Is it really OK for my son’s 10-yearold friend to be a communist?

Hannah-marie Clayton is 10. She has persuaded Kellogg’s to change the slogan on its Coco Pops packets (“Loved by kids. Approved by mums”), after complaining that it was sexist. Chikayzea Flanders is 13. He has won a court case against his school by arguing that its uniform policy, which banned dreadlocks, resulted in “indirect discrimination” against Rastafarians. Harper Nielsen is nine. She has caused outrage in Australia by refusing to stand for a school rendition of the national anthem. Currently doing the rounds of TV studios, she argues that: “When it says Advance Australia Fair, it means advance the white people. And when it says, ‘We are young’, it completely disregards the indigenous Australians who were here before us for 50,000 years.”

Reading all these news stories in one day, I was filled with a mixture of awe and dread. One can’t help but admire children with strong beliefs and the confidence to act on them. But is it – forgive my primness – entirely normal? Is the whole of Generation Z (successors to the millennials) so full of conviction? And if so, what does that mean for the rest of us?

I don’t remember having a single political thought, or hearing one voiced by my peers, for the whole of my childhood. Young activists might have existed elsewhere – awkward young Conservatives in the William Hague mould, or infant Leftists in porridge-coloured knitwear, accompanying their parents on CND marches – but, by and large, politics was something best left to the grown-ups. The grown-ups thought so and we didn’t think about it at all. There were so many more urgent matters to deal with, such as best friends and first kisses, and how to tease your hair into a rigid flick like the girls off Grange Hill.

Outside, political storms raged – Thatcher moved into No 10 when I was eight, and left when I was 19 – but inside the bubble of childhood, we were expected only to watch and wait. We would get our say once we were old enough to vote. Faith in democratic politics was stronger then, on both sides of the debate. Politicians were not yet regarded as universally corrupt or incompetent. I suppose it still felt safe to be patient, to leave the future to the professionals.

My early training in political torpor has, I must admit, left its mark. Even now, as I rake together my scattered political opinions, I find they amount to no more than a heap of doubts. My only strong conviction is that everything is more complicated than you think.

Not so today’s small fry. They are growing up in polarised times. They have inherited the identity politics and righteous indignation of the millennial generation (some of whom are now old enough to be their parents). The professionals, it must be admitted, have made something of a bosh of the future. And the more fractured and dangerous politics becomes, the more visible it is to everyone, including children.

My own children’s friends talk about politics with a conviction that makes me gulp. My son’s best friend is a 10-year-old avowed communist with a poster of Lenin on his bedroom wall. He recently brought to school a political primer for children, containing a multiple choice quiz. “The book says I’m a capitalist”, my son confided after school. “Is that a bad thing?” The question itself worried me. Its precocity just made me sad.