Comment by hollerith
6 months ago
When I was 13 (in the US in the 1970s) none of my classmates or friends ever expressed any interest in geopolitics or international relations.
6 months ago
When I was 13 (in the US in the 1970s) none of my classmates or friends ever expressed any interest in geopolitics or international relations.
That's probably the benefit of you not being 24/7 glued to the broadcast system called social media. I imagine in the 70s you spent your time mostly with friends in real life, and geopolitics was just 10 easily missable minutes on TV every evening.
Sure maybe there's a minority of kids with social media/smartphone bans nowadays, but they're probably as plentiful as 13 year olds interested in geopolitics in the 1970s.
I browse Instagram's TikTok clone ("Reels") when idle, it's rather dull, when that hurricane hit a few weeks ago, the stories were all about that, a few days later it was forgotten. Obviously, lately it's been about Luigi Mangione...
You don't need social media to be aware of what's going on in the world.
At 13 (early 2000ish) I was reading the newspapers my parents brought home and debated a friend of mine who in turn read his parents' newspapers - mutually exclusive sets from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
I need ask: when is the best moment to, as a parent, introduce a young person to the news cycle? You'll inevitably have to since they're on their way to become voters and taxpayers.
You don't even need newspapers or debates, sometimes existing leads children to politics. I'm a similar age to you, and social media didn't exist yet but I had political opinions.
My first independent political opinion (if we can expand politics to include techno/digital politics and not just national/state/local government politics) was formed at the age of 4/5. Just from reading discussions and arguments around me.
And, as a girl and a lesbian, I was starting to read ideological theory in part to cope with my life situation pretty early: I followed news about gay issues because I knew I was gay at 6/7 and it was clear that some people were okay with that and some were very much not and I needed to know the difference. Likewise with being female - the switch up in how I was treated by men when I crossed the pubescent threshold led me to seeking out books/works/discussions on feminism (as well as arguments against it). Suddenly, people cared a lot more about my body than they ever had before, and as an intellectual child, I wanted to understand what was going on.
I'd expect that's even more common now and extends to new groups of people. I know I've seen young men/teenage boys talk about how a lot of anti-male sentiment filters down and makes them feel terrible and also having to deal with their own switch in puberty where people go from feeling protective of them to scared of them.
A lot of politics and the news cycle has to do with domestic cultural issues, and many children are very aware of those by the time they reach 9 or 10.
International politics is something that a lot of adults don't engage with on any meaningful level, and conflating the news/political awareness solely with international military conflict would be an error, I think.
I think the best time to introduce children to politics and the news cycle is when they start asking questions about why the world is the way it is, or why different families/places do things differently than their own family or culture. Or when something political touches their life in a very personal way: e.g. the Japanese-American children being interned during WWII would have to be introduced to politics. This is going to vary by child; I don't think there is a hard and fast rule.
Most US-educated people take a class called "social studies" in middle school (grades 6-8). That will introduce them to the news cycle and geopolitics. Also, if there is an exciting political election in your early teens, many people become interested in politics at that age.
The difference between me as a 13 yr old (1990) and my 13 yr old son now is we have a different dimension which is way more important. Critical thinking about sources of knowledge.
As a parent now, we ‘know’ more than ours did. Helping with guidance is our role!
No one had an opinion about Vietnam? I was 13 in 2003, plenty of people had an opinion about 9/11, civil liberties, and Iraq.
I don't recall any opinions about Vietnam and would probably have remembered if someone had expressed an opinion to me.
And the war or whatever we call the situation in Gaza would be something I'd want to shield my 13-year-old child from having any knowledge of if I were a parent -- for basically the same reason I'd want to shield them from learning about sadomasochistic sex as long as possible.
Just curious, why would you want to shield them from reality? At 13 they’re only a few years from becoming a full fledged adult. Unsheltered life is coming at them fast. I don’t have children yet, so maybe my perspective would change if I did, but (while I would not intentionally expose them to harsher realities) I would never shield my kids. Instead, I would want them to be curious and ask questions while I still had a large influence in their lives, so that I could help guide them and give them tools and strategies to navigate a complex world. I experienced a fairly sheltered (religious/conservative) upbringing socially, but we had a subscription to US News & World report during the height of the GWOT which I read cover to cover. I understood geopolitics before I understood how to make friends. My transition to adult life was tough socially, but I at least had a decent understanding of how the world worked on a macro scale. If children are not sheltered socially, then they’re already encountering pretty much everything through their social circles. And with the internet, 10x+ that.
I guess it's part of growing up when there's no longer any living memory of war on your soil.
Anyway I need to ask the same question I always do in such conversations: what's the plan when this hypothetical child hits legal age and immediately receives the legal right to learn about all of this at once?
It was constantly on the nightly news. The Vietnam War was one of the first widely filmed conflicts. Plus, there were regular violent protests against the draft. I find it hard to believe that the adults around you didn't have strong opinions about it. Did that not interest you or affect you?
I am bit younger, but I was exposed to the outfall of Vietnam through Hollywood films and documentaries.
Your (hypothetical) 13-year old child is probably learning about it in their social studies class. Also: What age do you think German children begin to learn about the National Socialist/WW-2 era? I guess around 12-13 years old, and they turn out pretty well-adjusted to the world (in my humble opinion).