Talking Politics with Teens: Why It's Our Job to Raise Good Citizens

Our kids will be our future society, so it's important that they feel they have a meaningful voice and role to play. It's about feeling they matter, which, as I explored in previous episodes, is vital for everyone's mental health. But here's what's been bothering me. Who's teaching our kids how to participate in society? Is it schools, the internet? Do we trust them to do a good job of that. I'm Rachel Richards, former BBC correspondent, and you're listening to Teenagers Untangled, the audio hug for fearless parents navigating the teen and tween years. And today's guest says creating citizens is up to us parents. She's here to tell us how and why. Lindsay Cormick is a political scientist, professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, and the author of How to Raise a Citizen, and Why Is Up to You to Do It, Professor Cormack, thanks so much for joining us. Thank

you for having me. I'm looking forward to chatting with you.

Brilliant. Now, you argue that raising a capable adult also means raising a citizen in society. Why is this more important now than, say, a generation ago?

Well, a generation ago was certainly still important. I think what we're seeing now is when we look at test scores that have come out on the nation level for eighth graders and 12th graders, we know that our school children today aren't learning enough about civics, government, and politics. So, if we want our politics to feel and function better, we're going to have to step in and do things a little bit differently and give them more support.

Why is that happening? Do you think

there's a lot of reasons. It's not because teachers aren't capable, oftentimes it's because there's not enough time in a classroom day to do this. When we think about some policy implements that have been enacted in the last 30 years, we are really trying to say we want to get things that are tested and measurable, and when we look at the high school age, the thing that really matters is that S A T or that A C T. Neither one of those tests have any government, social studies, civics components, and so if you're a teacher in a constrained day and you know this is what you have to optimize for, things like civics are going to get short shrift. This is just one part of the problem. Another thing that's really challenging is that in many US schools, there's this little joke, which is we know who teaches AP US government, his name is Coach, and that joke is true because in many places social studies teachers on the faculty won't be full time because there's not enough classes that offer these sorts of lessons, and so they're also going to be swimming coaches, or soccer coaches, or wrestling coaches, and so we have teachers who are under supported, and we have days that are really constrained, and then a third and final problem is that parents themselves can be a big impediment to teachers doing this work, because they're afraid that teachers are going to teach it in a way they don't like, share values that they don't share, or do something like what some people fear is indoctrination, and so it's a really hard environment to get this sort of thing done in a school day, for all sorts of reasons.

I love your points, and obviously I'm in the UK, a lot of my listeners are around the world, but I think this has actually happened pretty much everywhere, because measuring the test scores and things has become so important, and so many of the other things that just been knocked off the the the agenda, and I was talking to a teacher the other day who was, and I was saying critical thinking really is an issue, and I feel like it should be taught in pretty much every lesson, like, you know, questioning what's going on, and I just think it's being sort of pushed to one major, maybe one module at 111 age grade, and it's just not enough, is it?

Not enough, and it really doesn't matter what country you're in. You want your children to understand the government system that they're going to inherit, because we want our kids to be powerful and resilient and capable, and they can't be those things if they don't understand the system that they live in.

Many teenagers now are encountering politics through TikTok, through social media, outrage memes online tribalism. We know we know about the way that the algorithms work to sort of silo people, and I think a lot of what they get is that politics is either corrupt, it's hostile, or pointless, or just only engaging with the huge global issues online, but nothing to do with their own communities. What are your thoughts about how we can tackle this, this soup that they're growing up in.

