How to prepare children for our strange and dangerous politics
It’s something of a point of pride for me that my children, oldest nine years, are only dimly aware of who today’s major political figures are. The older ones know the name of the president — that’s basic civics — but I don’t think they know much about what he or his party stands for. The only time I remember presenting the fact of Donald Trump to them was when I showed them the hilarious photo of the former president beaming with pride as he presided over the Clemson University football team’s fast food feast.
Politics is always serious business, but these days it’s much heavier than usual. Increasingly, voters on both sides believe our entire civilizational project is in peril. That means, on the one hand, that it’s more important than ever for young people to understand the basics of American government, and the fault lines that run across it today. But on the other hand, it’s also more important than ever to protects children’s innocence from bearing too heavy a burden.
I think one of the hardest aspects of parenting is discerning when children are mature enough to handle certain duties — and political awareness is a duty, just as surely as laundry or forgiveness. Expecting them to handle too much can lead to discouragement; expecting them to handle too little can lead to arrested development. When are they ready for concepts like “taxes” or “fossil fuels,” let alone “insurrection” and “abortion”? I don’t know, and anybody who tells you they know for sure isn’t being honest.
There is one theory, however, that I do think misses the mark, which might be called the “independent child” approach. This views as “indoctrination” any attempt to teach ideological or religious values, and rather supposes that the child will discover her or her own truth as he or she matures. The problem is that the child whose values aren’t formed by parents, the “empty” child, won’t fill that void on his or her own. It will be filled by others — by friends and unfriendly peers, by social media and entertainment conglomerates. No one, certainly no child, discovers what they believe all on their own.
That’s why, as I’ve written before, we’re pretty conscious about what media comes into the house. Our television is tiny and mostly lives in storage; we cut cable; some wiring defect stops us from receiving over-the-air broadcasts; and Prime Video is our only subscription. “The news” is an exotic thing in our house: I’ve fired up YouTube for major breaking events, like the Notre Dame cathedral fire, but otherwise family media are books and music and board games (and,yes, some CoComelon).
Does that mean we’ve fallen into the “independent child” trap? It’s something
I think about, especially now that we’re sending them to school rather than homeschooling. Have we been too hands off? Should we talk more about Joe Biden and Dr. Oz, inflation and infrastructure, so the kids have a baseline of understanding if and when their peers bring up those topics? I suspect (hope) other nine-year-olds have stronger opinions about building Legos then Build Back Better, but as we approach the teenage years, the balance will be shifting.
Again, this is one of the great gray areas of parenting: I just don’t know. I don’t want them to be empty vessels for others’ pieties and prejudices, but I also don’t want to fill them to the brim with ideas they’re not prepared for, and might later come to resent.
One thing I do know, however, is that all children love justice. They have a keen sense of unfairness — especially, of course, when a peer or sibling is being unfair to them, but also when they see others being badly treated, either in real life or on a screen. They might not know what exactly it means to say that “justice is giving to each his due,” but they know when that principle is being violated.
And to love justice is, at its base, to love truth. Justice that isn’t anchored in truth is arbitrary, which isn’t justice at all. Children often have a difficult relationship with truth when it comes, for instance, to fessing up to smacking a sibling or filching a cookie. But those are one-off fibs they’re usually very conscious of. They haven’t had time to
build up habits of lying, an entire edifice of untruths that turns the very concept of truth into something threatening and even unrecognizable. Love of truth is natural, but like any good inclination, over time it can be weakened and, eventually, destroyed.
It goes without saying that much of our politics is based on an active contempt for truth, up to and including denying visible, tangible realities. It’s one thing to say that the truth of complicated matters is difficult to discern; it’s another to say, which so many figures in politics and media do today by their words and actions, that it doesn’t matter at all.
The most important political education parents can give their children, therefore, is to cultivate their natural love of truth and justice. Don’t let those one-off fibs become habits of lying. In fact, help them, even through punishment, to abhor lying. Encourage them to become not just truth-tellers but truth-seekers. Point out small-scale cases of injustice — and of real justice — to build up understanding of what that concept means in everyday life.
Young kids don’t need to be armed with their parents’ very particular ideas about marginal tax rates and Congressional leadership and so on. They might win a (very stupid) cafeteria debate about Nancy Pelosi, but those moments aremeaningless, and will fade.
But they do need to be armed with principles, inculcated by the people they love and trust most, that will serve them right now and for the rest of their lives. That’s not indoctrination: That’s good parenting, and good citizenship.