When I hit the voting booths this November, I’ll have my five kids in tow. They may learn the importance of casting a vote, but if they ask who I’m voting for, I simply won’t tell them.
As an eager college grad researching segments and pre-interviewing guests for the 2005 MSNBC show, “Connected Coast to Coast” — a show hosted by Monica Crowley, who is campaigning for Trump this week in Pennsylvania, and Ron Reagan — I learned about civil discourse. On and off the camera, they showed it’s possible to engage in intense debate with people you disagree with and still respect one another.
Twenty years later, I’m raising five children in the San Francisco Bay Area. My oldest two — a 14-year-old girl and 12-year-old boy — beg me to tell them who I’m voting for. We flip between cable news channels, and they make comments about how the candidates look and talk. I’m struck by how impressionable my middle schoolers are — they look to me for cues about who is good or bad. They’d probably agree with me if I told them who I prefer, and then we’d likely be talking about personalities instead of policies.
My husband is a cyber security expert who advises both Democrat and Republican lawmakers on technology issues. Before I was a mom, I was an editor for a news website and a fact-checker for a national newspaper.
A few years ago, my husband and I determined that critical thinking and the skill of curiosity were two essential skills we needed to teach our kids, based on what we were seeing with tech developments and social media. Wrestling with difficult questions is necessary because they’ll be bombarded with false or deceptive information on almost everything. This election is another opportunity to train them.
Learning the democratic process is more important for them than learning which candidate I’ve marked on my ballot. They’re curious to know who their mom is voting for, but I’d rather turn it into a teaching experience. Our democracy depends on young people learning critical thinking and the skill of curiosity in an AI-boosted social media world. I want to know I did my part by coaching my children on the importance and integrity of their vote.
We also feel our children’s identities need to be rooted in something deeper than a political party or candidate. First and foremost, they’re part of a family and a community, connected to people from all over the world in Silicon Valley.
Keeping my kids connected to humans in our geographical proximity is a modern-day challenge. We live in a densely populated area, but we have to consistently invite people into our home and lives to stay connected to other families in a meaningful way.
There’s an informed democracy and then there’s our democracy. We’re parenting in the latter.
If I search the Internet for information on a candidate or policy I agree with, or disagree with, it will send me into a spiral, factual or not, with the same bias I came in with. My beliefs mostly don’t get challenged. Instead, I finish my search with a deeper bias.
For example, try searching “Dogs are better than cats,” or the reverse. It’s a simple exercise demonstrating how easy it is to keep finding information that reinforces what we agree with. The same goes for politics, only it gets nastier and the stakes are higher.
Showing our teens how to check multiple sources, challenge those sources, question agendas, and take content in context is a long-term approach we’ve chosen to protect them from manipulative algorithms.
This election cycle will come and go. It’s more important that my kids learn to think about what is being said than it is for me to indulge in talking back to the TV during a debate or to be seen to be “right.”
Hiding my vote in the family home has also had positive effects on me. Disciplining myself to control my emotions and words has forced me to listen more and make arguments for different sides of an issue, just like I did prepping for segments on a political TV show. Try it — it’s kind of fun. It’s also given me a greater sense of humor when everything just gets too dramatic. I can laugh instead of getting sucked into political watercooler chat (or, in my case, school pickup gossip.)
I interact every day with moms and dads who are doing their best raising kids in these technologically unprecedented times. And as parents, I know we all have more in common than the Harris or Trump campaigns want us to believe.
We all want what’s best for our kids and America. For me, that means keeping political opinions close to the heart — even when it comes to family.