Yeah, so you're absolutely right in that the internet sort of incentivizes things to ricochet around that make you feel helpless or really angry or aggrieved, and that's not a way to get involved in your local politics. And so I make the argument that we as parents have many opportunities, but we have to see it as part of our role to do this work. So, for instance, if you get newly paved roads, that's government at work. Your car ride is always going to be smoother. If you have clean drinking water, that is a government success, because you can turn on your tap and have access to something that you need for life. If you get a new park or a new senior center, something gets revamped. We, as parents, can point that out, because our kids are going to hear the negative. They already do that in social media, but beyond that, if you look at kids' literature and their entertainment, or the things like they're reading in books, if there's a government character, it's usually like a mayor or someone who's the head of a town, and those people. Oftentimes fall into two archetypes. One is a bumbling doofus who, like, might get things right, but it's really not there - they didn't really do it, someone else took care of it. Or it's a harmful stereotype, which is these people are out to hurt the people they're meant to serve. And so, no matter the age of our kids, they are getting anti-politician messages in a lot of different ways, and so it's incumbent upon us as parents to say, like, look, if we like firefighters, if we like police officers or teachers, we also have to know that there's government people who underlie these sorts of decision making, budgeting, allocating, giving jobs, and so we have to see this as part of a system instead of something that we just always want to hate or denigrate.

I absolutely love that. I think it's it really came to the fore in our local elections recently, because a lot of the local candidates seem to be standing on issues like Palestine, which had absolutely nothing to do with whether the roads would get fixed or whether we would get youth services, and I just felt that actually there was an awful lot of misinformation as a result of that, so how can we talk to our kids to get them involved in understanding that the local things really matter to them?

Yeah, so anything that you can see in your walk to school or in a commute that you have to work is something that some local politician has a hand in, and so that might be like the roads or the sidewalks that you can walk on, the sort of garden or green spaces that you have, and so those are the sorts of things that kids have an immediate access and awareness of. That's where I would start. Some of them are going to like different things. You might have some kids who are really into trains or metro systems. Some kids really want to have better trees or prettier flowers to look at, and so I would follow their lead, see what they're interested in, and then go find out who's responsible for this sort of thing. Is it some small council? Is it a little neighborhood group? Is it something bigger than that? Does parliament have some sort of way that they're allocating money? All those sorts of things are routes that you can follow as soon as you find what it is that your kids are interested in, and oftentimes it's going to be those local things, because they can see them.

What's really interesting about that is, I think, a lot of us parents, we may have moved somewhere new, or we just weren't involved in politics as we were growing up, and we may not even understand the machinations of our political system. So, we're a bit scared to even bring it up, because we might not know how to access it. What you've done in your book is given a really good understanding of how it works in America, but obviously in our different areas it's going to be different. So, it sounds like what you're advocating is that we can actually find this information together and explore together how it works.

Yeah, our kids don't need us to be government trivia experts. None of us are like, they don't need that. What they need us to do is model curiosity and capacity for learning, and so, yes, you're not going to know exactly who's responsible for what. No one knows all these things, but if you can show a child, here's what it is to figure this out, they're not only going to see you as someone who's capable, they're going to understand they who can develop their own efficacy, where it's like, ooh, if I care about something, it's not just like, well, I guess government will figure it out if they want to. It's like, no, I have a role in this. There's a responsibility, and honestly, one that feels kind of fun to be a part of something bigger, but they need someone to show them how to do it. They don't necessarily need to have all the answers from you. They just need to know that they can do it by modeling what you've shown them.

Yes, I mean, the modeling comes up all the time on our podcast, and what if parents say, 'Look, my teenager doesn't care, they're not, they're not engaged at all, they don't really, they're not interested. What would you say would be a good way of getting them engaged?

Yeah, so, so first, that would be counter to what we know about kids, kind of around the world, is kids don't like being treated as like little citizens in waiting, they actually are very interested in things that are happening. Sure, they might not know as much, but they don't really like thinking that they're aside from this. So, I would say it sounds like if someone comes to you with that, they would think that maybe their kids are sort of like civically disoriented, which is like, you know, it's not that I don't necessarily care about it, it's that I don't really have a space to sort of focus on, or an idea that I can sort of follow through, and that's what a disorientation is, actually something that kids can feel in a lot of ways, but I think what a parent can do is say, like, okay, is there anything that you think about that would make our days better, and just let it be as broad as that, so it could be like, you know, I wish school started later, or I wish we had healthier foods at school, or I wish we had air conditioning in this part of the, like, library that we don't, whatever that is, and then start to think about what it would be to civically orient to those things, and so it's probably not necessarily that they don't care at all, they do care about things, it might be saying, like, here's how we can orient that to something that is a civic-minded question, instead of just something that's like a curiosity,

brilliant, love that, and inside the home, presumably there are ways that we can grow enough as a family that aren't even connected necessarily to politics, but that engage our kids in feeling that their opinions really matter without handing over all our responsibility or other suggestions you can make about, you know, the way a family orientates themselves.

