Microblog Memes

To be fair, before a certain age kids really can't contextualize anything beyond binary. Its either good or bad.

For a real world example, there's a new solar farm not far from where we live. The company that set it up engaged in some shady bullshit acquiring the farm land which was entirely owned by small family farms, with a couple of family farms effectively forced to exit the farming business by their shady bullshit. For my mother in law who's a huge MAGA supporter, she bought all of the propaganda about renewable energy being terrible, so the local scandals over this solar project fit right into her worldview. My wife and I want a better world, so we take a more nuanced view of "that was bullshit but at least the panels will be generating clean electricity for the next 20-30 years or more" my kids are caught in the crossfire as both my in-laws and we attempt to inform them, but not directly throw the other adults under the bus. My 6 year old has really struggled with understanding how they should feel and it's taken multiple long discussions over multiple years to get to "solar panels are good but taking good farmland is bad"

Any discussion with important nuance is extremely difficult with young kids because they really can't understand nuance yet. They can kinda understand "yes but" with enough education time but more complex than that it completely falls apart. Kids can't fully wrangle with complex thoughts and metacognition until basically adolescence, and before that point it's largely just black and white reasoning.

So in short, kids will be taught in a purely binary manner until about age 10-12 when their brains are finally developed enough for more complex reasoning, and anyone who checked out of learning around that age will likely be pretty deficienct in more complex skills and issues