This piece comes to us from Sam Flatman, an outdoor learning specialist and an Educational Consultant for Pentagon Play. Sam has been designing school playground equipment for the past 10 years and has a passion for outdoor education. He believes that outdoor learning is an essential part of child development, which should be integrated into the school curriculum at every opportunity.
Should We Shelter Our Children From The News? by Sam Flatman
Is the world really such a horror show?
With fresh reports of terrorist action hitting our TV screens each week, the media would have us all believe that the world is fast becoming a complete dystopia. But are these stories something we should be keeping from our children?
The Future’s All Doom And Gloom
Hyperbole has always been a major component of news broadcasts. While horrific events may occur at any given moment around the world, they don’t necessarily add up to widespread chaos and total global ruin. When so-called experts discuss the fallout of these events, they are, more often than not, speculating.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be concerned. It’s only natural to see the attacks in Paris or Turkey and assume the worst for your own country. However, it’s not necessarily a narrative we want our children to grow up obsessing over. The news encourages us to be constantly vigilant – to always treat unknown circumstances as suspicious. If a child was to follow this advice, mistrusting every new experience, they’d never have a chance to develop into functional, well-reasoning adults. So: what’s the best way to dispel the fearmongering terrorism creates?
Pretend Play Rationalizes Real Life
A recent study suggests that children who are given the opportunity to digest and understand current affairs are better equipped to deal with them as adults. In fact, children have already adopted their own mechanism for coping with such sensitive issues: pretend play. While some parents might be keen to avoid exposure completely, it’s naive to think a child can be sheltered from certain events forever. Eventually, through conversations at school or TV at a friend’s house, children will discover the truth. Your duty as a parent is to give them every opportunity to come to terms with it rationally.
Typically, children learn to communicate through play long before they perfect the use of language. While adults gain emotional perspective through discussion, children engage with complicated issues through the filter of imaginative play. By denying them the chance to exercise this power, we risk stunting their emotional understanding. Terrorism is not a playful subject, but finding ways to rationalize it makes it easier for children to deal.
In war-torn countries such as Israel and Syria, children have been pictured using toys to reconstruct the devastation that is being caused to their homeland. These children repeat a scenario over and over again with varying outcomes, until they are satisfied with every possible conclusion. Even if their Lego city is eventually saved from the bombs by Superman and the rest of the Justice League, they find a way to hypothesize their safety. The aim of pretend play isn’t to dumb down the atrocity of war, it’s to find a way of humanizing it – even if, in a child’s mind, it takes more than a human to rectify the problem.
Pretend play is nature’s way of strengthening emotional intelligence and can inspire our children to discover new ways to deal with the world’s horrors. The media would have us all bunker down in the backyard. Instead, we must ensure that our children know how to separate the fact from the fabricated, so that they may grow up to be educated, caring individuals.
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35 Comments
I recall that children in Nazi concentration camps still engaged in play.
As always, children get introduced to the world at the level the child is at. My seven year old gets told there are bad guys who want to hurt us, but there are good guys who want to stop them. Just like the superheroes he plays with. Later he’ll learn that those superheroes are Marines and soldiers and airmen and sailors. As he reaches his teenage years he’ll learn the nuances of life, but now things are black and white, and the good guys always fight the bad guys because that’s what good guys do.
If only the adults had as much wisdom as the children.
@Workshop — at what age will your child learn that there are no such thing as “bad guys” and “good guys” and do you think you can effectively re-orient his thinking on that? I think a lot of the problems we see is the result of adults who hold onto the idea that people can be sorted into “bad” and “good.”
This is deeply important. You have to realize that children will hear about things one way or the other and if they hear from other children it will be garbled and possibly even scarier. I like the idea of developing a pretend play way of broaching certain topics. I wonder if anyone has created toys or games that have the purpose of introducing difficult topics with children and letting them “play” them out. On second thought I don’t think you need outside props.
This is why I think reading children original fairy tales and challenging books is important. Fictional tales have a way of modeling children’s fears and allowing them to work through them in a way that they can handle. I’ve noticed that very young children are not horrified by the same things we are – as when Cinderella’s sisters cut off pieces of their feet to try to fit the glass slipper, but are given away when the Prince sees all the blood! For children this just doesn’t seem real the way it does to us. When we think about the horror of foot amputation it’s real because we’ve known of real accidents and wars where that happened. But to children it’s as abstract as monsters and knights slaying dragons.
