Here's a question I never thought I would find myself asking. Should children under 10 be allowed to watch television news?
This is a household where current affairs enter the conversation regularly. However, I have noticed a certain sudden attentive stillness and distress in the younger children when they happen to be watching with me, and something truly awful comes on the news.
In recent months, it seems as if something truly awful happens with increasing regularity. Children are particularly affected by stories concerning other children. Within a relatively short space of time, there has been the incident involving a mother and her four-year-old son at the cliffs of Moher, the tragic deaths of the Dunne family in Wexford, followed all too rapidly by the sadness of a child dying, apparently by her mother's hand, shortly after her First Communion.
It is very hard to field the resulting questions. I am beginning to think that questions about where babies come from are a doddle by comparison. How do you explain to a child that another child has been killed by a mammy or daddy? Explanations about depression, other mental illness or enormous levels of stress may satisfy adults, but not children.
Is their basic security being undermined? Every child in a reasonably functional household should be able to believe that parents may occasionally act irrationally, or deliver long rants over the state of the house, but will still never voluntarily harm them in any serious way.
Yet the television news that they watch plants the idea that they may be mistaken in this fundamental belief, because they see that parents can destroy as well as love.
Rolling news has a lot to answer for. Does the obsessive coverage of such incidents lead to a cluster effect among already vulnerable people, leading to so-called copycat behaviour? Worse, does it implant ideas in those who are by definition vulnerable, our children? More than one parent has reported to me a threat by a small child to kill him or herself, as though such an idea was floating in the ether and their sensitive antennae had tuned to that cultural frequency.
I watched the news twice a day in the company of my parents, and I never remember suffering the same level of trauma I have seen in my own and other people's children. I don't think it is because the passage of time has erased my memories.
We did not get a television until I was nearly nine. At that time, a bomb might have been represented by a graphic of a street with a jagged red shape showing the site of the explosion. Now, if there is an explosion, almost immediately images of people with blood pouring down their faces begin to populate our screens.
As a result, our children begin to believe that the world is a more dangerous and violent place than it really is.
We experience a sense of shock at the abduction or violent death of a child precisely because it is so rare. Yet how can something appear rare if it fills our screens day after day? Our children are not the only ones to live with a nagging level of fear.
Does the constant parade of horrors that enter our living rooms every evening make us all paranoid and defensive? I cycled to and from school from a relatively early age, along lonely country roads. Today, many parents would be too nervous to allow that.
There is a great temptation to over-protect and to monitor every waking moment. It has come to the stage where people are glad that their children are inside glued to the Playstation, simply because it means that they know where they are.
The conundrum is that we are all social beings, and something vital in us withers if we do not interact with others in a carefree way. This is especially true of children.
Children are not stupid. The constant barrage of images to which they are exposed already make them fearful. Do our adult fears, no matter how we try to disguise them, confirm and compound their own terrors?
It is ironic that many adults, despite the fact that the economy is in reasonable shape, unemployment is low, and most people have a standard of living unthinkable in the 1980s, live in a constant state of low-level anxiety, not just about their children, but about many aspects of their lives.
Children who are too trusting may come to harm, but children who absorb the unspoken message that the world is dangerous, and that few people are to be trusted may also be damaged. Émile Durkheim wrote a classic text on suicide, which suggests that "the stronger the forces throwing the individual on his own resources, the greater the suicide rate in the society in which this occurs."
Certainly, when it comes to the traumatic issue of suicide, we can and must lobby our politicians for better psychiatric services, for out-of-hours cover, multidisciplinary teams, and community psychiatric resources. But perhaps we need to begin at an even more basic level.
The world is an uncertain and risky place, but our response to that reality sets the tone for our children's response. It may make sense to limit their exposure to upsetting imagery in particular, but we need to balance that against the need to allow them to grow, to take risks and to interact with others. Children need a sense that, despite the horrors that sometimes occur, the world is not random and that there is a basic order in it.
In order to communicate a sense of security to children, we need such a sense ourselves. That means having resources on which we can draw. The pressurised lives we now regard as normal militate against involvement in community activities from which our parents drew great sustenance, including the practice of religion.
Atomised individuals, or small family units virtually isolated in areas where there is no real community, will find it hard to provide the kind of security that children crave. We try to protect our children, so that their childhoods may be secure. The irony is, that in seeking to protect our children, if our response is too fearful, we harm them in other, ultimately more damaging ways.