The Importance of Raising Activist Kids (It’s WAY easier than you think!)
Listening to Kamala Harris’s first speech as Joe Biden’s presumptive running mate, you could see the impact of her mom on her. She talked about growing up as a kid in the racial justice movement in Oakland, with some of her earliest memories being strapped into her stroller on marches, and her mom answering her typical kid complaints with the phrase: “What are you going to do about it?”
Tears were streaming down my eyes listening to her speak. I grew up in a house that talked a lot about God, but not so much about the fight for equality. I never went to a protest until I was in my forties, and I was part of the lost generation of white women who focused our fight on getting ourselves ahead. The “Lean In” types who wrongly thought that all you had to do was play the right game and work harder to get yourself ahead in a man’s world. The generation that normalized and stuffed down sexual assault and sexual harassment.
In a world that (rightly) criticizes problematic white feminism, we weren’t even feminists until a few years ago.
Recently, a member of the Chairman Mom community who lives in the South remarked that she got a knot in her stomach reading AOC’s statement that her parents didn’t raise her to take abuse from men. “I think my parents did raise me to take abuse from men…” she told me.
My kids are being raised very differently. (Hers are too, FWIW.)
My daughter Evie went to her first protest at three. Some of you know this story. We went to the first Women’s March in Washington D.C. and I was terrified, not really knowing what to expect, not knowing if this was a horrible idea or not.
But I felt compelled to go, not just because of the election of Donald Trump, but because of a story I heard in Iceland a few months earlier. I was talking to Halla Tomasdottir, who had just barely been defeated in the Icelandic presidential election months earlier. We talked about the difference in what she faced running and what Hillary Clinton was facing in America at that time. There simply wasn’t the same hatred, wasn’t the same flash point of a woman being president. Nowhere near the same bias — not only from trolls, but from the mainstream media.
I asked her why that was. Why? Why? Why? It was a question I was in Iceland trying to uncover, because Iceland was at the time the number one in the Economist’s Glass Ceiling Index, the most enlightened place for a woman to work.
Halla said something that stuck with me and rang and rang and rang in my head. It was about a Day Without Women that Iceland did in the 70s. More than 90% of the country participated — this in an era where they didn’t have social media to organize things.
She remembers it vividly as a child, maybe one of her first memories. The entire country ground to a halt. Busses didn’t operate, banks didn’t have tellers, kids didn’t get fed unless someone else stepped up. It became perfectly clear how valuable women were to Iceland and what happens if they’re sick of your sh*t. Four years later, the country elected its first female prime minister. Halla saw the two as explicitly connected. Without witnessing that as a child, she said, she would have grown up in a very different country with a very different sense of her place in it.
It was a staggering lesson to me on the power of raising activist kids — how it changes them and how it changes the world pretty dramatically. That single day of protest changed the course of Iceland’s history. What the generation of women who were Halla’s age — and my age — were raised to expect from men, from the world, from other women.
That we were raised to take from men.
And here Kamala was telling us that a big reason, maybe the biggest reason, that she was standing there as the first Black woman and woman of Indian descent to be on a major ticket was because her mother raised her to be an activist.
Look at the impact Greta Thunberg has had on the entire planet.
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What does it mean to raise your kids as an activist? How do you do it? What is that moment when you know what causes your family is going to take on?
We are hosting an incredibly special virtual Chairman Mom event on this topic tomorrow (Tuesday August 25) at 9pm EDT/6pm PDT. The hosts are Rachel Adams Gonzales and Lizette Trujillo. Some of you heard from Rachel at last year’s Chairman Mom Flee. Her daughter Libby made the family CNN-famous and Internet famous when she advocated for her rights to use the girls’ bathroom in Texas. Rachel is a fierce advocate for trans rights and on staff at Remagine Gender. Lizette is the very proud mother of an 11-year-old trans child, a small business owner, a volunteer for the Southern Arizona Gender Alliance, and a member of the Human Rights Campaign’s Parents for Transgender Equality Council.
“There’s this idea that it’s hard work to raise activist kids,” Rachel said over email this week, talking about this session. “It’s not. I was raised in a household where my mom made sure not to share anything with us that she deemed ‘upsetting.’ Not a great way to go off into the world, completely unaware of the many realities I should have been aware of. I hope parents can come away realizing there isn’t some secret to raising activist kids, no big ‘to do.’ You can easily fold conversations into your daily routines, dinner time, breakfast and *not* driving to school.”
Lizette agreed, “Raising kids to be activists is easy.”
That in and of itself is a radical statement. But as I thought about it, I agreed.
Raising activist kids is less about any one big action, and more about a mindset shift. Activist thinking happens in the air all around them. We are activists in our home every moment of every day.
That said, making that mental shift to raise your kids to be activists takes bravery, especially if it’s not how you were raised or it’s not what’s reflected in your community already. And we want to bring a group together around this topic to be that source of solidarity you may be missing.
When I took Evie to that first march, it was a break from my family traditions. My parents chewed me out for it. It was one of the only times they’ve openly called my parenting dangerous and I was furious and hurt.
But that hurt has been washed away by seeing the impact it’s had on my kids. How they talk about race, how they talk about Indigenous people, how they talk about gender and LGBTQ rights. They talk about fairness and the unfairness of the world, like it’s a fact. It’s a problem to be solved like any other problem we try to solve in our lives.
And they’ve discovered the power of their voices. What’s more: They know the house we own was paid for by mom using her voice as a journalist. Words are the ultimate super power in our home.
On that first march, Evie and I went on, we rounded mile six or so of her on my shoulders, and I lifted her off so I could get a break. We passed a man with a megaphone who was God-knows how many hours into chanting, and he jokingly held the megaphone out to Evie as she passed by. She grabbed it. She started chanting in her tiny three-year-old tiny voice, “Hey hey! Ho ho! Donald Trump has got to go!” and people turned and looked. Two men asked if they could hold her up, and I said yes. She chanted it again even louder. Thousands of people stared up at her and echoed her chant. It was an electric moment.
Evie got down from the men’s arms and skipped — as if she was skipping on the air — over to me and hugged my legs with abandon. It was clear that she was hooked on activism from that moment forward.
