When we protect our children from certain kinds of knowledge, are we protecting their psychological health, or are we protecting ourselves from dealing with uncomfortable subects?

One must go with the gut feel on this one. The TV has its ratings scheme but most parents by default know their kids best. Err on the safe side I guess. If a parent is uncertain about an issue and decides to keep their young ones “in the dark” about it, it may not serve the child any ill effect at all so that is quite an acceptable approach in my view.

The best data any parent might have is the data he or she herself gather. And each child is unique so whether its innocence or exposure they may need at one point or another, the parents tweak and adjust as needed. There is no specific hard course to follow I guess. Just the ability to adapt to present situations in your kid’s life and growth process.

We are protecting their health. Kids get more and more knowlegde as they grow up. It doesn’t make sense to teach 6-year-old children all about the holocaust and the brutality of war and the effect of rape and so forth.

We didn’t make a point of introducing our kids to sex or violence and we didn’t protect them from it either. We rather dealt with things as they arose and answered their questions as best we could. We spent time on farms with our kids and no doubt they asked what animals were doing at certain times and I’m sure we must have told them but I don’t honestly remember.

There is more to the world than sex and violence and our kids absorbed it all in their own way. Books and children’s stories helped a lot.

There’s a fine line between protecting innocence and sheltering too much. It’s a difficult one to walk, but we’ve certainly tried. I do think some people keep things from their children for their own benefit, but probably most are just trying to do the right thing. Sadly, violence rears its ugly head all too often, and must be dealt with in an age-appropriate way when it does.

I don’t think small children need the gory details, but on 9/11 I had to explain to my children what was going on when I picked them up from school early (we were close enough to DC that it mattered). They were young enough at the time that “Some bad people flew some planes into buildings because they are angry with America” (and why this meant they had to leave school early, along with many of their classmates) was enough.

For both sex and violence (along with every other topic under the sun), it’s been an ongoing conversation that evolves as they mature.

I think we think we are doing it for the children, but are more so doing it for us. It’s like we’re trying to prove to others outside of the family how great we are as parents by sheltering kids from these things.

Yes, I believe many people are sheltering. Kids need violence and sex exposure. We need to let little boys fight and be aggressive, this helps develop their emotions and what not. It helps evolutionary speaking. They can learn to protect themselves and others. Sex wise the more they know the more they are likely to be safe. If you just avoid it or keep saying no don’t do it, they will be more reckless their first time. In fact, studies have shown that most unplanned pregnancies are because the couple that had unprotected sex was abstaining before hand. They decided that when they had sex that it would be unprotected because it would be more meaningful and so on. Having all this abstinence propaganda makes it harder for people to discuss the STD dangers and go more in depth, because all you’re getting is just “Don’t have sex.”