‘90s FAMILY : O.J. Trial Offers a Study of the Big Picture : Parenting: The courtroom drama, experts say, gives moms and dads a good opportunity to help kids learn about justice, racism and violence.

Try though they may, parents may find it increasingly difficult to turn little heads away from the media circus surrounding the trial of O.J. Simpson.

Even the briefest news break on an all-music radio station will blurt out the latest on the drama. The faces of the slain, the accused and assorted other players will stare out from the tabloids and magazines stacked at the grocery store checkout stands.

“It sneaks in,” says Regina Booze, who teaches children and parents at Pacific Oaks College and Children’s School in Pasadena.

If the questions come, parents might as well use the time to talk about issues such as justice, racism, violence and the legal system, childhood experts say.

“It’s an opportunity to talk about the legal system in the big picture, the system of justice, media hype and how the media has significant influence and responsibility. And it gives parents a chance to talk about why people are not for hurting and what do you do when you get mad,” says Daun Martin, a Santa Ana psychologist and immediate past president of the California Psychological Assn.

Of course, unraveling the jumbled-up playground accounts of events described in court may be the first task parents face.

“They hear things from other children,” Booze says. “And we all know how accurate information is when it’s passed from child to child.”

Gently set them straight on the facts known so far. Two people were slain. Simpson is charged but has pleaded not guilty to the killings of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman.

The trial is the time when all sides of the story will be heard in an effort to determine guilt or innocence.

If children do tune in, they tend to interpret what they hear through childhood’s point of view. Booze listened in on a group of 6- and 7-year-olds recently discussing the case and found their thoughts and “attempts at noodling out the logistics of the murders to be oriented toward the Simpsons’ children.”

“Some said (that) if he did it, he wouldn’t have done it alone because somebody could have run away and he would have had someone hold the other person . . . or they thought he wouldn’t kill their mommy where the kids could find them. Or they thought that if he killed them, then he would go in and make sure the kids are safe and take them home,” Booze says.

Booze, who also works with battered spouses, says she would especially seize such moments as a time to talk about frustration and violence.

“We talk about problem-solving and using your words,” the mantras of preschool- and elementary-school teachers, Booze says.

Speaking of words, experts say parents shouldn’t be shocked if their children come home from school wondering about the “N-word,” the subject of heated courtroom debate.

A child who is not African American may get some small sense of the pain such a word inflicts when a comparison is drawn, Martin says.

“All kids get called something by somebody in school,” Martin says. “Talk about the inappropriateness of racial slurs and how hurtful those words are.”

The best lesson may come from the trial itself, a lesson that can serve children well in any arena, Martin says.

“Before we draw our conclusions, we really need to hear the facts of the case. . . . They need to wait. They need to listen.”