Kids & Politics Conversations to spur civic engagement
BY GEORGE LANG
Engaging kids in conversation When parents do not talk about politics with their children or involve them in their voting rituals, their children usually do not become actively engaged in politics. According to a 2016 survey by Care.com, just 10 percent of parents believe it is good to start talking about politics and issues with children at any age, and only 46 percent engage their kids on the subject. Of the remainder who avoid politics at the dinner table, 90 percent of respondents said they did not believe their children would understand. Knowledge is power, and it is always appropriate to give your children that power. In 1973, my family was living in suburban Houston when my teacher at A.J. Martin Elementary School canceled a visit to the Houston Zoo, a long ride by bus on the Southwest Freeway. Instead, our class walked a mile, hand-in-hand, to the recently built McDonald’s, where we were shown how the shake machine worked and enjoyed some hamburgers. Now, anyone who has visited the zoo at Hermann Park knows this was not an equal trade, but McDonald’s was a good way to mollify a class full of disappointed kids. When I asked my parents why the plan had changed, they explained a letter that went out to all parents informing them the school was restricting long-distance field trips due to the energy crisis. Thanks to that McDonald’s trip, I learned about the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and embargoes. I was a kindergartener.
My parents talked to me about politics, and it turned me into an enthusiastic voter. Because the memory is so vivid, I believe my first experience with voting came when I was 4 years old. I remember going into an actual voting booth and only being tall enough to see a little of what was going on as my mother, wearing a long wool coat, pulled a lever that closed a curtain behind us. She flipped levers beside the names of several candidates, and then she pulled the lever again, registering her vote and reopening the curtains. The mystery and solemnity of the voting process was magnified by the mechanical noises going on behind those opaque curtains. I thought it was so cool, and by the time I turned 18, I was particularly bummed when I learned that those hulking machines were things of the past. Connecting arrows with a felt tip pen was decidedly less dramatic, but the process of voting still gave me chills. Throughout my childhood, there were issues of Time and Newsweek on the coffee table and I read them voraciously. I was a weird kid, but I was an informed weird kid whose parents engaged him on current events and made the evening news daily family viewing. Decades later, in 2012, my wife took our son to vote at a nearby church. It was the first time he could understand the importance, the nearly sacred responsibility of casting a vote. By that time, he had witnessed a few years worth of 24-hour news and, even though that curtain was replaced by cardboard dividers, he still thought it was pretty cool.
16 METROFAMILYMAGAZINE.COM / OCTOBER 2020
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