A new toolkit for PSHE and Citizenship Education classes called ‘Let’s Talk About…’ has just been released and is now free to download on the project section of the Childhood Publics Research Programme website. In the blog post that follows, Melissa Nolas, the Director of the Childhood Publics Research Programme, writes about the background and inspiration for the toolkit.
I have, over the years, been collecting press articles from the US and the UK of a genre which I now call ‘how to talk to children/kids about X’ where X is typically a subject that adults think children know nothing about or that is too sensitive, disturbing, or too advanced a topic for tender years.
One of the earliest examples I can locate in my own file is from the 2016 US Presidential Election campaign headlines circulated about ‘how to talk to your kids about Donald Trump’ and later ‘Talking to kids about Trumps Victory’.
In January 2017 at least one UK broadsheet ran an article about ‘9 ways to explain Brexit to kids – using Minecraft, sausages and cake‘ and later that same year, again in the UK, the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017, gave rise to articles about ‘how should we talk to children about terrorism?’ ‘How to talk to kids about Coronavirus‘ headlines came in March 2020, not just in the media but everywhere: children’s charities, NHS trusts, World Health Organisation, and Local Government.
More recently, in March 2022, there was ‘Be open, be honest and listen: how to talk to children about Ukraine‘ and in October 2023 ‘Don’t avoid discussing Hamas-Isreal conflict with children, say experts’.
The most recent headline I came across last week was ‘You need to talk to your kids about AI. Here are 6 things you should say‘.
Most of these articles default to the psychologist experts, as if psychology is the only body of knowledge to be able to say anything meaningful about children. With the sole exception of the March 2022 article on the war in Ukraine that actually notes the importance of ‘listening’, the rest give the impression of talking at children.
Interestingly, I do not recall coming across nor can I find a headline/article through a simple internet search, about how to talk to children about ‘austerity’ which has arguably had the biggest and broadest impact on children’s lives, plunging many into poverty over the last 15 years. It seems that there are some topics we should just not broach with children.
There is nothing systematic about my collection of these headlines – though a systematic media analysis, if it hasn’t happened already, I think would tell us much about adult anxieties of the moment, liberal parenting, and yet again about the pervasiveness of cultural representations of childhood innocence.
I think I became more attuned to these headlines/articles during the years of running the Connectors Study through which we explored the relationship between childhood and public life, and I was hoovering up any and all illustrative examples of this relationship that I came across in my everyday life.
These headlines, from the outset, grated with me. With a background like mine in childhood studies where we de facto consider children to have agency and to be knowledgeable beings living in the same communities and societies as adults, even if they develop their own cultures, these headlines/articles and the thinking behind them, start to look more and more bizarre even a bit funny and naive.
So I collected them to share with my students as examples of the sorts of assumptions that still circulate about children and childhood in the public sphere and shape a lot of policy and practice: namely, a top-down outdated socialisation model of child development.
Embedded in the articles are many bizarre assumptions about both children and adults: that children don’t know and adults know, or that children live in hermetically sealed bubbles, or that adults are necessarily comfortable with having difficult / sensitive conversations, or that communication amongst children and adults is only one way.
It doesn’t take much to pop these assumptions. The day after the UK referendum for EU membership in June 2016, as I’ve written elsewhere, I walked past a local primary school where children were already discussing Brexit just as the rest of the ‘grown ups’ were too – many children grow up talking politics in everyday family life, as my colleagues and I discovered in our ethnographic research.
Meanwhile, research by colleagues at Sheffield Hallam University (Formby et al, 2011) as well as more recent, smaller studies in the UK and elsewhere (Willis and Walstenholme, 2016; Burns and Hendriks, 2018) on teacher experiences of delivering PSHE and PSHE-adjacent topics, consistently suggest low confidence and discomfort in talking to children about ‘difficult’ or ‘sensitive’ topics (e.g., gender, race, death, economics, politics).
Finally, those of us doing research in the anthropology and sociology of childhood and/or childhood studies also know very well that children, as meaning-making beings, hear, see, feel, and make their own sense of the world around them on their own and with their friends all the time.
It was from these headlines, my irritation with them, and the knowledge that children know things too, that the idea for the ‘Let’s talk about…’ toolkit came about and was then realised during the ERC Proof of Concept grant (it’s taken a while to make public because a pandemic has put me back by a few years…).
The toolkit inverts the idea that adults need to always teach children about important life events and instead asks what adults – be they teachers, parents, or other significant others in a child’s life, can learn from children about important social topics. The toolkit is an invitation to take children’s knowledge as a starting point for conversations. Using a childhood studies approach, we reviewed relevant literature on what children already know about things such as the economy, politics, gender, race and death and created a pack of 36 cards summarising some of these findings.
The ‘Let’s talk about…’ toolkit is free to access and is intended to complement PSHE, Citizenship or related curricula and existing tool and resources out there. There are a limited number of card packs are available FREE OF CHARGE in English and in Greek. Postage can be arranged upon request (postage charges will need to be covered by the school/educator). I am also available to provide professional development training to schools / groups of teaching / local authority educational staff on developing a research-informed approach to PSHE topics and how to use these cards in classroom settings.
For further details please contact Melissa Nolas @ sevasti [dot] nola [at] gmail [dot] com .