The news has been unbearable: shootings one after the other, every day some sort of senseless tragedy. My older son, almost 12, was recently diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I have been actively shielding him from the news: it’s even too much for me at times…there is no need for him to hear about these things. If someone mentions something in front of us about such an event, I gloss over it quickly and move on. In June, I realized that wasn’t going to work anymore.

We live in a suburb of Orlando. The night the Pulse nightclub tragedy happened, my husband and I had been downtown at a comedy club. We had no idea what happened until the next day. The next morning, my mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and brother-in-law came over for our weekly Sunday breakfast. They walked in the door asking us if we had heard about the shooting downtown. I hadn’t, but quickly changed the subject because the kids were around. As soon as the coast was clear, I went online and read the devastating news. Obviously, our community would never be the same again, but I was relieved that my son had been spared the knowledge of the tragedy.

The next day my boys (ages 8 and the almost-12-year-old) went to summer camp. That night, one of them asked about the shooting (they must have heard kids talking about it). I said that a bad man had gone into a club with a gun shooting people, but that the police had caught him and he was dead. I didn’t tell them about the 49 people who had died, or the countless others who were injured. I didn’t tell them about the LGTBQ component, or the speculation about terrorist implications. In my mind there was no need for them to know these things. My eight-year-old asked if any police officers were killed. I was relieved to be able to honestly answer “no”.

That seemed like the end of it.

A month later I was in the car with my kids talking about the presidential race (something else I’ve been shielding them from). We were talking about the announcement of Vice Presidential candidates. Somehow the issue of guns came up. I was giving them, what I felt to be, one of my better soapbox speeches about the intention of the Second Amendment and common sense gun laws when my eleven-year-old chimed in and shattered my view of his innocence. He told me that he had been curious about the Pulse nightclub shooting so he looked it up online. He knew 49 people had died. He knew that it took a few hours for people to get out and be rescued. He knew dozens more had been injured. He knew that the youngest victim was 18. He knew that the nightclub was 16.5 miles from our house, and 1.5 miles from where his father and I had been the same night. He had Googled everything. My sweet, innocent, anxious child knew everything I was desperate for him not to know. He had known it for weeks, and hadn’t told me. He kept it all inside.

While we only allow laptop use in common areas of the house and we have enabled Google Safe Search and YouTube Explicit Filtering on the laptop he uses, it obviously didn’t block news sites, nor should we have expected it would. The question is, knowing that he has access to these sites, how to encourage his curiosity without limiting his ability to research topics of interest.

While I was devastated that he had been burdened with this information, I was actually proud of him for taking the initiative to look it up on his own. I told him so. I also told him that I would prefer in the future that when he’s curious about something, he would tell me so we could research it together. Then I changed the conversation to talk about all of the positive things that people did in responding to the tragedy: I showed them pictures of long lines of people waiting to donate blood. We talked about the millions of dollars that had been raised for the victims and their families.

I realized  that there’s a budding young adult in my house; I can’t keep treating him like a child. I’ll never know how he internally dealt with that information when he learned it. He might have had trouble sleeping. It might have consumed his thoughts (as it did all of ours). The thing is that he handled it. He’s clearly ready to have heavier discussions.

I can’t continue to shield him from the world, as scary as it might be at this moment in history. I’ll still choose which details I share. Kids don’t need to be burdened with too much too soon. But what I will do is continue to show them the good in this world, treat them with respect, answer the questions they ask, and remember that they can probably handle a lot more than I think they can.

Samantha Taylor is a wife and mother of three kids; one with special needs. After working for non-profits for several years, Samantha now works for the family business, publishing local lifestyle magazines in central Florida. In her free time she enjoys cheering for her beloved Florida Gators, sharing her love of old movies with her children, and blogging for Kveller.com and GrokNation.