How much of the adult world does your child need?

# How much of the adult world does your child need?

It's one of the most repeated pieces of advice in contemporary parenting: protect young children from the adult world — the news, grown-up conversations, the TV on in the background. The intuition behind it is strong: a four-year-old doesn't have the tools to process a news bulletin, and what they can't process keeps rattling around in their head.

But when you go looking for the evidence, you find a picture more nuanced than the advice. There are solid findings in one specific area, reasonable hypotheses in others, and a big zone where honestly we don't know — and where the advice has been stretched further than the data allows.

Let's separate the three, because the difference matters when you're deciding what to really filter and what you can save yourself from policing.