History in the making — again — for kids

There is a lot of talk about how the pandemic and rioting may affect our kids, but what about the kids themselves? These are kids who have had most of their lives canceled; they have been forced to learn in different ways, socialize in different ways, exist in their own already-fraught-and-still-developing-minds in different ways — ways we’ve never seen before. We didn’t go through this.

Not going to talk about politics, not going to talk about politics, NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT POLITICS.

When I started this column two-and-a-half years ago, a well-known CEO and friend suggested that I never write about politics.

“You just don’t want to go there,” he advised me, wisely.

But how can I not right now? I was going to write about how our pets have overtaken our lives this week, which sounds idiotic now. Pets?

“Mom, what does sedition mean?” my 9-year-old George asked me Friday. Forget it. “Sedition is kind of like what happens when your sister calls 911 in reaction to my taking her iPhone away,” my husband Ian chimed in.

There has been a lot of talk about how to handle talking to kids about what’s going down right now in our country. “‘These are the right questions:’ Greenwich educators create teachable moment over Capitol chaos,” said the headline on Greenwich Time on Jan. 7, with a story by Justin Papp. But schools are meant to be nonpartisan, so parents everywhere, many with strong feelings after the events of last week, have got to wonder how this is playing out.

Adam Rohdie, head of Greenwich Country Day, “reminded teachers, students and families of the school’s values — to engage in debate in a civil way, to disagree without being disagreeable and to challenge ideas, but not necessarily the person sharing those ideas,” Papp reported.

“If you support Trump after this, you should shut your stupid mouth,” my 10-year-old daughter Selma announced at the dinner table Thursday. (Guess she’ll never get into Greenwich Country Day.)

“Why can’t Trump support all the people who believe in him — which is nearly half the country,” my 12-year-old Louie responded.

“Shut your stupid mouth,” Selma said to him.

“That’s where sedition comes in,” Ian told him, ignoring Selma. “If you are causing people to attack the government, that’s illegal.”

“There was a man with bull horns painted red carrying a spear!” George hollered, in a tone that suggested he had not fully absorbed Ian’s point.

Michelle Murillo cited Dr. Asha Patton-Smith, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Kaiser Permanente in Burke, Va., in her article “How to talk to your kids about the riot at the Capitol” on the WTOPnews on Jan. 8.

“Patton-Smith said parents need to monitor the information their children are getting online, such as paying closer attention to their social media accounts,” Murillo writes.

Selma’s “media feeds” include a vast array of variations on a dance to the recent smash hit, “WAP” by Cardi B.

“Isn’t Cardi B the one who got in a catfight in the Oak Room?” my mother asked yesterday. “In my day, women wore white gloves in the Oak Room.”

Needless to say, explaining “WAP” to my mother proved challenging.

The point is, my kids don’t seem to be preoccupied with “anxiety” and “questions” regarding recent events. Louie’s feed was all about “Rick and Morty,” an animated science fiction sitcom involving an insane grandfather taking his grandson through multidimensional realities. George doesn’t have a “feed,” but his passion for Fortnite remain undeterred. If anything, it was time to rile up my kids.

“Do you guys realize what happened this week?” I asked, as I tried to enlist them to watch “Meet The Press.” “This will be something you talk to your kids about; this is history in the making!” Nothing; blank stares. “Our democracy is at risk, our country at war, everything is falling apart and NOTHING IS SECURE,” I hollered, quasi-hysterical.

“The best course is to be calm, reassuring,” Murrillo writes. Kids “need a lot of hugs, feel like they’re cared for, feel like they’re safe.”

“Hello?! Guys get involved, this is a historymaking horror show, what is wrong with you?!” I went on, yelling at the kids.

“Look, I’m sure they are processing it,” Ian assured me. “The schools are all over it, and kids tend to let their hair down at home.”

Suddenly, I realized how badly the kids needed a haircut. Then I started to take a more dramatic approach.

“Did you know the protesters were going to HANG the vice president,” I told the kids, hoping to engage their heightened appreciation of gore. “They even set up a gallows and a noose!”

“A guillotine is better,” Louie responded, unenthused.

“Maybe we should make a rap song about this whole thing,” I suggested to Ian, “Just like ‘Hamilton,’ but we’d call this one ‘Pelosi’s Despair.”

How does an angry, woman, clad in bright patterned

face masks, dropped in the middle of a forgotten,

Spot in the oblivion by MAGA, demolished, in squalor

Turn out to be a hero of the Squad-ers

All three of our kids are now experts on American history from 1776 to 1804 thanks to the sheer brilliance of Lin-Manuel Miranda, so it’s worth a shot.

“Remember,” Ian told me, “Middle schoolers are not the most responsive age group. Maybe they are just trying to block everything out. I’m not sure scaring them is the best tactic, Claire.”

And so we plod on. We’ve staged dinner table discussions where one side of the table aims to represent one side of the argument, while the other one presents the other one. The only problem is the argument has changed; we are now in more of “food fight” territory.

“Now you’re talking,” George yelled.

And yet despite all the Cardi B., “Rick and Morty,” and Fortnite, there are moments of hope.

“It’s like the environment,” Selma told me. “You guys messed it up, and now we get to fix it. But we WILL fix it, Mom.”

When I called my friend to complain that everything going had ruined our ability to plan Louie’s bar mitzvah (and was she using the same line?), she said, “I’m not stressing my kids right now, they’ve been through so much already. You gotta stand back and realize that at the end of the day, it’s our kids who are the actual heroes right now.”

There is a lot of talk about how the pandemic and rioting may affect our kids, but what about the kids themselves? These are kids who have had most of their lives canceled; they have been forced to learn in different ways, socialize in different ways, exist in their own already-fraught-and-stilldeveloping-minds in different ways — ways we’ve never seen before. We didn’t go through this.

“When you say frontline worker, think about our kids growing up with this,” my friend said. “Ultimately, they will need to be their own heroes because they are the ones on the front lines… the front lines of their entire lives.”