Andrea, I’m 44 years old, and I understand that there are good guys and bad guys.
People who want to cut off my head because I don’t believe the way they do are bad guys. I don’t mean people who figuratively want to cut off my head. Heck, my wife wants to do that to me. I mean, quite literally, separate my head from the rest of my body.
The bad guys generally want to separate me from my life and my property via violent means. It’s not too difficult to tell who the bad guys are. I may disagree with lots of people, but those people usually aren’t villains. But if you want to steal my car at gunpoint, I’m pretty sure “bad guy” is an appropriate label.
Anyone remember playing ring around the rosy? It was invented by kids as a way to cope with the black plague.
My kids just watched a documentary on the iceman found in the Alps who died more than 5000 years ago. The doc focused on how he died and as my oldest (7) was explaining to me that he was killed by someone based on his injuries, he referred to the killer as a bad guy. I told him that we didn’t know if he was a bad guy, only that he killed him.
It’s too easy to simplify things to good vs bad, but in doing so I think we are doing a disservice, both to our children and to the people we label as ‘bad.’ By labeling them as bad, we dehumanize them, which makes it easier for us to do horrific things to them, because we’re the good guys, right?
At 7, the guy doing the killing is a bad guy. Because death brings sadness, death is therefore bad. I doubt that a seven year old, living in our modern culture, understands the nuance that adults so clearly understand. And it does get difficult to explain to children the difference.
For example when my son sees the police on the side of a road next to a former speeder, my son asks “Are the police taking the bad guy to jail.” Don’t know that he’s a bad guy, kiddo. But maybe he was driving too fast and the police needed to tell him to slow down. But sure enough, the next time the police lights are seen . . . “Are people going to jail?”
Bad guys and good guys doesn’t mean inhuman monsters and angels, so yes, of course your children should learn there are bad guys and good guys and they should never outgrow thinking that they exist.
Bad guys are people whose actions against you (directly or indirectly) are morally unjustified. Good guys are those who, in a given situation, are on your side in doing the right thing. Making it more complex than that means you can’t even decide whether you should let someone mug you or not.
There are bad guys, and there are good guys. I’d prefer that my kids grow up to be good guys. But, if they’re bad guys, I want them to be bad guys on the side of the good guys.
My daughter was in first grade on 9/11, which happened around “time to get up for school” in these parts.
So it kind of took care of itself.
My opinion is to neither hide the truth from the children nor point it out… if it’s important, they’ll absorb it and process it, and if it isn’t, they won’t.
I am very strongly against the Hyperbole that the media thrives on. However I don’t think that shielding children in a similar way to a rated R movie would solve it. We need to OUTGROW it instead. We need to outgrow this form of entertainment. The news does it BECAUSE it’s so much in demand.
Education is the key to outgrowing this 80 AD Roman Colosseum style of entertainment. The ‘Harm Joy’ of that era is similar to what we have today. The insatiable appetite to condemn is a big reason for the sex offence registry. This also feeds the ‘Us vs Them’ mentality. This feeds the, ‘All men near children are suspicious’ belief.
This is the main reason for my blog. I’m trying to educate people. It’s well known that a 7 day per week diet of ice cream and fast food will affect your body. I’m trying to tell people that what you feed your head also makes a difference. It determines how you perceive the world.
Watch your thoughts. They become words. Watch your words. They become deeds. Watch your deeds. They become habits. Watch your habits. They become character. Watch your character. It becomes your destiny.
The above words are not just a clever saying that belongs on a Hallmark card. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lao Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Winston Churchill, and Mahatma Gandhi have all made versions of that quote. When are people going to actually start paying attention to it? Perhaps they will later. CSI is just too entertaining and the clickbait on the intranet is irresistible. The answer is to set up a bureaucracy to protect us from this temptation. Besides collecting as many ‘likes’ on Facebook takes priority over everything.
http://www.onmysoapboxx.com/
As an analyst in the security field and a parent to young kids, I live with this issue. The concept of good v bad is misleading. Rather, it should be that people around the world have very different views and opinions that are often informed by religious and community leaders. What happens around the world can be discussed at home but generally needs to be amended or simplified to the age of the child, and even then the intimate details might need to be omitted. Examples: People take other people hostage for various reasons; it’s an opportunity to discuss that we never GO with strangers. People hurt other people because they don’t understand or value them. To speak about geo-political events is a wonderful thing. Bad things are happening to schools in Aleppo, so we value even more the opportunities for education we have here. We value the right to have different opinions and to be able to say them aloud. We value having a free press and being able to look things up without censors. We value inclusion and kindness. We value friends with different skin colors and life experiences. The violence and gore of terrorism is best left unsaid. The same could be said for diseases like Ebola, yellow fever, dengue, malaria, zika, etc; discussions can focus on how lucky we are to have great medical care, the need sometimes for shots, and/or the importance of healthy eating. I hope this helps focus the conversation.
