A letter from Rachel Buchholz, KIDS AND FAMILY Editor in Chief
|  | Rachel Buchholz
KIDS AND FAMILY Editor in Chief | | | | |
I can’t help it. Like a child asking her parents what time it is a minute since the last time she asked, my eyes keep checking the time on my laptop, watching how long I have before D.C.’s 7 p.m. curfew goes into effect. In my home office just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, I hear helicopters hovering and have just watched a half-dozen National Guard vehicles, some full of soldiers, drive by.
I’m having a hard time making sense of all this: that people are still having to forcefully demonstrate against issues their parents and grandparents have already protested; that racism—blatant or unintentional—continues to crop up in a country that many of us wrongfully assumed had overcome it; that in this moment, when we should all be fighting the pandemic together, we’re fighting each other instead.
And I wonder … if I can’t make sense out of all this, how will children ever be able to?
Parents have had a tough few months communicating troubling issues to their children. How do you explain to your 10-year-old why he suddenly can’t play with his best friend or attend the fifth-grade graduation he’s been looking forward to all year? What’s the best way to comfort your eight-year-old whose classmate told her Asian-American friend that she was spreading coronavirus? How do we express to them that even though adults keep talking to children about racial equality, cities are still being torn apart after another police incident against an African American?
It’d be a lot easier if we could just ignore how these issues are affecting children, keeping our fingers crossed that they’re too wrapped up in video chats and YouTube to notice much of anything. But we all know that’s not true. They’re overhearing TV reports, watching you gasp at social media posts, and probably getting a lot of information on their own, through friends or friends’ parents. And no matter how much we want to shield children from these uncomfortable and sometimes frightening topics, doing so just makes it harder for them to process confusing events as they get older.
The good news is that children can handle it. They understand fairness and kindness, what it means to accept things that are different on the surface, how sometimes you get so angry that you can’t do anything but yell. They just need guidance and support from their parents to apply those innate qualities to the serious current events facing them today.
National Geographic Kids magazine has always been about empowering kids to make the world a better place through being kind, protecting the planet, and understanding that every living thing matters. But we also want to empower parents to deal with the relevant family issues they’re facing today, whether it’s protecting kids’ mental health through shutdowns or coming up with brain boosters while they’re out of school.
Basically, we want to provide the tools for children to be able to say, “I got this.” And we want parents to be able to say, “Hey, we got this too.” | |
| Sincerely, |  | Rachel Buchholz
KIDS AND FAMILY Editor in Chief | |  | | | |
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