Should Our Children Identify With a Political Party?
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My older son lives for a party postmortem. On our way home from a gathering or event, he’ll always pipe up from the back seat: “So what did you guys think?” He begs my husband and me to rehash a get-together with the same ardency with which he asks for sneakers and candy. I think he loves this because by assessing and, yes, judging our experiences (three-quarters of our family are Virgos; it can’t be helped), we are reaffirming our own little group identity. From the back seat of the RAV4, listening in on what we thought about the food and the company, he’s feeling the warm embrace of belonging to a family tribe. Family tribalism can be one of the most pleasurable parts of being human. The stories we tell one another about who we are have a power that crosses generations, that defies the grave. But they can also curdle into something inflexible and brutal, even while — or especially when — they’re being told in the spirit of togetherness.
Given that most families I know have spent the last eight years shit-talking Donald Trump around the dinner table — a human caricature who, for that reason alone, seems to be of particular interest to children — I was not surprised to learn, in a new research project sponsored by CNN, that when you talk to grade-schoolers about the election, children of Democratic voters are more rigid in their thinking than children of Republican voters. Children who sympathize with Trump are more likely to repeat misinformation, but they also express less hesitance about entering the home of someone who doesn’t agree with their politics. The children of Democrats reacted with stronger negativity about Trump than the children of Republicans did about Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.
Many of you reading this right now are asking yourselves: What’s the problem here? Is there really any harm in teaching your children to condemn the politics and comportment of Donald Trump? Isn’t it the role of a parent to teach children to distrust people who are undeserving of their trust? How else should we talk to our kids about oppressive politics other than as what it is — dangerous and cruel? Yes, and it’s fair to consider when we’re teaching them important values of truthfulness and fairness, and when we’re simply teaching them to speak in the code words of our tribe.
Tribalistic thinking (or political polarization, as it’s more commonly known) erodes social cohesion, regardless of which side does it. It hollows out the institutions and services that we need: libraries, community centers, schools. The evidence about polarization — and it’s abundant — concludes that it’s bad for everyone. I suspect that it’s common to assume that the people responsible for this problem are our opponents. That is not always the case. Sometimes I worry that parents on the left have embraced a tribalistic way of speaking and thinking — eagerly mimicked by our kids — in part because it just feels so good to belong. Maybe we’ve done this to assuage some of the stress of enduring Trump for all this time. But this somewhat doctrinaire communication style also risks alienating people with whom we would otherwise find common cause, and you can sense the downstream effect of this in the CNN study.
Democrat parents have a bit of a golden-rule problem on our hands. We deplore the dehumanizing rhetoric of our opponents — the way they sneer about cat ladies and immigrants and trans people. So we often dehumanize our opponents right back, calling them pure evil and dangerous. We say this in front of our kids, and they hear it as part of our story of tribal belonging. We use language that they vividly understand, and we don’t necessarily correct them when they repeat this language back to us, distorted and exaggerated into a political narrative befitting Trump himself. We stoke fear and paranoia, and then we wring our hands about our weakening democratic institutions as though we were above the fray. As we round the final bend before the election with bated breath, it’s worth assessing whether we really want to keep this up, no matter how the election goes.
In a 1960 study on the effect of socialization on children’s political views, researchers found that parents influenced their children’s beliefs, but that influence was mostly toward the positive: which party or politician to support. That has changed. In 2023, Stanford researchers did a new round of research, this time talking to teens. They found that political polarization among teens has increased sharply in the last few decades. This increase isn’t driven by peers, which would suggest to me that kids are becoming more politically active in general, which would be good news. It’s not due to the internet either. The increased polarization is driven by parents. Today, not only do parents teach their children who to like, they teach them who to hate.
Being willing to set aside our differences for the duration of a civic meeting or neighborly coffee has become, for some people, a form of moral capitulation, and the lizard-brain pleasure of social-media discourse is largely to blame for this. The implication of “silence is complicity,” when taken offline, is that you should lead with the points on which you disagree with someone rather than try to find common ground first. This precludes a lot of communication, obviously, and it only works if your opponents aren’t making use of the same strategy. If two people who don’t agree both approach their encounter by quick-drawing, it’s hard to imagine much of a conversation.
Why would I want to humanize my opponents if they insist on dehumanizing my friends and loved ones? For one thing, those of us who enjoy the safety of privilege — white people, cisgendered people — owe it to those who don’t to do the awkward and sometimes dreadful work of engaging in good faith with people whose politics we abhor. And if we’re parents, we owe it to our children to give them the tools to do that communication. No one’s identity exempts them from the responsibility of teaching children how to think critically about themselves and the world. Part of what that means is seeking to understand the perspectives — however offensive to you they may be — of people with whom you disagree.
Family tribalism takes shape in the places where the pleasure of belonging is strongest — in the back seat of the car on the way home from the party, or during Sunday football games, or while playing Catan, or during pizza night. The stories we tell in these places are the ones that really stick, so we might consider changing some of those stories a little bit. Tribalism can organize itself around fear or love — it’s really just a matter of what stories are being told. Reminding your kids that, in theory, anyone would be welcome in your home, no matter their political affiliation, is a place to start. Calling yourself out for your own biases and making fun of your own blind spots invites your kids to consider their own. Demonstrating that you’re the kind of family who tries to look for common ground, modeling patience with difficult neighbors, being optimistic in your community involvements — it can add up.
I often think about those “In This House We Believe” lawn signs, which catalogue the liberal catchphrases of the pandemic era (“science is real,” “love is love”, etc.), and how they have always been so ripe for parody because many people sense that, tonally, they’re a little obtuse. I agree with all of the statements on the signs, of course, but the tidy listing of beliefs suggests a smug tribalism forged in a social-media silo. Or, put another way, it’s meaningless in the same way that hanging a sign from Home Goods that says “Gather” in your kitchen is meaningless: Is this some sort of command? Do you expect the sign to enforce compliance? That’s not how influence usually works.
Tribalism will never fade away — we all love to feel like we belong. But we can change its character, its emphasis, if we try. When we present our political beliefs to our children as essentially a branded collection of slogans, or a stern set of doctrines, we’re obscuring how much effort and care should go into being a politically aware person. Politicians are for holding to account, not for creating personality cults around. When we talk to our kids about who we’re going to vote for, we should explain our choice based on what we care about more than about what we oppose.
Most of us have loved ones whose beliefs don’t perfectly align with ours, and kids need help making sense of that beyond a binary of right and wrong. Our biases are often simultaneously irrational and grounded in experience. Understanding this is not moral relativism, it’s social intelligence. Belonging to a group feels good, but teaching your kids how to identify group dynamics can feel good too.