November 6, 2024
Talking to Our Kids About the Election
Dear Parents,
I wanted to reach out about the election, parent to parent. I know there will be many articles written about how to talk to your kids, but I wanted to share two pieces written by a friend of mine, Ali Michael, Ph.D., who focuses on parent eductation as part of her consulting practice. She's a member of a Reconstructionist congregation in Philadelphia and is the chair of their children's education committee.
The first is piece she wrote today. I’m copying part of her blog post below. In it she compares the moment we are now in with how it felt when she was diagnosed with MS. I especially appreciated the three questions she identified that kids want to know in difficult times: Am I going to be okay? Are you going to be okay? What does this mean?
It's a fine line between tending to children's emotional lives and being honest with them. Managing our anxiety while tending to theirs is not easy. Keeping these three questions in mind can be helpful.
5. Kids have predictable concerns at times like these.
When we told the kids about my diagnosis, they had three questions that we had been told to expect:
a. Will I get MS? (i.e. Am I going to be okay?)
b. Will you die? (i.e. Are you going to be okay? But also, am I going to be okay?)
c. How does MS work? (i.e. What does this mean?)
These are the questions our children want answers to now.
What I told my children this morning is that no matter what happens:
- We will keep you safe.
- You are not alone.
- We cannot know the future. Half the people in this country don’t want this. And even many people who did want this wanted it because they can’t afford groceries—not because they are hateful.
No matter what happens, we have our family. We have our community. You have your school. You have your friends.
By the time my 11-year-old got in the shower this morning, I heard this: “Even if Trump wins, we will still have D and D, will still have our cats, we will still have each other, we will still have our cousins. That’s something” (i.e. We are going to be okay).
And then, “I can’t believe half of our country is still so sexist” (i.e. What does this mean?).
I anticipate a lot of processing—back and forth. I expect there to be questions—and maybe tears—for a long time. But I need to keep coming back to what they want to know most, which is “Will I be okay?” And what I can say for sure is, “You are not alone. I am here with you. I love you.”
Today we wake up in the same country we lived in yesterday. But with more data.
After the Tree of Life shooting, Renee and I spoke with our kids’ elementary school social worker. She modeled for us how to help them cope with living in a cruel and unpredictable world. She emphasized that children are capable of synthesizing difficult and painful ideas, especially when the adults around them speak according to their developmental needs. We often underestimate what children—even young children—can handle. While we certainly want to shield our children from the darkness of the world, it is also important to help them wrestle with political realities and expand their capacity to engage with the world around them.
Ali shares a similar message in her article, “What Do We Tell the Children?” after Trump was elected in 2016. Here’s a short excerpt from it that my colleague, Rabbi Isaac Saposnik, shared this morning in an email:
Say that you will stand united as a...community, and that you will protect one another. Say that silence is dangerous, and teach them how to speak up when something is wrong. Then teach them how to speak up, how to love one another, how to understand each other, how to solve conflicts, how to live with diverse and sometimes conflicting ideologies, and give them the skills to enter a world that doesn’t know how to do this.
L'shalom,
Rabbi Laurie