Pentamom and Workshop – I absolutely agree! Teaching kids that people aren’t usually all-bad or all-good (once they’re old enough for that level of nuance) is one thing; throwing away the whole concept of bad and good is something else entirely. If a kid doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as good guys and bad guys, what could even inspire him to care and fight for what’s right?
“Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.” – GK Chesterton
I’m a bleeding-heart liberal, so I’ve always done my best to talk about “sometimes people do bad things” and “everyone has good and bad inside of them” and “police officers are there to stop people from making mistakes (not “stop bad guys”).” My five year old son though, talks like all boys that age– “Look, a bad guy! Shoot him shoot him! Good guys to the rescue! Send the bad guy to jail!” He hardly is ever exposed to “media”, and he’s obviously not learning it at home. That sorting– good guys vs bad guys– seems to be hard-wired into children.
“That sorting— good guys vs bad guys— seems to be hard-wired into children.”
I don’t think it’s hardwired into the children. Rather, I think it’s the inevitable result of raising children. One of the first words they learn is “no!” A little bit further along in development, the association is made… that which results in “no!” is bad behavior, and other things are good behavior. You can see it in animal training, too… the dog learns that piddling in the living room is bad behavior, and they’ll act guilty if they’ve done it. (Granted, I’m not privy to whether all of that barking translates to “there’s a dog who piddles in the living room! Shoot them!”)
The nuanced view… that “bad” people may be misunderstood “good” people, or even just “good” from a different point of view… definitely comes later, and some people struggle with it even in adulthood, particularly where conflict is involved.
“Good guys to the rescue! Send the bad guy to jail!” He hardly is ever exposed to “media”, and he’s obviously not learning it at home. That sorting— good guys vs bad guys— seems to be hard-wired into children.”
Exactly! However I want to take this a step further and ask the question.
How are these children learning the Us / Them mentality?
They get bombarded by this idea from birth. All of us are helping this to happen! They then grow up and help feed it.
“How are these children learning the Us / Them mentality?”
Easy enough.
They start with me/them.
Then, later, they start moving people from “them” to “me”, which forms “we”, as the individual notices commonality between self and “other individual”. Eventually (presumably), we’d all wind up with just “we”, and no “them” once we’d recognized sufficient commonality between ourselves and everyone else… the process is just slower in some than in others.
(And, of course, the fact that I consider you and I to be “we” doesn’t mean that you have any such notion. (Insert Lone Ranger/Tonto joke with the punchline “what do you mean we, kemo sabe?”))
They learn this good guy vs. bad guy and us vs. them stuff from other kids.
Parents raise children but their peers socialize them. They learn culture from their peers.
They take on the play styles and attitudes of their peers.
https://www.amazon.com/Nurture-Assumption-Children-Revised-Updated/dp/1439101655
It’s not a question of protecting kids from “the news” but rather protecting kids (and ourselves) against a highly selective and grossly distorted presentation of events mislabled “current affairs.” Educating children entails helping them learn how to evaluate information rationally: what kind of evidence is most reliable, what is a valid inference, how to identify subtle attempts to persuade and deceive you? The accuracy or reliability of many specific media reports today is close to zero.
I don’t make any effort to follow what the mass media rant and rave about or casually claim is what people need to know to be “well-informed.” Some headines reach me regardless, and I see no reason to pay serious attention to them. As far as I’m concerned my students have no need to keep abreast of “the news,” unless certain individual students have a specific interest and there is some new information that might be useful to that individual.
@Keen Observer
“Parents raise children but their peers socialize them. They learn culture from their peers. They take on the play styles and attitudes of their peers.”
So … the peers ARE “the bad guys”!
“The accuracy or reliability of many specific media reports today is close to zero.”
