How To Talk To Your Kids About Donald Trump
Note: Do not look to the internet to help you talk to your kids. They are your kids. You are their parents. I can talk about my choices and my beliefs and how I have chosen to express them to my kids, and if something here helps you, I am glad. But if they don’t, that’s an opportunity for you to craft an explanation that does work for your family. That’s democracy. And that process is at least as important as the people we eventually vote for. We turn our elections into character stories and the process becomes an afterthought. This is my attempt to help correct that impulse in my own family.
As Trump ran for office, I was alternately amused and horrified by the stories about him in the news. And I really started to enjoy his face in the coverage: Trump’s expressions were just amazing. You can find unflattering pictures of any politician, pausing them in mid screed or during a sneeze, but Trump was something different. He brought the character he had created for television into his politics and it really showed in the coverage. He had no poker face. So, as an artist, I began to draw him.
I painted and drew him a lot.
And then I had to explain to my 5 year old that this wasn’t because I liked him. I had all these pictures of a crazy orange man, and it hadn’t really occurred to me to hide them or explain them much to my kids. So one evening, when we did start talking about the election, my son thought I was going to vote for the same man I had enjoyed drawing so much.
This caught me somewhat by surprise because these are not flattering pictures. But that tells you something about being 5: he doesn’t have the background to understand propaganda yet. And I could, if I wanted, sculpt him into the biggest Hillary Clinton fan you ever met.
I do not want to do that. I see so many pictures of children at political rallies. Many of them are adorable, but some are not.
It is fine to take children to rallies. Politics affects all of us, even from before birth until we die. It is never too early to try to teach your kids about democracy and how our country works. That is why I took my little girl to see Hillary Clinton back in May. There was so much in my head that day. First I was worried about the Clinton rally I had heard about in Los Angeles earlier that month, where protesters outside had made a gauntlet with bullhorns. I was also worried about the logistics of having a three year old at a political rally, which is why we had to leave before Clinton even arrived at the venue. But most of all, I wanted to be able to talk about this with her after the fact. Whether Clinton wins or loses, I want my daughter to know that we saw the first woman running for president, or tried to, anyway. We were part of this moment in history. And when we talk about elections and speech rights as she grows up, she will have these pictures, and I will have these memories about her life, to tell her why she matters and what is possible.
But I don’t really talk to my kids much about Hillary Clinton. I remember thinking really hard about this, when some stranger on Twitter accused me of taking my daughter to worship a war criminal, and I thought, “how would I begin to tackle that with a 3 year old?”
You can’t. Well, some people try, and I’ve seen videos of young children who were clearly trained by their families to prefer one candidate over the other, and I don’t want to judge the choices other parents make with their kids, but I feel like that is part of the problem we have now: we treat the candidates like characters in some kind of play, instead of treating them as what they are. And what they are is pieces of the machinery that makes up our government. The president isn’t a king, even though Trump campaigns like one. And Hillary Clinton may or may not be a war criminal, but I’m not going to tell my kids she is or isn’t one until they understand exactly what that means. I don’t want them just parroting what I said uncritically, and let’s face it: 4 to 6 year olds are not particularly critical of the things their parents tell them. They believe there’s a magical rabbit that sneaks in our house at night to give them candy because that’s what we’ve told them, and with this power somes some responsibility, I think.
That’s why I haven’t really told my kids about any of their platforms or campaigns, beyond what they are ready to understand. My kids both understand that we have never had a girl president. They both grasp the inherent unfairness of 200 years of boys getting a turn. And they both understand that Obama was the first black president, though our conversations about race are only beginning. They don’t understand racism, but they do understand fairness.
We also talk about refugees. We’ve watched movies and read stories that help them understand what war is like, even if they don’t quite grasp what war is. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a brilliant, fantastic adventure, but there is no getting around the fact that it shows a family struggling to survive while their city is under seige.
And that is the context they understood when we looked at this picture.
We have also watched Star Wars, which shows a boy struggling after his family is brutally killed by an evil empire. And we have also watched Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which shows how children were evacuated out of London to the countryside during the Blitz. We have watched Mulan, and my son understands that it was terrible for the emperor to ask Mulan’s father to join the army when he was old and injured. Sending someone to die is not a terribly complicated idea. And he understands that Mulan broke the law to save him, because sometimes the law isn’t fair.
When we talk about the election, we read Maybelle the Cable Car. Even if you feel like a book about voting on the fate of cable cars in 1940s San Francisco might be boring, it’s a good chance to talk about how we make decisions about cities and countries. We read The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, about how a little brown bunny with a ton of children at home proved that she could be so fast and kind and wise that she became the next Easter Bunny. And her kids helped out at the house so she could go to work.
Do not talk to your kids about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not really the problem. The problem is all the people who helped him ascend to the general election. The problem is that people want to vote for him when he says hateful things about immigrants and refugees, just like the ones we see in Star Wars and Baron Munchausen. The problem is that people are afraid to believe the things they learned as children: that fairness takes sacrifice. That most people are good. That kindness is more important than success.
That empathy isn’t weakness.
Talk to your kids about why following the rules matters and about defending the rights of other people. About standing up for what you believe in without being mean or cruel. Teach them that the words they choose matter, that they can be hurtful even if you didn’t mean for them to be.
Do not talk to your kids about Donald Trump. Talk to your kids about the world the way it should be. And then, when they grow up, maybe they can make it so.
