg. That cognitive knowledge isn't helpful when the child is lying in her bed in a high rise flat worried about planes flying over. Scaffolding is key, age appropriateness is part of that, and you don't get either when you turn on the news, sit back, and let whatever is happening that day into your child's head.

The criminal age of responsibility in the UK is highly problematic.
www.theguardian.com/society/2019/nov/04/age-of-criminal-responsibility-must-be-raised-say-experts

It's a legacy of a barbaric age.

Agree @mathanxiety - intellectual maturity and emotional maturity are very different and a child can be streets ahead in intellectual maturity whilst still very vulnerable emotionally.

eg a precocious reader can outgrow the language difficulty in books aimed at their age group before they are anywhere near ready to process the more difficult themes in young adult or adult fiction.

The gap can be particularly hard to negotiate for children with ASD.

It’s quite tricky to navigate and needs some sensitivity or as it can result in debilitating anxiety for the child.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001hff1?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

I realise you are probably stateside Math so unlikely to be awake. I listened to this, this week, very intersting. A Cambridge Professor thinks 12yo should have the vote, so presumably capable of processing (in all ways the information).

I think we will have to agree to disagree. Children have always worried, anxiety is a very useful emotion in evolutionary terms. Children need to earn how to rationalise and process that anxiety. Shielding them from the realities of life is no way to do that. Traditional nursery rhymes are terrifying, many "children's films" have very disturbing themes - chatty chatty bang bang, even the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is fairly disturbing. Listen to the pod cast if you can it is fascinating.

Perhaps the question was worded in a way that children wouldn’t understand.

How about if an interviewer asked ‘What big issues in the world are you interested in’ or ‘Is there something going on in the world that you think is really important’ or ‘If you were Prime Minister, what do you think would be the thing you’d most like to deal with’

What would most children say to those questions or be able to think about?

When interviewers ask these questions, it’s usually just a conversation prompt rather than a test of knowledge. Some people probably couldn’t imagine their child engaging in answering this kind of question. However, if your child is applying for an academically selective school which interviews, they’ve probably been prepped for the exam and have also prepped for an interview - that doesn’t mean tutoring necessarily, but most families will have engaged with the process and answering a question like this is something most will have thought about. So lots might not really know much about the wider world, but will have prepared something to talk about. Good interviewers phrase questions in a way 10 year olds can understand and engage with. The one about what you’d do if PM, is probably easier to engage with than a general question about the news.

Out of interest, for those not letting their children see news or other sources of info, what age would you let them look? Do you know 100% what they’re looking at online?

But the point of those is that they are age appropriate fiction.

It’s a rehearsal to build resilience before encountering terrible real-life things.

Similar to how a goldfish or a gerbil is safe way to learn about death before it’s granny’s turn.

(My child’s normal psychosocial development was disrupted by childhood cancer, diagnosed just before she turned 7. The psychological fall out has been intense. We can’t protect them from everything but if it’s possible to stick with age appropriate content then we really should!)

We have rolling 24 hour news on (for work) on at least one tv in the house.
Kids (8 and 3) are not affected on the slightest.
However as a family we are very into current affairs and have regular discussions around news stories that all the family are involved in.
8 year old can happily chat about the complexities of climate change, wars and interest rates for example with a genuine interest. However we really invest the time to explain these things in detail to him so that he isn’t worried about anything he sees. I think this is crucial if kids are watching the news to make sure they understand as I would say it is the misunderstanding that would breed any kind of fears or sadness from watching it.

Children need to learn how to rationalise and process that anxiety. Shielding them from the realities of life is no way to do that.

I disagree with this. If there's any truth in it then why is there a TV watershed? Why are games and movies and other media content rated according to appropriateness for certain ages? Why not let children into strip clubs? If they're awake, why not bring them out on the town on a Saturday night? Why are there child protection services? Surely a horrible home environment promotes resilience? Mistreatment is a character builder? And teachers should be allowed to humiliate and hit students who get on their nerves too. That was once a reality of life.

The usefulness of fairy tales consists in letting children have little bite sized pieces of the good and evil aspects of life, in manageable amounts, that they can process through seeing the triumph of good, which happens in the vast majority of tales. They need the comfort of knowing there is ultimately this order in the world. This is because they are not in fact able to deal with the realities and the messiness of life. The nightly news offers no resolution or comfort or glimpse of the orderly ending children need.

I stopped all live tv in our house at the beginning of covid. I no longer watch the news and neither do my children, I don’t read newspapers or follow any news outlets on social media unless they’re local and my daughter has previously told her teachers she isn’t aloud to watch the news. It is all completely miserable and anxiety inducing and I’m glad that I am sheltering my children and myself from it all, I’m a happier person for it and so are my kids. My niece needed therapy to go into public spaces after covid, if she got sick she thought she would kill her nanny who she is very close to, she’s 9 and is terrified of everything.

