How to talk to your children about conflict and war

It can be hard to avoid news about the conflict and war around the world, especially with images and updates regularly topping the news and circulating online.

Brad Morgan is the director of Emerging Minds, an Australian organisation which develops mental health policy, interventions and programmes, and leads the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health.

“You see it on public transport. We see it in shops. You see it at home. Obviously, for some children, it's also in their pockets or at school,” Morgan tells Nine to Noon. “Certainly, the news exposure to these sort of things is pretty prevalent and persistent and pervasive across every part of our lives these days.”

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Guardians should be proactive in establishing what children have heard, Morgan says.

“I tend to encourage just being curious … ‘I've been watching, lots of news has popped up this week about this, have you seen anything pop up?’

“Then through that conversation, you can say, ‘it's a bit worrying, isn't it?’ And encourage them to sort of share some of their worries just by you sharing some of yours.

“But just assume that kids will probably try to protect you as well from their worries.”

For children who might not be at the age where you can ask them these questions, you can offer simple explanations instead, Morgan says.

“‘When there's a disagreement between countries, they find it hard to find a way to resolve that and so, as a consequence, sometimes they try to protect themselves or try to end that conflict by using weapons or by engaging in these sorts of things’. And so that might be a simple enough explanation for some children.”

It’s a natural and healthy reaction for children to be concerned about others in pain or suffering, but hearing about one global catastrophe after another can have a cumulative impact, Morgan says.

“Generally, we would recommend limiting exposure to news, particularly for those under sort of five or even probably a bit older than that,” he says.

“But something that's really important just to be aware of, particularly with younger children, is they might not be able to distinguish whether … that's happening in their neighbourhood or whether that's actually on the other side of the world. So it does have that potential to make them feel unsafe in their context.”

Providing some reassurances will be critical here, Morgan says, including about what is being done to help people in distress.

Share your own stories of when you witnessed chaos in the world and how “hope can be maintained, that there were actions that were taken, there were consequences to those things but, in everyday life, things were able to recover and develop again”.

“So sort of framing these things as, I guess, waves of issues that pop up, some of them are big, some of them are smaller, but they do change and they do settle.”

It’s okay to share with your children that you have worries too because it gives them permission to feel it’s okay to react that way, Morgan says.

But try to emphasise ‘what it means for us in our everyday life’ and encourage problem-solving by finding ways to disconnect, he says.

Be mindful that infants and young children are attuned to looking at our faces to gauge whether they’re safe or not, he says.

“If you're feeling quite distressed just by witnessing the news … probably turn off the news in the first place, but then actually do something calming and help them feel like they're in a safe space again and that's just through the way you react with them.”

With older children, take care with how you talk about conflict because they will be trying to understand your values and beliefs to form opinions, he says.

We live in an age where everyone has license to release their own narrative, and social media has the potential to expose our children to extreme content, Morgan says.

“Certainly what does tend to pop up, particularly [with] war and conflict, is discussions around race and discrimination.

“Something that we really encourage you to think about is how can you communicate in ways that encourage compassion.”

Focus on humanity instead of the political aspects which can increase a sense of separation, he says.

“I think, from a parent or an adult entry point, opening up the conversation enables you to understand where they're coming from [and] introduce different ideas.

“If they're being exposed to extreme content as well that you find quite disagreeable as a parent, even though you might find it hard to swallow, [ask] ‘can you show that to me? I want to sit down with you and watch that so we can have a bit of a chat about why that information has been given in that way and who's giving that information’.

“You use it as a way to what we call media literacy, which is unpacking who's telling this story and why they're telling it in this way.”