Should Children be Told everything

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The idea that parents and, to some extent teachers, should tell children everything is a hotly debated topic, and has been so for many years now. The two sides to this argument are fairly obvious. There are those who believe that children should be told as little as is possible, while there are those who think that it is right to sit a child down and tell them everything about life.

When people try to justify not telling their children something that they know will at some stage at least, be important, they may say that it is for the child’s good, that telling them would upset them, and it is suggested, slow down development. Keeping children ignorant is maybe stunting any growth that they might have, which is clearly counter productive.

Parents often seem to under estimate what their children can take. As time goes by, people, it would seem, tend to forget what it was like to be a child. The sense of curiosity that children have, is lost in adults. If a parent thought back to what is it was like to have their parents not tell them something they would realise how difficult it is for their children. If a child has done something, or something has happened, they will be made to tell their parents what it was that had happened. Children, however, are not in a position to force their parents to give them answers, and while it may seem like a good idea not to answer every question a child asks, just telling them “no” is not good. I heard of a family that was moving house, and the parents didn’t know how to tell their children. They got round this problem by only telling them just two weeks before the moving date. Clearly this was a bad idea. Yet while underestimating the level of information that a child can take is clearly an issue, over estimating what they can take, while not as common, is still an issue. One cannot just sit a child down and go through everything, as in the facts of life, with them. While this is very generalised, children are not. No two are the same. Parents need to understand how their child will react, not any other child, some children just develop faster than others. There will be a time when all children are ready, it just knowing when that time is.

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Could more knowledge being imparted to our youth protect them from tragic events that are in the papers every week? They are read, commented on, and then dismissed. Rarely do people think that anything bad could possibly happen to someone they know due to a lack of knowledge. Society seems to think that while things happen to people in books and on the news, it could never, ever happen to them. It is this inability to realise that people everywhere think the same way about the bad things that, perhaps, makes tragic accidents happen more often. If we take ...

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