How parents should engage kids in conversation on difficult issues such as Israel-Hamas war

While driving my twin 6-year-olds to Sunday school, I shut off the radio as soon as I heard the talk show hosts mention the Israel-Hamas War. My ever-so-curious children, however, caught just enough of the radio segment to put down their “science journals” and bring up the war.

I told them it has broken my heart. They asked why. Innocent people, I said, have been getting hurt. Usually, my sons would follow up with a round of questions. This time, they stayed mum, as their eyes filled with tears.

Instinctively, I changed the subject by playing a buoyant children’s song through the stereo. I quickly regretted my reaction.

This missed opportunity prompted me to seek ways for parents to help their children navigate sensitive subjects. I direct Penn State’s Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative and Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative. We provide professional learning to K-12 educators on the effective instruction of difficult topics, which exist in the curricula, and issues, which bubble up in the news and community. So, I reexamined our approach through a father’s lens.

Here are a few tips, informed by research conducted by the initiative and others, including psychologists and scholars around the world, as well as my decades of experience tackling difficult topics and issues as an educator, journalist, and documentary filmmaker.

From the suggestions below, extrapolate what works for you, depending on your circumstances and bandwidth. Note that conditions vary and exceptions abound:

• As best you can, identify and put aside your biases. Focus on what’s best for your children. That means continually prioritizing their safety and development. Slide everything else, such as tribal inclinations and intellectual convictions, down the list.
• Unless your children face danger, assure them of their safety. Back up your assurance. Bar young children from social media. Restrict teenagers’ doomscrolling. Time and limit their screen time. Monitor, supervise, and set up parental controls on their electronic devices. As much as possible, block disturbing still and moving images from their impressionable eyes. Gory and grim content can trigger trauma on one end of the psychological-damage spectrum and, on the other, desensitize brains and hearts to hate and violence.
• Determine age appropriateness by considering the difficult issue’s context, proximity and relevance to your children’s physical, mental and spiritual lives, as well as their personality, disposition, maturity and interests.
• If you decide to discuss a difficult issue with your kids, learn and/or verify the main facts for yourself in advance. Then, resist taking the easy route by just offering information. Instead, initiate a two-way conversation. Ask open-ended questions about their interest in, knowledge of, and feelings about the subject. Discuss the emotions’ effects on understanding and judgment.
• At some point during such dialogue, introduce your kids to the ubiquity and power of storytelling. Impart on them that the stories swirling around us often shape how we view the world, process the news intellectually and emotionally, accept or reject facts and fiction, and so forth.
• Encourage them to engage in similar civic discourse with their friends and classmates. Remind them to listen actively and show respect. Rest assured, exposure to a variety of peer perspectives poses no threat to your children’s identity, values and worldview. On the contrary, it can strengthen and sharpen them.
• Trust your children. They can handle complexity. They deal with it daily in various aspects of their lives. Embolden them to explore the difficult issue for themselves. Some may opt to reflect quietly. Avoid my car-ride mistake and let them. Other kids may prefer a hands-on approach. They may make art, journal, read books, write stories, and/or explore in other ways. Allow them to determine if they wish to do so alone or with you and/or others.
• Forging agency does not mean forgoing guidance. Help them come up with their own guiding questions. This will spark and sustain their curiosity. It will also enable them to hone a skill that drives innovation.
• Once they formulate their questions, assist them in searching for answers by showing them how to conduct primary research, find credible sources, check facts, cross reference reports, and deep six deepfakes, lies and propaganda.

Such exploration can spur kids to hone their critical thinking, fact-finding and active-listening skills, as well as gain empathy.

Empathy rarely emerges on its own. We must cultivate and practice it. To do so, start by realizing we can never effectively put ourselves in other people’s shoes; we can only strive to see where they’re coming from, where they hope to go, and what obstacles they encounter.

The best way to instill empathy is to demonstrate it. The good news is that following at least some of the above suggestions, such as inquiring about your children’s thoughts and feelings, can accomplish that.

Once acquired, empathy can and in most cases should lead to compassion.

As your children gather information, help them analyze it. They may choose to act on their findings. They may form an anti-bullying club at their school or set up an exercise for pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students in which they must make the other side’s argument.

These are the mundane ideas of an adult. Children come up with much better ones.

Next time my kids bring up the war, I’ll give them the space to reflect and the tools to figure it out for themselves.