‘90s FAMILY : Lessons in Reality : Parenting: How should kids learn that life can be unfair? That some people don’t have food or a home? If handled poorly, such issues can leave kids overwhelmed.

The 4-year-old girl asked her father a simple question. Why was the man in front of the supermarket asking for money? Little did she know that the answer would be so far from simple, shocking to a child who always had a comfortable bed, good food and warm clothes.

No home? But where will he sleep? No food? But what will he eat? Suddenly and for the first but not the last time in her life, she learned one of the world’s universal lessons: Life is not always fair. “She just welled up with tears right there,” said her father, Rob Conaway, of Norwalk.

She talked about the man throughout the shopping trip, so Conaway gave him $5 as they left, more than he usually would hand out but the amount seemed to comfort his daughter. For a moment, anyway. Back in the car, he found himself gently explaining why they couldn’t invite the man home.

“When you’re explaining it, you’re not really sure you understand it yourself,” he said. “It’s difficult to not convey the suspicion that goes with it sometimes.”

It’s a balancing act many parents struggle to perform every day as their children glimpse the world’s woes. The young bombing victims who stare out from the covers of newsmagazines stacked next to candy and gum. The homeless parents standing with children at the street corner. The evening news that brings the story of a 10-year-old’s suicide.

“The challenge is to find a middle ground,” said Adrienne Kaplan of Long Beach, whose daughters are 5 and 8. “It can be overdone. I think they need to start at a small level, but to make them crazy about it is absurd. It’s our problem.”

That middle ground is the healthy place for children and adults to be, said Daun Martin, psychologist and president of the California Psychological Assn. The Greeks called it the “Golden Mean.” In other words, moderation. Swing too far on the compassion pendulum and children become overwhelmed and learn hopelessness and anxiety. Swing back the other way and they become desensitized--hostile, even--to the weak.

Among the extremely desensitized are the gang members, “who might, just might, cross the street to help their own mother,” Martin said. But to a lesser degree parents can desensitize their children when they tsk-tsk their way through the news and then flip over to a situation comedy without comment or discussion.

“One of the major things we forget today is that we resolve our fears and tension and anxieties about things by helping, by doing something . . . and talking about the world,” Martin said.

But how do parents plant the seeds of compassion without drowning children in despair? Follow a child’s lead, said Janine Olson, a head teacher at Pacific Oaks College and Children’s School in Pasadena. Even at Pacific Oaks, where the founders’ Quaker principles of fairness and nonviolence permeate the curriculum, children are not given more than they can handle, Olson said.

“One of the biggest mistakes we as adults make is talking too much. That has a tendency to make the questions stop because it’s not fun,” she said.

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The other mistake is misinterpreting the question. Ask a question or two in return to find out just what and how much a child wants to know, Olson said.

Then keep the answer simple and let it sink in. During recent walks in a nearby park, many Pacific Oaks children asked why men there were cooking food at barbecues. For some children, the answer “they don’t have kitchens” was enough. Those who wanted to understand more asked more.

There are no exact age guidelines to follow when it comes to dispensing these life lessons. From about age 3 1/2 to 4, children begin to ask such questions because they believe everyone lives as they do and are befuddled when their perception gets dinged by reality, Olson said.

By about second grade, most children have a basic understanding of the more complex issues surrounding social ills. And the discussions become all the more important, often presenting opportunities to talk about the family’s values or religious answers. Kaplan discovered that when her 8-year-old heard a radio broadcast about promiscuous men in a foreign country who had contracted the AIDS virus.

“Does that mean those men can have sex whenever they want?” her daughter asked from the back seat of the car.

They had a good talk, and “I definitely put a moral judgment on it,” Kaplan said. “It was a good opportunity. But I didn’t think I’d be talking about that yet. I’m sorry it had to come out of that newscast.”

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More and more, Kaplan turns the radio off now when her daughters pop into the car. But no one can wear blinders. When Stacy Kredel of Irvine took her three children on a train trip from Orange County to Los Angeles, the short ride opened their eyes wide to homeless communities otherwise unseen from most streets and freeways.

“My youngest just didn’t understand why we can’t just even it all out so everyone has a house,” she said.

But the experience gave them a better understanding of why their father helps out at a soup kitchen. Kredel said she wants her children to have a slightly bigger world view than she had growing up on Balboa Island in the 1960s.

“Maybe there wasn’t much of ‘It,’ but if there was any at all, it was never talked about,” she said. “We want to expose them to some of the realities (so they will) learn to think for themselves.”

Conaway, on the other hand, laments that too much reality has already soaked up too much of his daughter’s childhood innocence. His daughter still delivers him an occasional bundle of outgrown clothes and toys for the homeless--without prompting.

But he can’t help but notice that when they turn onto the freeway every day to pick up her younger brother from day care, she almost never comments anymore on the ever-present homeless people.