I disagree. They have the weather and traffic reports right when they say they’ll be. (The weather is overcast and rainy, the traffic is backed up on all the commuter routes. Back to you.)
Local TV news is reliable, by which I mean predictable. Crimes and traffic accidents will get covered, especially if there’s been someone hurt. And, in THIS particular metropolitan area, if three snowflakes are spotted in the air simultaneously, the local stations will all go wall-to-wall in their news coverage of the “winter blast!”
I don’t watch TV news unless I am VERY bored, because TV news is biased. Not biased politically, but biased in favor of the medium… things that they can take pictures of and talk about for about a minute and a half to three minutes, and then be done with. If you are interested in that sort of thing, TV news is great for you. And then, there are few items of actual import that get news coverage… Airplanes crashing into skyscrapers, space vehicles coming apart over Texas, airplanes landing in the Hudson River (yes, there’s a theme in my examples of aerial vehicles being badly broken. Purely coincidence. Back in 69, the space vehicle landed and returned safely, and that would have qualified for my list, if the majority of people alive today were old enough to remember it.)
Far too many American voters are badly misinformed, because people are quite willing to tell them what they want to hear, whether it is true or not. As an example, a rather staggering number of voters believe that President Obama refuses to deport illegal aliens, in defiance of the law. That’s just not true, but people believe it, and the ones who do, believe it rather fervently. Given the choice between “here are the facts” and “don’t believe them, they have a liberal bias!”… facts don’t always win.
The trick is not to find a completely unbiased source of information. The trick is to learn to recognize, and correct for, the bias(es) that are present. Kids can learn that… but it’s not guaranteed, and it’s fairly unlikely if the adults in their lives can’t do it, either.
@James Pollock
‘ And, in THIS particular metropolitan area, if three snowflakes are spotted in the air simultaneously, the local stations will all go wall-to-wall in their news coverage of the “winter blast!”‘
I suppose you could call that reliable, but not accurate. I’ve noticed a recent years a tendency for weather reports to present anything other than a dry mild day as an apocalypse in the making:
Yes, the “winter blast” as you mention.
A little rain? Flood warning! Prepare to seek high ground!
Sunny day? Watch out for heatstroke! (Good advice in south Texas, where I lived at one time, but here in the Allegheny mountains?)
Cold, but no snow? Frostbite! Stay inside!
It’s not accurate. They portray situations as worrisome when they aren’t.
“I suppose you could call that reliable, but not accurate”
No, it’s accurate. We’ve had schools closed because of it. We get snow that sticks to the ground about once every two years. The city grinds to a standstill.
“A little rain? Flood warning! Prepare to seek high ground!”
Nope. We don’t get any snow, but we get rain pretty much every day in the wintertime. Our forecasts aren’t whether or not it will rain, but when and for how long. The areas that flood are well-known, too, and again it’s not if, it’s how much.
“Cold, but no snow? Frostbite! Stay inside!”
We don’t get that cold, usually, either. I never got around to turning on the furnace last winter. I think we had one night below freezing.
It’s cool (relatively) in the summertime, warm (relatively) in the wintertime, and we don’t get much in the way of tropical storms or tornadoes. We do get the occasional volcanic eruption. But since we so rarely get snow, nobody who lives here gets any practice driving in snow, and 90% of the population doesn’t know how. So… three snowflakes in the air signals a day off from school or work, because the schools will shut down if there’s any snow on the ground, and a lot of businesses, too. I’m one of the few people who CAN drive in the snow (I spent a winter in AF tech school in Denver… I learned to drive a bomb-lift vehicle in about a foot of snow, with a 500-pound bomb strapped on the front. The native Denverites didn’t even slow down for a two-foot accumulation. Portland shuts down for two inches, and I once saw about 3/4 of an inch in Seattle…3 of the 4 lanes of I-5 were filled with abandoned cars, with actual moving cars creeping by at about a walking pace.
I was also in Seattle the Thanksgiving when the bridge sank. They actually cut into the football game to cover that..
@James Pollock
“But since we so rarely get snow, nobody who lives here gets any practice driving in snow, and 90% of the population doesn’t know how. So… three snowflakes in the air signals a day off from school or work, because the schools will shut down if there’s any snow on the ground, and a lot of businesses, too.”
We easily get enough snow for everyone to have had practice, but schools here shut down or are delayed, more snow days in a typical winter than I had K-12, and I lived in snowy areas (on the Great Lakes in Michigan and Ohio before Pennsylvania). They didn’t used to shut down for every snowfall.
