My kids are having a hard enough time at ages 5 and 8 just learning how to get along with their own neighbor at school and activities. They don't need to know what's going on in the world.
The 8 year old knows some things and it has deeply effected her.
For instance, the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Last year was 10 years so it was everywhere. They talked about it at school, there was some sort of special on almost every channel about it, there was no way she didn't hear about it.
We watched on of the specials, I can't tell you which one, but it was a very in depth look at it. She cried the whole time. She is a very empathetic child, for people, animals, all living beings.
She can't watch TV and that song by Sarah McLachlan, Angel, come on. She knows that the commercial is going to show unhappy animals and she starts tearing up. She can't imagine why anyone would treat anyone or anything like that.
So, for her, she does not need to news in any form. The world becomes a dark dangerous place where she is not safe and neither are any of the other beings here. No news shows for her.
For the 5 year old, he would not be interested in the cause and effect of what he was seeing. He'd be more interested in the wars and fighting aspect of it all. He does not need to know that he lives in a world with so much hatred and senseless violence.
I think that little kids have enough to deal with without sitting them down and having a formal time for "let's see how bad the world is today". The kids have to deal with bully's, homework, interpersonal relationships, cliques, teachers who are having a bad day, they have too much to learn and deal with already.
In college we did a lot of testing. We administered the MMPI to anyone who would come to get an extra credit for a class, we administered a lot of those psych tests for different grad students trying to show cause for a more in depth study on any given subject.
There were several that hypothesized that people who watch the news regularly had a tendency to be more depressed. We had thousands of students come in during that year. It was across the board. It was phenomenal. People who keep up with world events, tragedy's, wars, natural disasters, etc....are much more likely to suffer from depression.
After this study was done I just never had any interest in knowing what was going on in other places of the world or even in nearby cities. I want to know if I have storms coming, if I have heat warnings, what is going on with my local city and if there are events we can attend. That's about all I look at on purpose.
I did watch to see how Hurricane Isaac landed and what the outcome of that was. But as far as sitting down on purpose each day, there's just no way I'm going to allow the kids to watch the world news or even the local news talking about who got murdered and what fire destroyed a family.