More Presidential Talk

Jackie ♦ January 16, 2009 ♦ 6 Comments

One of the nice features of WordPress is that you don’t need to install blog stat software, because WordPress does it for you. Apparently, a lot of people out there are Googling stuff with “inauguration” in it, oddly enough, along with “teaching the” and “writing about the” and “kids and the.” So I thought I would go ahead and post about my kids, my family and politics.

I’m the daughter of a US History teacher who grew up near the Capitol of the United States and married a government worker and political junkie, so it was always foreordained that we would try and raise our kids with an ever-evolving sense of citizenship, duty and patriotism. We’re also pretty feminist/lefty/progressive, so we knew we wanted that to be in the mix.

But how do you do that with a two-year-old? Well, we have tried a variety of strategies. I went to anti-war peace rallies when I was pregnant with the girls, and we took them to DC in strollers for the March for Women’s Lives in April 2004, not that they really understood any of that. When my husband worked for the mayor of our city, we took the girls to political events, and they held up signs and shouted slogans. We tried to explain the idea of voting, and how you could win or lose your job if you were in charge of areas, like cities or towns or states. We read books like Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type and Duck for President and tried to answer any questions that came up, and then tried to further explain those answers beyond “collective bargaining” and “participatory democracy.” They have accompanied one or both of us to vote in every election they’ve been alive for, and I think they’ve even gone with my mother once. We talked about how I especially feel it’s important for women to vote, because women fought so hard to win the franchise.

My husband likes to watch the Sunday morning political talk shows, which my girls learned early on to call “those shows where the men are always shouting at each other,” and sometimes we answered questions about things they overheard there. We often have conversations about political or social issues at the dinner or breakfast or lunch table, and we answer questions that come up from those (are you sensing a pattern?). In short, we did a little direct inculcating and the rest just came up by spending a lot of time around our kids and being ourselves around them, and trying to be as receptive as possible to all their questions.

When the election season started, things got stickier. They’re old enough now to be asking more complicated questions, and so we talked about how we chose who to vote for– I focused on war and health care, because I thought they were issues they could understand. We talked about Obama, Clinton and McCain, and they became able to recognize their faces and where they stood on a (very) few issues. We talked about the historic nature of this election, and even Martin Luther King Jr., whom they had learned about in kindergarten. We went to a friend’s house for Election Night, and brought the kids down from the playroom to announce Obama’s win.

Who knows what they will remember, or what they will think of politics or elections in the future. But they will have a model of engaged citizenship, if I have anything to say about it.