Calling the whole continent of Africa (54 hugely different countries) as endless scenes of war and political dysfunction and ingoring the endless scenes of war and political dysfunction in the West - is a pretty Western centric, colonised view.

A revolving door at no10, batshit crazy economic policies that blew a £30 billions wide hole in our economy, huge corruption during Covid, record breaking profits of gas companies while people have died of cold because they can't afford to switch on heating, and that's just in the UK! A halfwit in America nearly sparking a civil war , but dysfunction politics is a thing that happens outside the West???

But I suspect my opinion would be dismissed as part of the anti-common sense, virtue signalling, North London intellectual woke agenda, by these same people who ban the news for their children.

This is because they are not in fact able to deal with the realities and the messiness of life

My wife grew up on a large farm, she saw pigs getting slaughtered, animals shagging, cows getting killed, injured animals getting put down, live births , dead births, she saw it all by 10. She dealt with it. She's probably one of the most level headed person I know, especially compared to many friends I know who grew up in idylic childhoods in the suburbs protected from anything harsh.

She currently works at a Eton group public school and when I showed her OP's post she completely agreed and most of her colleagues would agree a 10 year old banned from watching the news by their parents is very disturbing , and that's OP point. Not filtering the news, or being highly selective, but as OP says, werent allowed to watch the news and had no opinions/ ideas about the issues.

How anyone can defend that is beyond me

Not filtering the news, or being highly selective, but as OP says, werent allowed to watch the news and had no opinions/ ideas about the issues.

How anyone can defend that is beyond me
They had no opinions on the topics the OP decided a KS2 child should have an opinion on.

Not watching the news doesn't mean the children aren't exposed to any issues and are left clueless about the world beyond their front gate. All it says is that in an interview situation a child was being judged based on whether the interviewer liked the way the family does things at home, based on the interviewer valuing the news and certain topics.

Personally, I want my DC to have access to age appropriate news sources and to be aware of a range of issues in an age appropriate way, but the OP's questioning doesn't establish which children have the most academic potential.

It would have been a better question to ask the children to share about a topic or issue that they are interested in / an issue they care about. Much more open ended and much less likely to throw a child who gets content in a way that isn't 'the news'. You'd probably get more developed and thoughtful responses this way as well.

I'd be concerned if a candidate for an academic school couldn't talk about an issue or topic they are interested in. I wouldn't be concerned if a child on interview didn't perform well when asked about their thoughts about the news or certain topics that a stranger decided to ask them about in an interview situation.

Totally agree - age appropriate reporting, yet covers most current affairs. We loved them - cancelled our subscription at 13 yrs, but lasted 4 year and will subscribe again when my youngest is old enough. Great to get them off screen too.

But used as a filter for a popular selective public school that no doubt feeds Oxbridge and top Universities, asking a 10 year old to discuss a recent subject in the news is an excellent way to determine intellectual curiosity in current events.

It could be as simple as talking about things like mental health week ( My daughters prep has a week long, age appropriate awareness on this ) Why are nurses striking and is it right to do so? Indeed why are teachers striking? All these things- a boy or girl of above intelligence should have an opinion on and should know are current events. All of them have an impact on their families lives.

I'm pretty sure this is what the OP means, not a breakdown of the dynamics of migrants drowning in the channel, or if the UK should send them to Rwanada, or human right abuses in Iran, etc

@DaddyPhD
You took my quote featuring the words Africa and Haiti out of context.

My mother grew up on a farm and also witnessed all the usual farm sights, sounds, smells. Like your wife, she's also a well balanced person. That doesn't mean she got to be the person she is because she saw lambs born or piglets slaughtered or injured animals put down before age 10. Correlation isn't causation.

But used as a filter for a popular selective public school that no doubt feeds Oxbridge and top Universities, asking a 10 year old to discuss a recent subject in the news is an excellent way to determine intellectual curiosity in current events.
Again, that's only because you, like the OP, have decided that a child having an opinion on the news is a marker for academic intelligence. Which in reality translates as 'this family are the right sort of family who do things how the OP thinks they should'.

A child can show their intellectual curiosity by talking about a world issue, or topic of their choice, or an issue of they feel strongly about.

Farming is different to news content anyway as the latter is packaged, sensationalised and delivered in a way to maximise emotional hooks. There are better ways to inform dc

But, in all honesty, it IS a very useful filter and sorts the 'robot' kids who have been drummed into studying day/night (due to expectations, culture etc) to achieve 'high scores' but are not actually really of the intellectual level where they show natural curiosity or make unusual, out-of-the-box connections. The truly gifted invariably seek news out or go beyond the boundaries.

I have in the past worked with lots of kids and it is the one defining thing for a truly gifted, and I've interacted with a lot of highly able (but not 'truly gifted') kids and they are able to form opinions when they've been presented with something but wouldn't seek the additional info out in the same way.

Exactly @Bitteplease

I think kids can be extremely intelligent and academic and still be utterly untouched by the news at 10 years old.