What was funny, during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, was to see local (and even national) weather reports trying to say “yes, we lie about severe weather all the time to scare you, but this time it really is scary!”, but using euphemisms so as not to actually say they lied before.
Of course 7 year olds can understand nuances. People are not all good or all bad. I am surprised how many people are insisting young children cannot get this concept. Just change the way you talk about these issues – talk about the complexity of people and the actions they take – kids get it. My current 7 year old understands this, as do all his three older brothers. People are complex.
Well my kids were in middle school during 9/11. So I didn’t have any choice. I made sure that I instilled the message that if we give in to fear, they win. But I also felt like they should be aware of their surroundings. It was a fine line to walk during that time.
“But if you want to steal my car at gunpoint, I’m pretty sure “bad guy” is an appropriate label.”
But not an accurate label. As someone who spent 10 years representing people who stole cars at gunpoint, life just ain’t that black and white. An incredibly small number of my clients are “bad guys.” The vast majority are just imperfect people who had a number of hardships that most of us can’t fully understand and made a series of really bad decisions that ultimately lead to them coming into my orbit. Like most of us, they are a dichotomy; a mix of both good and bad. They will rob a store and then spend the rest of the day lovingly nursing their dying grandmother who raised them.
I was in court last week with a man who robbed a store at gunpoint when he was 17. A “bad guy” according to you. He is now 60 years old and has never committed another crime. We were in court because he needed a waiver from DFCS to be able to live in his sister’s home so that he can help her raise her grandson whose parents are drug addicts with no desire to stop using drugs. Based on the ample testimony we heard, he wasn’t even a bad guy at 17. Just a stupid kid getting high with the wrong people.
And, yes, children, even young children, are able to understand this concept. I have never spoken to my daughter in terms of good or bad people. In fact, I’ve talked at length about there being no such thing. We talk exclusively of good and bad choices and what helps shape those good and bad choices.
“Given the choice between “here are the facts” and “don’t believe them, they have a liberal bias!”… facts don’t always win.”
In fact, there was a study done a couple years ago that indicates that facts rarely win. Giving people facts that challenge their beliefs actually causes them to become more firmly entrenched in those beliefs, not less.
“Bad guys are people whose actions against you (directly or indirectly) are morally unjustified. Good guys are those who, in a given situation, are on your side in doing the right thing.”
Wow. That is basically a definition that says “if you agree with me, you are good and if you disagree with me, you are bad.” Definitely not what I will ever for even a single millisecond of the day teach my child. She is perfectly okay with the concept that there are neither good nor bad people; just good and bad decisions.
“Making it more complex than that means you can’t even decide whether you should let someone mug you or not.”
No it doesn’t. Robbing someone is always a wrong choice. You don’t have to view the person as bad to believe that them robbing you is a wrong action. You can sympathize with them completely and still want to not want to be robbed.
Sheesh, how did you all raise children? I certainly hope it wasn’t with this idea that throwing a plate in anger makes them a bad person, but instead that throwing a plate is an inappropriate response to whatever made them angry. Even if their anger is 100% justified, throwing a plate is not the correct response. This is no different.
If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for my kids. We don’t shy our kids away from reality. If they ask a question we tell them the truth. We explain to them in a manner they can understand. We don’t patronize them or shelter them. But we do make sure we try to keep it at least G rated as much as possible. Eg. With sex. We don’t talk about “birds and the bees”. We talk about reproductive organs, and the truth of how babies are made. But we also teach them responsibility, consequences, and making the right decisions at the right time. After that, it’s pretty much up to them how to process. But we are there to answer questions. Like most children though, they change the subject pretty quickly. lol
Piaget would tell us that up until about age 11 when a child is in Concrete Operational stage of development, they can only really process concrete concepts. The final stage age 12 and up they start to understand the abstract. Piaget was not perfect but some of his stuff makes a lot of sense when you look at kids ability to see beyond black and white– good guys vs bad guys.
Then again some people never develop past this stage. I am not being snarky, its a common thing for certain brain differences to be unable to understand abstract reasoning or even sarcasm.
BL October 28, 2016 at 5:31 am #
@Keen Observer
“Parents raise children but their peers socialize them. They learn culture from their peers. They take on the play styles and attitudes of their peers.”
So … the peers ARE “the bad guys”!
