In the course of a famous letter on the vices of crowds, Seneca laments the violence of the gladiatorial games:

In the morning they throw men to the lions and the bears; at noon, they throw them to the spectators. The spectators demand that the slayer shall face the man who is to slay him in his turn; and they always reserve the latest conqueror for another butchering. The outcome of every fight is death, and the means are fire and sword...You may retort: "But he was a highway robber; he killed a man!" And what of it? Granted that, as a murderer, he deserved this punishment, what crime have you committed, wretch, that you should deserve to sit and see this show?

Seneca goes on to observe that the mob mentality of the arena crowd is "dangerous for the character of the young." In another frequently-quoted passage, Augustine describes how a young friend of his became so entranced by the spectacle of the arena that he forgot his principled opposition to the slaughter of innocent men. Although neither Seneca nor Augustine talks specifically about children, both authors clearly regarded the gladiatorial combats as unsuitable for the impressionable.

Seneca and Augustine, however, did not speak for the majority of their contemporaries. There is no evidence that the games were the "R-rated movies" of antiquity.

The sons of prominent men were expected to attend the games as part of their training for a life in the public eye. Sometimes, they played an important role at a very tender age: the son of the fourth-century senator Symmachus, for example, presided over public games when he was 10 years old. An inscription recently discovered in Pompeii, likewise, notes how the father of a boy who had just assumed his toga virilis - probably at the age of 14 or 15 - sponsored a huge public banquet, paired with games in which no fewer than 416 gladiators fought.

Senators sat with their families - including, apparently, young children - in the first rows of the Colosseum. There were also often children in the imperial box, not least when the emperor (as in the case of, say, Elagabalus or Gordian III) was a child himself. Children may have been sparser in the stands above, reserved for male Roman citizens (i.e. adults), but there's no reason to think that they weren't standing with women and slaves in the highest tier, drinking in the excitement and carnival atmosphere.

Roman children were routinely exposed to death and bloodshed. Even those who grew up in a time of peace knew the bellow of cows being slaughtered in sacrifices, the screams of slaves suffering corporal punishment, and - in larger cities - the snap and thud of fatal accidents in the circus.

The literary canon that formed the basis of Roman education - above all, the Aeneid - dripped with gore (artistically rendered, to be sure). And to judge from the rhetorical exercises assigned to pre-adolescent youths, which never shy away from war and murder, there were few attempts to whitewash the content of these texts.

The gladiatorial games, in short, were integral to a world and worldview in which the developing emotions of children were much less important than the social imperatives of readying the young - and especially the sons of the elite - to assume adult roles and responsibilities. The games, after all, were supposed to be a sort of "moral education" in themselves, accustoming the spectators to courage in the face of danger of danger and death. On such terms, there was little in the arena that would have seemed unsuitable for, or unfamiliar to, Roman children.

The question itself about children exposed to violence reflects our modern-day biases. A point of view naturally rooted in our current culture. For example, nowadays most of us abhor of slavery. Meanwhile, only a couple hundred years ago it was seen as normal practice by the majority of societies.

In Western cultures until about early XX century children were seen as little adults. Smaller in size, of developing intellect, but not different from grown-ups. Only later, with the works of multiple thinkers and scientists from Freud onwards including Jung, Winnicott, etc., were determined the phases of human development. Which derived in our current prevention of exposing kids to things considered for adults.

Violence itself was until no so long ago seen differently to today. Physical punishment was common in schools well into the XX century, and of course the same as home. Executions and corporal punishment of criminals was a public spectacle that drew multitudes. Sources for this are multiple, as it was common practice until recently in the West, and it is still practiced nowadays in countries like Iran (examples of public executions are easy to find in Google).

As nicely explained by previous postings, it is known that at least some children, for example those members of the families of senators and emperors, were included in the games. So perhaps, the question for someone from the Roman times, rather than asking if children could be allowed to attend the games, would be: why would we not allow them in such a great event?

This is a bit off topic but I’ll ask anyway. Do we know how often gladiator games took place? Was it a weekly thing or just for a special occasion kind of thing