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Parenting in times of turmoil (the WI v. Kyle Rittenhouse verdict)
November 19, 2021
As a children’s museum, we care about the safety and well-being of children and their families, as well as the community we are raising these children to inherit. We owe it to our children to work toward a world where racism, gun violence, and police brutality are unacceptable.
As our community processes the results of this trial, we as parents and caregivers need to look to the immediate needs of our children. In the short term, you can limit children’s access to news and discussion of frightening events. Young children often can’t contextualize events the way adults and adolescents can, meaning that distant dangers can feel immediate and one event reported repeatedly can feel like many instances of violence. For more information, NPR’s Parenting: Difficult Conversations series has a useful podcast/article: What To Say To Kids When The News Is Scary.
In the long term, ignoring racism and violence will not protect our children from their effects. Caregivers should talk to children in age-appropriate ways about these tough topics.
In 2020 we put together a selection of resources on teaching children about racism. Tragically, these are as relevant now as they were then:
- Talking Race With Young Children, Parenting: Difficult Conversations series by NPR
- An Activity Book for African American Families: Helping Children Cope with Crisis, National Black Child Development Institute and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
- Resources for Talking about Race, Racism and Racialized Violence with Kids, Center for Racial Justice in Education
To that list, we’ll add the picture book Something Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice (Marianne Celano, PhD, ABPP, Marietta Collins, PhD, and Ann Hazzard, PhD, ABPP, illustrated by Jennifer Zivoin and published by the American Psychological Association’s Magination Press.) As per the publisher “Something Happened in Our Town follows two families — one White, one Black — as they discuss a police shooting of a Black man in their community. The story aims to answer children’s questions about such traumatic events, and to help children identify and counter racial injustice in their own lives. Includes an extensive Note to Parents and Caregivers with guidelines for discussing race and racism with children, child-friendly definitions, and sample dialogues.”
There’s much work to be done. As an organization deeply invested in creating a society where all children and families can play and learn together, and as a cornerstone of our downtown, we will stay active in the conversation and the work.