Yes, I think that's still. Totally true, so I'll speak from where I am right now. I am in a congressional district where we have had someone representing this same place for 34 years. We are having an election next month to have the primary contender be selected from the Democratic Party. Whoever wins that election is going to win the general election where we happen to live. And so, how I've brought my 14 year old into it is we get tons of mailers, tons of pieces of mail from all the candidates, and we laid them all out on the table two days ago, and it was actually kind of fun for her to see these like physical media things, because so much of what kids interact with is sort of this like flat screen based thing, and so that was an interesting thing in and of itself, but then she could figure out what she thought of these candidates based on sort of what they told her, it's like we sent these things to your mailbox, now you get to make an assessment. Now, sure, she's 14, she's not going to vote, she doesn't get the actual decision, but it's that sort of practice of like, let's just look at what these people who want to do this job think that we should know about them, let's figure that out together, and it's tactile, and it's fun, and it's not super consequential, because they're at the end not making that decision, but it's a process and it's a pattern, and you start to like do that earlier on, and then they understand what they can do when they're older,

and when it comes to some of the topics that are big topics, big political issues, they can feel very polarizing. I think a lot of parents feel uncomfortable because things have shifted a lot from when we were growing up about what's acceptable. Yeah, I was talking to parent the other day, and she used the word, and I said, "Oh, people don't use that word now to describe that, and she said, "What? Oh no, now what? And I think we feel concerned about stumbling into something that we don't understand. Are there ways that we can phrase political questions in a way that don't feel like they're polarizing, and that can unpack the problem instead of stumbling into something that feels dangerous.

Yeah, so when things feel polarizing, I know that it feels daunting to take it on at all, but if a child comes to you with something that's like a polarizing topic, I think we have to do that, because if we don't do it, they can go to their rooms and just say, like, Alexa, insert whatever that polarizing topic is, or get on their phone and like ask whatever sort of AI or search engine that they're going to use, and so I think first thing is first we have to do it, but I think when we're trying to have that conversation with our kids, there's two really big things to keep in mind. One is that we don't have to start by stating a position, we don't have to say here's how we think about this or here's our family's approach to this, we don't have to do that, so it doesn't have to be like I'm putting a little flag here, and this is what we're saying, but the second thing is I really encourage parents to ask their children, what have you heard about this subject, and the reason I like that as a starting question is it doesn't make them defensive, they don't have to justify an opinion or a position, they're just setting the table with what they've heard, they might have said so and so said this at school, or Uncle Joe said this, or I saw this on TV, and just let them set the table with what they've heard, and then you can move into harder sort of questions, like what do you think about that, given that you've heard all these things, what do you know about that, showing the difference between an opinion and knowledge, and then I like to end these sort of conversations with, like, well, what do we need to know more? What do we need to go learn, and so it's something that you see it as like an ongoing process, instead of like we've had this discussion, here's the end point, we're done. Polarizing topics are never done, we're never done sort of figuring these things out or grappling with them. And so the idea that we can model this is a constant process, this is something where we can keep learning. I think that's a really good thing for us to do for our children,

and what would you say to a parent who says, I don't know what to say to my kids about how messy politics is, and that it just feels like nobody seems to have control on what's going on, and what's the point.

