Comment by mezzie2

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.