Nope, peers are NOT that bad guy at all; research and experience tells me that contrary to popular belief, kids get most of their culture and attitudes from their peers, not their parents. In the early years, it is done through play, play, and more play, pretend play, especially. As they grow older, they have more serious discussions and deeper friendships.
I suggest the “Nurture Assumption” by Judith Rich Harris to learn more about this process:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption
It actually can be used to support “free range kids” as it suggests parents do NOT have to spend all their time fretting about and entertaining their children and many attitudes towards 21st century parenting found in popular books are entirely cultural and change over time BUT children playing together and socializing in groups is a universal thing (in most of the world, they play without direct adult supervision, let alone constant adult attention; the adults in the vacinity do sort of keep an “eagle eye” out for each other’s kids). The premises of the book is that personalities and outcome as an adult are formed through a combination of genetics and interactions with other children.
As the daughter of immigrants raised in the U.S, I can give plenty of real life examples I have seen that support the book. For example, here’s the cultural one: in my parents home country, kids have no set bedtime. Everyone goes to bed at the same time and children are ALWAYS included in parties and night events, which often run well past midnight. Only the small babies sleep on their parents lap; even toddlers stay up late. Most Americans are horrified upon hearing this asking me, “How those children get enough sleep” and how “adults get to ‘socialize’ with their kids around. (All the American parenting books push early bedtimes and sleep routines). Back in that country, kids keep each other busy at those family style by playing with each other while the adults socialize; even the toddlers. They play in mixed age groups and the older kids look after the younger ones and only go to their parents when there is a problem
and often they will solve it themselves. Amazingly, the kids don’t get cranky from staying up late; they just make it up by sleeping in and taking naps the next day. This is something that would horrify many “child development sleep ‘experts'” but it works.
Another example from the book is how children of immigrants often turn speaking and acting like their peers (the accent, mannerisms) than their parents even when they still spend more waking hours with the parents.
I highly recommend that Lenore’s followers both read the book and observe their kids play styles and conversations with their peers from a distance to see for themselves how this happens.
@Keen Observer
“Nope, peers are NOT that bad guy at all;”
Why do I keep forgetting to put smiley faces after my humorous posts? No, I didn’t really mean it.
“research and experience tells me that contrary to popular belief, kids get most of their culture and attitudes from their peers, not their parents.”
I was aware of that.
“They play in mixed age groups and the older kids look after the younger ones and only go to their parents when there is a problem
and often they will solve it themselves. Amazingly, the kids don’t get cranky from staying up late; they just make it up by sleeping in and taking naps the next day. This is something that would horrify many “child development sleep ‘experts'” but it works.”
This happened in my youth (in Michigan and Ohio), but only as long as it wasn’t a “school night”.
“Another example from the book is how children of immigrants often turn speaking and acting like their peers (the accent, mannerisms) than their parents even when they still spend more waking hours with the parents.”
I saw numerous instances of this as a kid.
I grew up in a family filled with emergency responders. My father and grandfather were on the fire department, my mother was in the auxiliary, I had uncles on the EMS, and a friend of the family on the police force. The idea of hiding all bad things from your children more or less ends when you tell them “Grab the cooler, we’re going to the scene and you’re going to hand out water”.
For 10,000 years kids have been witnesses to war, disease, famine, flooding, fires, and disasters that modern Americans simply can’t comprehend. And somehow those kids survived. We know they did, because we’re here. The idea that we have to protect our precious little angels from ever experiencing a bad thing is insane.
Regarding the “bad guy” vs. “good guy” debate: Children are learning morality. They haven’t learned it yet, and we can’t expect them to have done so. Just like lessons in school start simple, then build into more and more complex concepts, teaching children morality needs to start simple and build into more and more complex topics. In grade school I’m perfectly fine with them accepting that there are bad guys and good guys. In middle school, they should be asking WHY they are bad guys and good guys–ie, what principles we use to determine it. In high school they should begin to have a grasp on the concept of ethics as a philosophical discipline. It doesn’t take much, either. My sister and I developed along those lines via Darkwing Duck–we used to have long debates about whether Darkwing was a good guy or not, and why. Once you start asking “Why?” the nuances naturally become factors in the discussion–it’s an inevitable part of the progression of said discussion.
You have to start somewhere, and a simple good guy/bad guy dichotomy works best for very young children. It gives you a foundation for later discussion.