On Being a Political Parent
One of my earliest memories is of going to vote with my mother. It was in the basement of my elementary school, in the lunch room, and back then in NYC, all of the voting machines were mechanical and made a big crunching sound when you submitted your vote. The mood was both bureaucratic and exciting, it feel like something important was going on. In those moments of early childhood, the seeds of my lifelong political activism were planted.
When I became a mother, I started taking my children to vote with me, partly out of necessity (they were with me all the time, so, logistics) and also because of my own infant indoctrination as a voter. By then I understood intellectually how important it was to vote in a democracy and I wanted my own children to be similarly attached to it. By including our children in our our political activities, we are teaching them how to be active members of our polity and that political action is normal.
In some ways politics and parenting is similar to religion and parenting, we tend to align with our parents. But democracies have another layer, that of learning to think for one’s self and choose right from wrong based on our individually chosen values. An exposure to voting invites a host of questions from children and it introduce a practice of paying attention to politics. Children will naturally question voting: what is voting? why do we vote? After all, it is a strange and curious behavior, if observed with the sound off, so to speak.
A democratic country has many ongoing demands and needs. It requires a sense of citizenship, of civic responsibility, of participation. And if your political beliefs include the right of each person to think and speak freely, as they are in a democratic society, then you have to remain open to the possibility of political disagreement with your kids. Learning how to navigate this can allow for emotional closeness to remain even with political differences.
Accepting potential political differences with your kids can be challenging, especially if your own political beliefs stem from your own intellectual discernment and just not from family inheritance, like religion. But learning how to accept differences within your own family sets the stage for kids being able to do it in the greater society. The effort to stay open-mind and be able to get along with others by agreeing to disagree goes a long way towards maintaining our civil society.
How you navigate politics as a parent is something that you can do consciously or unconsciously, as so many aspects of parenting are. As a politically active person, I naturally see teaching my children of their civic responsibilities as important as teaching them their responsibilities for anything else, such as going to school. For me, the personal is political. Children are sponges, and whether you intend for them to or not, they are going to know what you think is politically important.