Yeah, so parents don't need to feel like they have the perfect answer. I think something that I say to my daughter pretty often is, like, this is my first time being a mom, so I'm still learning this too, and I understand that this is complicated. The same can happen for politics, because it's not only honest if you don't really know what it is and think that it's complicated, but it shows you something more thoughtful, which is the notion that citizenship is not about instant certainty or always being right, it's about like being curious, thinking that you can listen to others, thinking that you can learn a little bit more, and so I think that's a more important thing than to say I might not get it right because I don't know it, and it feels really daunting. They don't need that. Avoiding the polarizing topic makes them scarier, but getting into it and naming calmly that you don't have all the answers, that you're interested in learning more, and yes, that it is complicated, and yes, it might feel like stuff is falling apart. That's not a bad answer. That's an honest answer, and it's a way for us to say, like, okay, despite the fact that this feels really dire, guess what, we can figure it out.

Yes, yes. And it's interesting, because I think in a lot of countries immigration has become a massive topic, and as soon as it gets raised, the answer is, well, that's really racist, and how do we pick our way through some of these thorny topics to get people to be respectful about understanding each other's opinions?

Yeah, I actually think those are great topics, and something that is really neat about having these conversations with children is that they do not come at these conversations with the same sort of prejudicial or historical baggage that you might say in. The American context, like, here's what a Democrat would say, or here's what a Republican would say, and in any sort of multi-party context, you have sort of, like, here's what these parties would say. Kids don't have that, they sort of just have their own sort of internal locus of, like, here's what I think is fair, is usually something that they would appeal to. And so, if we can have the conversation with a child, you can sort of see, like, where are they coming from before we have that sort of intermediate about of like how a party would think about this, and so I think it's something where you just say sort of like let's stay open to the possibilities, hear them out, let them tell you what they're thinking. If they happen to use a term that's derogatory, or if they use a phrasing that feels problematic to you, it's okay to pause and point that out to be like, ooh, where'd you hear that? Oh, I thought that this is something that would have been something that would have been offensive if I had heard this in the workplace. Like, I don't think I've never heard someone say it like that. And so it's not like, how dare you. It's not something where you need to chastise them, because we know no one likes a scold, and if we want them to keep talking to us about this, we want to give them the runway to like lay it out, and we have to be the safest conversation partner for them. They have to be able to do that stuff with us, because if they can't do it with us, they might find a place online that's worse, more fearsome, scarier all around. And so we should do that sort of practice with them, even if it gets onto touchy top topics, or they say something that might not feel politically correct or acceptable on the main line. It's better to hear them out and let them say it to you, so you can understand what's happening in their brain. Absolutely, I think it's, I think it's great to go quite local, because

that way they can see the impact on their own environment and the services that are important to them, and I think getting engaged in the local level can can be accessible to younger people when it comes to looking at big parties. When our kids go, well, none of them seem to appeal to me. How would you help your kids navigate how they can find a space that seems right for them?

I love this question. I say this oftentimes to parents. If you can't look up and find, look around, because there are always good people around you, at least at our level, at the state and local level, doing good work, or at least trying hard. They might not share the exact same end points that you want, but most often these positions are underpaid, sometimes just volunteer, and it's someone who believes they have something to offer, and so that might not be at the national level, that might not be where you find your role models or your idols in this sort of space, but if you look around, there are certainly good people doing this work everywhere. The way that my daughter sort of thinks about these people is she's like people in local government are like people on the yearbook committee, they just want everyone else to have a little bit better time, and they think they're the ones to provide it. They're not nefarious, they're not evil actors, they just think they have something a little bit better to offer. And so, I think you can always find those people.

Brilliant. And if there's a one habit ritual conversation that you think every family could introduce at home on a regular basis, that could help them raise thoughtful, engaged citizens. What would that be? I

think knowing the electoral calendar is the very first step to any of this, and so I know that elections are different times in different parts of the world, and then we have snap elections or scheduled elections, but if you don't have an awareness of sort of like the cadence or the pacing of how these things go, then you miss the on ramp to having some sort of influence, and so at the very basic level, it's knowing those sorts of things, and it doesn't have to be overwhelming, you know, we're already managing overwhelming schedules, if we have like kids who are at different schools, different doctors' appointments, different sports, different clubs that they're in, and so just making sure that there is a sort of baseline awareness of like here is when these questions are being asked of us. Then we can sort of launch into like what those questions need us to grapple with. What are the issues? What are the candidates? But we have to have some sort of awareness of what that calendar is, and oftentimes it's not that easy, because some of these things are sort of on that quieter calendar. Some of these things are like these local and state elections aren't always big media environment stuff, so it takes a little learning, but as soon as you get into your calendar and just routinize it, and it's not that bad.

