Too Young?

When we renewed our membership to the Brookfield Zoo this year, we decided to upgrade to the Supporting Member level. We did this for two reasons - dolphin show tickets add up and Medium wanted to attend the lecture series. All in all it's a great bargain and supports a wonderful organization.

Medium and I went to a lecture on polar bears the other night. I'm guessing she was the youngest in attendance, but this isn't something unusual and isn't something that bothers her. She enjoys lectures. Two polar bear experts with Polar Bears International explained how the bears live, mate, hunt and die in the wild. We learned a lot about these great animals, and a lot about how climate change is affecting their habitat and threatening their existence. We learned about trends in climate change, saw the data and the global effects of green house gas emissions.

We saw a friend on the way out, who expressed alarm that Medium may be too young to hear the dire predictions. This is the same friend whose testimonial about the lecture series prompted Medium to want to upgrade our membership level, so we were not at all offended by her genuine concern. Honestly, I knew the topic in advance, we read the blurb together and agreed we wanted to to. It never occurred to me to consider Medium to be too young.

Medium has always been an old soul. She reads voraciously - fiction appropriate for her age level and interests, non-fiction all over the map. She has many interests and pursues them at her own pace. We talked out it on the way home. We agreed that some of the images were a bit strong, after all, hunting is not pretty. We both wished we didn't know about cannibalism in the polar bear population, but that we can't just thing of them as cute cartoon animals. She knows about climate change, this child, she's read and learned much about the dire predictions for our future. I could no more shield her from this doom and gloom than I could prevent my children from playing video games. That is to say, I suppose I could shield her, but feel it would be a disservice to limit her explorations of the world around her.

We are looking forward to the next lecture night.