Talking with children about the news

Son #2 has become fascinated by skyscrapers, especially the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest building and definitely a tremendous piece of engineering.  His fascination extends beyond this building, and includes skyscrapers in New York.  His mum and I were lucky enough to visit the city some years ago, and came back with a lovely illustrated book about the city's skyscrapers.  He can also tell you, if you want to know, some of the world's previous tallest buildings, which include several in New York, of course, and also the Eiffel Tower, which has also been met at school as part of a project about "Fantastic France".

The news?   Recent news.  Our son's class spent some time at circle time earlier this week remembering the recent terrible events in Paris, after a classmate had mentioned seeing about it.

The Guardian reported what the French education ministry had done to help teachers. 

And older news.  From 1970 to 1973, the tallest building in the world was the original World Trade Center in New York.  It appears in books we had read, but so does the new one (as a design), and so I had said that the original one was no longer there, that it had been replaced by new buildings, including the "Freedom Tower", which we had read about.  

And that was going to be that, until he was older.

And then, there we were, watching a documentary about building an enormous artificial island in Dubai.  The island was designed to increase tourist visits to Dubai, to start to develop alternative sources of income to replace, in due course, oil.   Work started in August 2001, and was affected by the global downturn in tourism that followed 9/11.   And the programme showed, briefly, what happened to the World Trade Center.  I am glad I was watching it with him.  So, we had to talk about what had happened.

I don't think the answer he needs now to the question of "why" is the one that he will need when he is older.  For now, I hope it was ok to tell him that it was not an accident, and that people did die (he asked both those things, and he had seen a photo of a plane that crashed some years back into the Empire State Building). 

So, how do you talk to children about the news?    I am not thinking here about breaking bad news to them about their health or the health of family members.  That should be the subject of a separate post.   But, how you talk to them about difficult stories in the news.  You can, as I tried to, not tell them, but they will find out about the news story sooner or later and they will want to know.

Here are a few things that look useful. 

BBC's Newsround has advice for children/young people on what to do if you are upset by the news.


PBS Parents


Common Sense Media

HealthyChildren.org - an American Academy of Pediatrics site.  

A lot of British advice that I found was about dealing with bereavement, abuse or illness, but Cranmer Primary School in Mitcham, Surrey, has taken some American advice and amended it for a British context. 

A interesting newspaper item is this one from the New York Times, reporting French sources and media.
   

Media literacy, or how to read health stories in the news

I started writing this during the recent Labour Party leadership campaign, and have returned to it while doing an excellent MOOC course from Cardiff University, The Informed Health Consumer, one week of which was concerned with the reporting of health stories in the media.

Here are some of my thoughts about reading health stories in the news.

1.  Read the story, and not just the headline.   Is the headline written by the same person who wrote the story?   I am not sure it is, although this reveals my lack of media literacy!   Reading just the headline is perhaps like reading only the title or abstract of a research article.

2.  What motives do the story's authors have?    Or the newspaper?    

3.  Is what the story reports the whole story?   What are other reports saying?  

4.  Have the authors of the news story read the research study they are reporting?  Or just the press release?   And what were the motives behind the press release?

5.  What did the original research actually say or do?   Who did it?    I have memories of stories that drug A is a cure for disease B, or that eating a particular thing makes you live longer, but what did the original research say?   How many people were involved?    Or was it animal research?  Was it a "front group" (effectively a lobby group, trying to look like disinterested people).

If we are going to read a newspaper story about health critically, what should we be looking for?

One of the tutors on the Informed Health Consumer is Andy Williams, a journalism researcher.   This adds an interesting angle.   One of the units lists "science news values", things which journalists look for when reporting science and health, or things that may be shown.   These are

• Inaccurate reporting of uncertainty, or over extension, so for example, reporting a study that shows marginal risk of cancer in mice, over-extending the results to say that the same thing causes cancer in humans.
  
• Focusing on studies that report risks, thus suggesting the world is a riskier place than it is.
  
• Simplification - of course it is a valuable thing about reporting that it can simplify technical things, but things can be oversimplified and in the process distorted.
  
• Serious disagreements are always reported, suggesting that science has more conflict in it that it does.
  
• Human interest angle - of course, this is another positive thing about news reporting, but the risk in health stories is that a report of one person drinking tea and getting cancer is used to suggest that drinking tea always causes cancer.

The course uses some news stories that were picked up by the Behind the Headlines feature on the NHS Choices website, which is an excellent place to look at how health stories are reported.  Behind the Headlines chooses a story picked up by the press, and looks at the original research reported.

Finally, some proper advice on reading health news, from NHS Choices.   This advice is also reproduced on PubMed Health.