My son falls for all the hoaxes, what can I do?

My son falls for all the hoaxes, what can I do?

Hello. How’s everything? I hope you’re well.

I also hope that you are not suffering at home from this wave of hoaxes and misinformation that has been unleashed after DANA. It is not that it is new, but the floods, the deaths, the uncertainty and everything that has occurred around the Valencia catastrophe have triggered fake news, half-truths, influencers and communicators (they are not journalists) trying to be protagonists, the attempts to establish “alternative facts,” as a Trump advisor said at the time. Basically, anything that serves to contaminate public debate.

These hoaxes are having a lot of success among teenagers, who are inclined, for various reasons, to give a lot of credibility to whoever they are. A teacher wrote a few days ago: “This has been my worst week since I dedicated myself to teaching. I have had to explain countless times that you cannot attack a politician, that thanks to taxes they have free education (even books), that illegal immigrants do not have pay, that a ship with Moroccan antennas was not the creator of the DANA…”

And, perhaps this is your case, fathers and mothers wonder what they can do. They don’t quite understand how their children (yes, it’s quite a masculine thing) have fallen in there and they don’t know how to get them out or, better yet, help them get out themselves. It is a complicated situation: adolescents are forging their identity, they tend to reject parental figures in some way and it is easy for them to live in small bubbles (networks-friends) that feed each other.

But things can be done, those who know tell us. We have spoken with several experts, from psychologists to trainers, to teachers, and they have given us a series of tips so that those of you who are interested can work at home with your children. I leave you some ideas (I can tell you that this requires a certain commitment on your part, it is not about giving the kid homework):

  • It’s never too early to start. If you have a small child, one way may be to accompany him in Internet searches when he has to do some work and see with him the results that the search engine returns, locate the advertisements, etc.
  • Be interested in their networks. Maybe it’s not your thing, they don’t tell you anything and you don’t understand them, but you have to make the effort. See who they follow, learn who they are. You can even recommend other profiles of people you trust to follow.
  • Ask them questions. But open questions, like “how do you think such a thing can be fixed?” That they have to reflect and argue.
  • Don’t openly confront. If you tell him “that’s a lie” it is easy for you to achieve the exact opposite effect to what you were looking for. It may be more productive to say something like “what is the source? Do you think that influencer knows about DANAs?

There are more strategies. If you are interested in the topic, I recommend that you click on the link and read the article. Everything is well explained and argued by the experts themselves.

This week we talked about…


  • “Remember how you felt when they told you that you could study.” Anna and Mar (in the photo) were excellent students, but their personal situation meant that they had very few possibilities of going to University. Until a group of people crossed their path who, basically, are going to pay for their studies just because. The Dádoris Foundation is made up of 25 citizens who, grateful because life is going well for them, want to give that opportunity to people who were going to miss out on that possibility. They do not ask for anything in return, only that, if the future smiles upon them, they return the gesture. It is a laudable initiative that can change the lives of people like Anna or Mar, but at the same time it makes you think about what is happening to a system that does not guarantee that anyone who wants to go to university can do so.
  • Spain is filled with private universities. The fact that there are people who, like Anna or Mar, cannot study for economic reasons is especially distressing in a country that does nothing but open private universities. In a short time we will have more than public. What does that mean? That equal opportunities goes out the window. We have been talking with Juanlu Sánchez about the effects of this private emergence in this Monday’s podcast.
  • Cantabria deletes its list of historical figures without women for Selectivity. A little story of those that we like to publicize. You will remember that last week I told you that the University of Cantabria had included only one woman among the list of historical figures that they enter at the Ebau. Well, I called the university, asked and published it and in a few hours it was announced that that list was being eliminated.
  • A school will have to pay 40,000 euros to a family to reduce a case of harassment. It is the Hijas de la Caridad Nuestra Señora de Begoña school, a concerted religious school in Santutxu (Bilbao). The school told parents that the “physical attacks – pushing, pulling hair, kicking –, harassment – ​​touching intimate areas, breaking into bathrooms – and intimidating behavior – breaking objects, coercive behavior to prevent eating” that occurs Because the sentence was proven, they were a “coexistence” problem.

To upload grade

  • Valencia, an opportunity to redesign schools. Obviously we would all have preferred it not to happen, but, even if it is for a bad reason, the destruction of schools by DANA offers the opportunity to rethink them and make them betterfollowing the idea that the learning environment influences the educational process.
  • The rector of Salamanca, against ‘Nature’. The president, immersed in a serious reputational problem for marketing with quotes and articles, criticized the magazine for withdrawing some of its articles and threatened to take to court “anyone who wants something” and perhaps also “anyone who doesn’t want it.” . The cloister went to see it, although they couldn’t because now it turns out that it is illegal to broadcast them (before the controversy, no one had thought of it, it seems).
  • By the way, more than a thousand professors from 53 universities have signed a manifesto asking the minister to investigate cases of malpractice on campuses.

With this I say goodbye, I am sorry if this newsletter has been a bit long, we had a lot to tell today.

Thanks for being there.

See you next week!

Source: www.eldiario.es