Education is extremely important for someone’s structures and relation with life. Parent’s are usually the main educatirs of a child, even before the teachers. They often face difficult topics and wonder wether they should explain them to their children. For example, many people wondered what should be told to children about the outrages in New York, last september. Should parents reveal important things to their children ?

On the one hand, it can be said that children often don’t have the tools to understand properly important things. They cannot step back ( prendre du recul) and revealing them important things may be risky. For example, when a young child’s parent dies, the remaining parent often says that the other will come back later, but seldom talks about death. Moreover, talking about too sad things can have bad consequences for the child : talking about war, violence, etc. can lead to anxiety, paranoïa, etc. This all leads to thinking that it is good to hide some things from a child.

On the other hand, it is not possible to stay a child for a very long time, is it ? There is a moment when every child has to become a teenager, then a grown up. If the parents hide everything important from the child, he might become an immature or irresponsible grown up. Furthermore, important things are nowadays dealt with on TV, in the newspapers, on the Internet, etc. Therefore, it is very hard not to reveal anything important to one’s child. To do so, the child would have to live in a completely closed environment, which is obviously not good.

To conclude, I think that, although it is important for the parents to choose what they will tell their children , they have to consider them as intelligent human beings and not hide important things from them.