Four ways to help your teen make sense of a ‘ruptured’ world, according to high school teachers | Canada Voices

A recent conversation around my family’s dinner table took a weird turn when my teenaged son started talking about the bunker he wants to build. The adults at the table had been discussing the recent escalation in belligerence from the Trump administration when my 17-year-old calmly announced that it was time to begin stockpiling supplies and preparing for the worst.

I tried to explain that the world is not on the brink of catastrophe – and that we wouldn’t be digging or hoarding our way out of the current challenges – but he was already spinning the globe in search of the perfect spot for his future hideout.

The aggression of our southern neighbour presents a unique challenge to Canadian parents and educators. We want our kids to understand what’s going on – from the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to U.S. President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again threats to take control of Greenland or Canada – even as we struggle to do so ourselves.

“Every single day we are given treasures,” says Andrew Champion, a civics, history and economics teacher at Fredericton High School in New Brunswick. By “treasures” he means news items. “Each one is worth days of discussion,” he says. “But they just keep coming.”

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Champion, who has been teaching for 20 years, believes the volume and pace of recent events is having a numbing effect on today’s students. “The last five years have been nothing but chaos,” he says, referring to the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Gaza war and devastating climate events – in addition to the increasing unpredictability of the Trump administration and political violence south of the border.

“They open their phones and see Charlie Kirk getting shot in the head, or the Venezuelan president being handcuffed,” says Champion. “Many don’t think it’s a big deal. They’re desensitized.”

Other students may be worried about what they see in the news, or perplexed by the 30-second clips and soundbites that fill their social media feeds.

If you’re wondering how to support your teen through these troubled times, here are four strategies to keep in mind.

1. Help them to tell fact from fiction

Ryland Caravello, a Grade 12 student in Toronto, likes to stay on top of current events but he’s aware that information shared on social media is not always trustworthy. “Everyone has a motive,” he says.

“The biggest thing I teach my students is how to distinguish between facts and misinformation and disinformation,” says Champion. With advances in AI, and the proliferation of doctored images and anti-factual claims, the task gets more complicated by the day. Champion recommends CTRL-F, a digital media literacy resource from the Canadian civic education charity CIVIX, to help guide students toward sources they can trust.

It also doesn’t hurt to have old fashioned news media around. As social media becomes more fractious and trickier to decipher, kids may find reassurance in the fact-checked printed word or newscast.

2. Tie the present to the past

Connecting the events of today to those of the past helps kids contextualize what they are living through. Steve Axworthy, a social studies teacher at Little Black River School and municipal councillor in Victoria Beach, Man., says the single most effective way of helping students understand the current moment of big power aggression is to review the lives of fascist strongmen throughout history. “You teach them about Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, Stalin, Lenin, and they see the pattern,” he says. “And then they understand why history is important.”

But Caravello, the Toronto high school student, wishes teachers would bring more of the present world into classroom discussions. He’s also surprised by how focused his peers are on American politics, and how ignorant they are of the basic facts of Canadian history and governance.

“They’re pretty much all anti-Trump,” he says, “but they really don’t know what’s going on in Canada. It’s annoying.”

Four ways to get kids engaged in the political world around them

3. Be honest with them

Global affairs may soon be top of mind for more students. My own teenaged sons are not overly interested in geopolitics, but a recent headline about the Canadian military modelling of a response to a hypothetical U.S. invasion got them thinking. So did the recent news that Germany, the country of their birth and citizenship, has introduced voluntary military service over concerns about Russian aggression.

As Prime Minister Mark Carney made clear in his speech in Davos, there’s no point in pretending that the rupture in global relations is not serious. The challenge is to get kids thinking beyond the immediate impact to themselves and consider the bigger picture. Suddenly democracy and sovereignty are more than abstract notions.

Axworthy makes this point by starting his Grade 8 social science class with required reading of either George Orwell’s 1984 or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. He says students are astonished by how these dystopian novels, written in 1949 and 1953 respectively, seem to have anticipated so many facets of the world they see around them. Axworthy says their predominant reaction is, “How come nobody is stopping this?” and “Can anything be done?”

While some teachers avoid raising political issues in class because they fear reprisal from parents, or accusations of having overburdened students’ young minds, he has the opposite concern: that by “protecting” kids from the facts of history, they will ultimately come to resent their gatekeepers. He sees no evidence that students are worried about an imminent American invasion.

“The only fear I see in my students is the fear of people not doing anything,” he says. “If you give them knowledge, they feel empowered and they realize that they have agency. It sets them on a path.”

4. Promote open discussion

Champion works hard to create a safe space in his classroom where kids know that opposing views are welcome, and that there are no stupid questions. “It’s clear that some students are only hearing one political perspective at home,” he says, “and this is a chance for them to hear others.”

In our family, the younger generation typically opposes their elders at every turn in political discussions. It’s part adolescent defiance, part provocation and part test of mettle; before they adopt a position for themselves, they want to make sure it has merit. Heated discussions are productive as long as they remain civil, and civility takes practice.