A CONFLICT I REFLECT UPON.

A former newsreader with the ABC (in Australia) has numerous mutual friends with me. I took another former newsreader by surprise when I asked if he used to read the news on Channel Ten, and he replied, “Not the evening bulletin, but the updates,” and I told him that I remembered a story about two women travelling in a cream Ford Falcon and the registration started with “OCM.”

I can remember news stories from when I was three or four, and I remember a two incidents. My mother used to ask my brother to be quiet when the six o’clock news was on, and he’d defiantly make noise, and one night, my father called me in to play with my brother and told me that I was too young to watch the news. Then, a few years later, when I was 10, my teacher told us, “You’re old enough now to start reading the newspapers and listening to the news.” Some of our teachers would even ask us about what we saw on the news, and we used to watch Behind The News at school.

During the 1985 SEQEB workers’ strike, the power came on for a while, and one of the conflicts with having a younger sibling, especially if they’re neurotypical and you’re autistic or vice versa, is that you’re expected by your parents to go down to their level. When the power came on, I wanted to watch The National, which was on at 7PM, and my mother snapped, “You don’t need to watch it!” Well, actually, Mum, if my teacher tells me that I’m old enough to watch the news and you tell me I’m not, you’re holding me back. If I face a question about the news that I can’t answer, I can’t easily say, “My mother won’t let me watch the news.”

I was curious about the world from a young age, and I remember poring over maps when I was a kid, wanting to know where places were and what capital cities they had. My brother was never curious about that, and instead preferred sport.

I know some parents might think that their kids are too young to process the news, but what I think is needed is more of a parental guidance approach to individual stories and segments on the news and parents should aim to be in lockstep with the teachers on some stories. Parents also need to be able to say to their kids, “Okay, if you see something disturbing, you can talk about it with us.”

After all, the role of parents is in part about helping to prepare children to be adults, not about keeping them as children forever.