How do children grow up with the news?

Toddlers are mostly engaged with themselves and their parents. What happens around them - and especially what happens in the wider world - is still difficult to understand. News will mostly confuse them rather than enrich them. However, that doesn’t mean the news will always pass them by completely. They might pick up information and emotions from siblings or parents. Especially because they have no way to place the news, these experiences can be frightening for them.

In primary school, kids have a lot to process. Learning to read, write, count, … In the first years of primary education, there is no space in children’s heads to process news: things remain very abstract. The older they get, the more space there is for news in their daily lives. Especially when they start hanging out with siblings or friends regularly, a lot of information can seep through. They will become more curious and can get totally lost in certain topics. In this phase, they consider teachers and parents as the main sources of information, although they usually cannot hold nuanced views at this age - things will be mostly black and white to them.

Youngsters in secondary education become more and more adept at thinking about society and the world in abstract terms. They question things they hear in the news, go looking for extra information and develop their own opinions and core values. Although they are increasingly able to critically judge information, their sense of justice is very strong at this age and the black-and-white thinking phase is not out of the way yet. Because they are looking for their identity, they are vulnerable to extreme ideas. They gain a lot of ideals in a short period of time, but these can change again quickly.