🧠 The Human Experience (and What Our Kids Are Absorbing)

Part of being human is learning to hold many things at once.

We can laugh at dinner while worrying about a loved one. We can celebrate a birthday while grieving a news story. We can feel joy, confusion, anxiety, and hope—sometimes all in the same day. As adults, we (mostly) learn to manage this mental juggling. But children? They're still just learning how.

And they take in more than we think.

From Transitional Kindergarten through 5th grade, children are quietly absorbing the world around them—snippets of adult conversations, breaking news alerts, playground chatter, and the emotions of the grownups in their lives. Even when we think they’re not listening, they are. They’re watching. Wondering. Processing.

As they grow, so does their awareness—and so do their questions.

🌍 What They Notice

Children in elementary school are in a unique phase of development: full of curiosity and increasingly attuned to the world beyond their immediate surroundings. At this age, they may:

• Notice and question current events, routines, and relationships

• Explore deeper ideas about fairness, identity, and belonging

• Ask repeated questions about exclusion, equity, and even war

• Eavesdrop on adult conversations or media—without full context

💭 How They Process It

Their thoughts and emotions don’t always show up in clear words. More often, they come out in:

• Dramatic or symbolic drawings and storytelling

• Worries or repeated “what if” questions

• Physical symptoms like tummy aches or sleep disruption

This doesn’t mean something’s wrong. It means they’re trying to make sense of things in the best way they know how.

🧘 How We Handle These Conversations at WHPS

One of the most important tools we have at WHPS is Morning Meeting.
What begins in the younger grades as a way to build social skills—like eye contact, active listening, or solving a class problem together—becomes something much more profound as students grow.

In Upper Elementary (grades 2–5), Morning Meeting becomes a forum—a safe, structured space for children to talk about what they’ve heard, how they feel, and what questions they have. If there’s something happening in the world, and the students are already talking about it, we don’t brush it aside. We lean in.

We:

• Help students name their emotions

• Offer age-appropriate information and reassurance

• Gently correct misconceptions

• Allow space for different perspectives

• Reinforce belonging, empathy, and understanding

As someone who spent the last several years of my own teaching career in fourth and fifth grade, I can say without hesitation that these conversations are some of the most important and meaningful we have. They help students feel confident and safe—but also thoughtful and engaged. These aren’t just teachable moments. They’re the foundation of what it means to become an informed, compassionate citizen of the world.

💡 One Last Thought for Parents

Children surprise us all the time with their depth and insight. But they also don’t have our years of life experience, emotional context, or coping tools—and they don’t need them yet.

So when something comes up:

• Stay curious. Ask what they’ve heard and what they think, without jumping in too fast.

• Model emotional self-control. Kids can absorb our fears even more than our words.

• Don’t take the topic further than they are. Sometimes it’s not quite as big as we imagine, even if it’s big enough to matter.

I am incredibly proud to work at a school that honors children’s emotional development with the same seriousness we give to academics. Every grade, every day, we use Morning Meeting to help children learn, reflect, and grow in community with one another.

And most of all: we are your partners.
If your child brings something up at home—tell us. These moments are bigger than one conversation, and we’re here to help. It also helps us anticipate what may come up at school so we are ready to work through it together.

We’ve previously shared some thoughts about how to approach difficult world events with children. You can find that article here.