Politics and children

How do you explain Politics to your children? Seriously. My almost nine-year-old kind of gets it. I don't know where my seven-year-old stands. Now my five-year-old...I think I just confused him entirely. I was reading the news and I was exclaiming over how even more people are going to be Anti-American. I don't think I used that exact termininology, but that is basically what I was talking about. My son wanted to know what I was talking about. So I explained it like this:

"You know how there are a lot of different countries all over the world? Let's pretend they are houses. And in each house, the people who live there have their own rules and their own way of living. (We spent a minute talking about camels and cars and huts and caves and houses, lol.) Well, you know how when you go into someone's house to visit, and you might accidentally break something and then the people who live there aren't happy with you? Or you broke their house rules? Well, that's what America did. We went into someone's country (house) and broke something and now more people that live in all the other countries (houses) are going to be upset with us. All the people in all the countries (houses) can't agree all the time because we all live with different rules."

I don't think he got it. lol So I did not go on to tell him about a really bad person who lived in one of the houses who wanted the rest of the houses to follow his rules. That would have really confused him! LOL

So how do you explain this stuff to young children who want to know?