Yeah, and we've had some amazing things happen in our local town, where we've had an attempt to start making people pay for parking, which we haven't had up until now, and the local citizens just rose up and said, "No, we don't want that, because it's going to ruin our local shopping district, so free parking for an hour, and yes, so once we highlight these things and the way that our actions can actually really make a positive difference, I think it definitely helps our kids to see that it's worthwhile, right? It helps our kids to

see it, yeah, totally, but it also helps the people on the other side to see that we're paying attention, like you can have a better, more accountable politics if you are a part of it. If you're, it's actually like quite a privilege if you can check out and everything goes perfectly, but it's usually the case that you get better outcomes if you have more minds thinking about

it. Yes, such a good point. And how can we replace this. Kind of concept of politics as being a battle with something that's more about problem solving. Are there tips for that?

Yeah, so I talk about this a lot in my classrooms, where I have college students, where when we sort of think about American politics, we've got two big parties and they're always like duking it out, but we should have parties be rivals, like if you have rivals or if you have opponents, that's not necessarily I'm going to crush you or you're going to crush me. That's like steel sharpening steel, like you're going to have good ideas somewhere, I'm going to have good ideas somewhere. We might not agree, but in that sort of like battle back and forth, we get to better collaborative outcomes, where your expertise wins sometimes and mine does other times, and we're always sharpening if we see them as enemies, that's a problem. If this is, I need to eliminate the other side, or they can never win, or they never have good ideas, they're evil or stupid, that's the problem. But in a political system, in a democracy, where you are deciding things by majority rule with some sort of representation, you want different viewpoints, and so having opponents or political rivals is actually a benefit to a system, not a detriment.

I love that. I think that's so important. I, when I was interviewing about critical thinking, the whole, the whole mantra was not winning the argument, but finding the winning argument, which is a different thing altogether. And, like you say, that sharpening of ideas against each other, and actually welcoming.. I think. I think we, as parents, can bring this back to ourselves again. Actually, in the home, not being scared of being challenged by our kids when they disagree with us, which I have one that just does this all the time. Sometimes I'm not up for it, because I'm tired, or whatever, but she will challenge me constantly on anything that I say, and that can be really helpful, because it can make it, can force me to really think about what I'm, what my opinions are, and that's a good thing, presumably. I

think that's true in a small house setting, and it's true in a big country setting, where it's like, if you have a back and forth, if you can have a dialog where someone has a contribution, someone listens, and someone has a contribution, someone listens, you'll presumably get to a better outcome, because you just have all those different friction points, like we don't get diamonds by no friction. You have to have some sort of sharpening mechanism, and that is conversation, that is dialog. It's not violence, it's not sort of political silencing, but it does take a little bit of discomfort in the friction that having a different opinion with someone else shared with you provides, which is a good thing.

Is there a way that we parents can talk about things without coming across as too cynical, because I think a lot of us, you know, we've watched the politicians, you know, back and forth. I mean, in England, we've had a horrific problem with the change of prime ministers over and over and over, and you can end up feeling quite cynical. And then, if they are teenagers and kids are quite idealistic, are there ways that we can restrain ourselves from crushing their idealism?

