When I was 13 (in the US in the 1970s) none of my classmates or friends ever expressed any interest in geopolitics or international relations.
Sure maybe there's a minority of kids with social media/smartphone bans nowadays, but they're probably as plentiful as 13 year olds interested in geopolitics in the 1970s.
I browse Instagram's TikTok clone ("Reels") when idle, it's rather dull, when that hurricane hit a few weeks ago, the stories were all about that, a few days later it was forgotten. Obviously, lately it's been about Luigi Mangione...
At 13 (early 2000ish) I was reading the newspapers my parents brought home and debated a friend of mine who in turn read his parents' newspapers - mutually exclusive sets from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
I need ask: when is the best moment to, as a parent, introduce a young person to the news cycle? You'll inevitably have to since they're on their way to become voters and taxpayers.
My first independent political opinion (if we can expand politics to include techno/digital politics and not just national/state/local government politics) was formed at the age of 4/5. Just from reading discussions and arguments around me.
And, as a girl and a lesbian, I was starting to read ideological theory in part to cope with my life situation pretty early: I followed news about gay issues because I knew I was gay at 6/7 and it was clear that some people were okay with that and some were very much not and I needed to know the difference. Likewise with being female - the switch up in how I was treated by men when I crossed the pubescent threshold led me to seeking out books/works/discussions on feminism (as well as arguments against it). Suddenly, people cared a lot more about my body than they ever had before, and as an intellectual child, I wanted to understand what was going on.
I'd expect that's even more common now and extends to new groups of people. I know I've seen young men/teenage boys talk about how a lot of anti-male sentiment filters down and makes them feel terrible and also having to deal with their own switch in puberty where people go from feeling protective of them to scared of them.
A lot of politics and the news cycle has to do with domestic cultural issues, and many children are very aware of those by the time they reach 9 or 10.
International politics is something that a lot of adults don't engage with on any meaningful level, and conflating the news/political awareness solely with international military conflict would be an error, I think.
I think the best time to introduce children to politics and the news cycle is when they start asking questions about why the world is the way it is, or why different families/places do things differently than their own family or culture. Or when something political touches their life in a very personal way: e.g. the Japanese-American children being interned during WWII would have to be introduced to politics. This is going to vary by child; I don't think there is a hard and fast rule.
As a parent now, we ‘know’ more than ours did. Helping with guidance is our role!
And the war or whatever we call the situation in Gaza would be something I'd want to shield my 13-year-old child from having any knowledge of if I were a parent -- for basically the same reason I'd want to shield them from learning about sadomasochistic sex as long as possible.
Anyway I need to ask the same question I always do in such conversations: what's the plan when this hypothetical child hits legal age and immediately receives the legal right to learn about all of this at once?
> I don't recall any opinions about Vietnam
I am bit younger, but I was exposed to the outfall of Vietnam through Hollywood films and documentaries.
> the situation in Gaza