What do we tell our children and when? This is a broad topic. There will be many instances as parents that we choose to or not to inform our children about certain topics. As an educator watch out what you say cause it might just not be worth it. I think many parents avoid topics and tell their children little white lies to delay answering the question honestly. A lot of the time we dont want to scare the children because we feel they are a little too fragile for the harsh reality. At no point do i think that a parent should create a lie to answer their children's questions. Death for instance is a scary topic to approach for any age group. Do you tell a child that when someone dies they go to a better place to soften it up? Do you tell them what your religion believes? If you are christian do you tell them they go to heaven? or hell? There is not an easy answer. I think that any chance you get as a parent you should inform your child truthfully and as delicately as possible the first time the topic arises. If we dont inform our children then they will find the information somewhere else. More often than not the alternate resouce will be less accurate. I personily dont want my child learning the birds and bees from his classmates in middle school. Every topic will have an appropriate time to be discussed. Some may be very early in a child's life. If the parent doesnt take the first opportunity they may be too late to inform their child of its importance. Any child is fully capable of understanding and I dont think a parent should ever under estimate them. Most children are only fragile and scared because we make them that way by putting a force field around them.

I agree that as a teacher it is not our place to tell students truths about things their parents may not want them to know! That is definitly the role of the parent... and the chose of the parent of whether they want to tell their children the truth or sugar coat everything until they are older.

I found this discussion in class very interesting. When is too young? I think that like Lauren said in class we greatly underestimate the mentality of our students. I believe that students as young as 6 can understand and talk about subjects such as the child labor laws or death but we often would rather avoid the subject. Avoiding subjects such as sex or death will result in the children getting the information incorrectly from other sources as adam stated. I feel that at younger ages it is appropriate to introduce the topic and skim the details and just have the child aware that it is present. As the child matures, you can then introduce the topic a little more deeply and since they alright knew about the topic it wont come as one big shock.

Informing children of certain issues is the responsibility of a parent or guardian. There are boundaries teachers can cross with certain topics, this should be avoided especially so that problems wont arise with parents.

Like Sarah said a teacher should not take the place of the parent but at the same time I think that it is very important for a student to be informed what is going on in the world. Think of how your teachers handled September 11. For the most part by the time this event happened many children were already in school. Should the teachers have gone about the day and never told there students? In a elementary school it is plausible to think that the students could have gone the entire day without knowing what was going on and then it would be left up to their parents to explain everything. I think that as a teacherit is your job to inform your students of everyday events. Your students are memebers of society and they count. If you shelter them from all the bad things in the world, they will have a false view of reality. But I think that before a teacher explains/talks about event they should consider if they are including their opinion or fact. Then when more personal things are involved a teachers should be very careful not to step over his/her boundries.