Yeah, and I think we already know teens are sort of prone to this cynicism because they're sort of like smarter than us and tool cool for us, but if they all they hear, if all they hear is something like all politicians are corrupt or nothing ever changes or the system is broken, the end, then it's going to be frustrating, and something where it's like, why am I even participating in this if it's like not even ever going to work, and it never gets better. So, I think the pivot that you have to do is something a little more hopeful, where instead of saying, like, the system's broken, it could be this system has real problems, but people have changed things before, we have become better with each successive generation, so people can change things again, that shows that we matter, that sort of balance matters. It's not just saying, like, this is great, and I hope it gets better. You can cite problems when you see them. There's a credibility to that, but to stop it, just the citing doesn't do the work that we need. You have to do that hopeful next piece, which is, and there's ways to change it. It takes people, we don't have to pretend politics is perfect. It's not perfect. Children are smart, teens can understand when adults are lying to them, and so we need to say, like, yeah, there's problems, and yet we have overcome things in the past. We can do this again, and we can make it better. Yeah, I have seen quite a strong rise in socialism, communism ideas. I think, because there are a lot of people who think, well, does democracy even work anymore? What would be your response to that? Yeah, so, so, no one's like slamming on the doors to get into China, or to immigrate into Russia, or to fight, like, no one's doing that, no one's saying, like, please let me into your countries. Everyone who's trying to immigrate somewhere is trying to immigrate to a freer place, which is usually some sort of constitutional republic, republican form of democracy, and so, though it might be seductive, some of these ideologies, I think, if we just look at the like hard numbers of this, you can say to kids, like, when people have a choice of where they can live, or when people are trying to get to somewhere better, they're always going to a place where they can be freer, and that is the sort of like lesson of the empirical world's transformation, that it is better to be free. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the American context are very worth pursuing and keeping, and though these other things might sound really nice or really fun, or there have really good sort of like messages under. Lying them of equality, there is a benefit to being in a country that says every person matters the same, because we all get to vote for one

massive benefit. I've lived in countries that aren't like this, so I'm super grateful I'm here, super grateful. And also, what would your response be to kids who say words are actual violence?

Oh, well, you know, I'm sort of lucky that I don't really hear that that much. That doesn't really happen in my classroom. That words are violence. We have an upfront sort of conversation on the second class about what we, our expectations are, and so if someone were to say to me, like, that word is violent, I would have to interrogate sort of with them what it is that is violence, like. So, if I can't even imagine what the word is that they would say, but I'm sure there's some slurs that someone would say, like, that's actually violent, and you might say, yeah, it cuts down on my sort of like mental health, it makes me feel less than, that's certainly a problematic way, and I wouldn't want people to feel like that, but there is a difference between physical violence, and I don't necessarily know that I would say, like, I want a classroom where there is mental violence, but words are violence is probably not accurate in most cases, and so I would have to really go back and forth with someone if they were to say that to me.

Brilliant, brilliant, Lindsay. Absolutely brilliant conversation. Thank you so much. I have been doing, sort of, you know, how do we show kids that they matter? How do we increase critical thought? How do we ensure free speech? So it's all part of a conversation I've been having to try and figure out how we can help our kids live in the world in a way that supports democracy and supports free thinking. And so this is a really, really helpful conversation. Thank you so much. If people would like to buy your excellent book, it is quite American-based, so it's particularly for American readers. And also, your podcast, what is the best way for them to find you? And tell us a little bit more about the podcast that's coming out.

Thank you. So, the book is sold everywhere. If you buy them on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Bookshop, or you can go to How to Raise a citizen.com Ask me for a signed copy, I'll do that and send it to you. And coming in a few weeks' time is going to be a new show, a new podcast called Government That Doesn't Suck, where we're going to get into implements and times in which government has made decisions that we're all sort of better for. So, for instance, I think our first episode is going to be on the US highway system, where the United States could not have grown into the power that it was if it didn't connect all the different parts of the country together, and so that is a time in which, yeah, government didn't suck. It actually made many things way better.

I love that. I'm definitely going to be an avid listener. Thank you so much, Lindsay. That's it for this week. If you would like to get in contact with me, it's teenagersuntangled@gmail.com My website is teenagersuntangled.com and my substack is teenagersuntangled.substack.com And on that, I give you a full explanation with notes and everything of my thoughts about these lovely interviews and PDFs that you can print off, so you can keep them at home for kind of prompts and ways to remember these things, because I know we listen, and then we go, what was that again? And I know some people have listened time and time again to the same episode. You don't have to do that. Go to Substack. That's it for this week. I hope you found it useful. Let me know, and send this to at least one person who you think might find it useful. That's it. Big hug. Bye bye.