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How to Turn Your Kids into Radicals

It started as a joke.

It was Friday night, which in our family means pizza and movie night. It’s the only video time our kids get–we don’t watch television, video games, or any of that–just one movie, as a family event. My son, eight years old, was skeptical of the idea of watching Pete’s Dragon, which had arrived from Netflix that week. So my partner, mostly as a joke, said, “Well, if you don’t want to watch that, you can watch our movie, Food Incorporated.”

My son stopped. “What’s that about?”

We explained that it was a documentary about what is wrong with the food industry, and the bad things that big corporations do to farmers and food.

“That sounds interesting, I want to know what is wrong with our food.” His ten-year old sister completely agreed.

So we gathered in the living room and watched it together, both children totally focused on the movie, learning about factory farms, food-borne illnesses, corn-fed vs grass-fed cows, and agribusiness. My son did start to lose interest about 15 minutes from the end, when the more abstract issues of Genetically Modified Organisms went a little over his eight-year old head, (and frankly it wasn’t the strongest part of the movie). At the end we read off the long list of ways to help and change the system, and they got up resolving to write their own books about the problems with the food industry (And I was really glad that we were eating home-made, vegetarian pizza with nearly all organic ingredients from the food co-op–which spared me the image of two outraged children demanding to know why we would be feeding them corporate food).

The really amazing thing is that this really was their idea. We didn’t particularly encourage them to watch it–we warned them that there might be a lot of sad or gross pictures from the insides of slaughterhouses, and were a little worried that they might not be ready for it. But they really wanted to see it–they wanted to know more about what was wrong with the world, and left wanting to do something about it.

Though I have been a progressive for most of my adult life, I haven’t been trying to push my politics around my children. Since they were born I haven’t been much of an activist. When Seattle’s activist community was preparing for the WTO protests, I was preparing for the birth of my first child, and saving vacation to extend paternity leave. I took my daughter to a couple of protests against the Afghanistan war when she was a toddler, riding on my back–but the anger of the protest frightened her, and I didn’t want her to grow up thinking that protests were something scary. When my son came along, I found myself pretty well consumed by the day-to-day concerns of raising two children in a healthy and caring way.

Oh, we’ve made clear what we feel about things. They grew up knowing that George Bush was a bad President, and, at an age appropriate level, why. We taught them why we feel war is wrong, why we eat organic food, why we drive a hybrid car and try to use the bus whenever we can. We talked about racism and pollution and global warming. We read them books about saving the environment, about people’s lives around the world, and the incredible children’s books of Patricia Polacco and Dr. Suess (The Lorax and The Butter Battle are still some of the most political kid’s books out there). We played them children’s music by Dana Lyons.

They have certainly grown up surrounded by progressive values, but we haven’t really tried to push a lot of politics onto the kids. In part, because their ability to understand some of the more abstract concepts is still growing, but mostly because it feels wrong; trying to push political views on a child goes against the grain of any sort of liberatory politics. You can’t force people to be radicals; they have to choose that path themselves. All we can do is lay the seeds.

What we have done, is to teach our values: values of compassion, of kindness, of fairness, of respect. We have tried to teach them that who they are as people matters. We have tried to give them appropriate limits and rules, which kids need, and a safe and healthy space in which to live. We teach them not to hurt others, not to hit, not to tease or put people down, and that nobody should hurt them. And we love them, and listen, which is the most important part of all.

Parenting is an ultimate act of faith and trust. We are entrusted with the life of another human being who is totally dependent on us for everything. We are entrusted to care for that life, to give that human being the love and nurturing they need, and to fill their world with wonder and magic. We are entrusted with helping them grow: first to walk and talk, then to figure out how the world works, how to come into their own as a person, and eventually to eventually go off into that world on their own. And we need to have faith-faith in our own ability to do this incredibly daunting task, faith in the wonderful people they are, and faith in the wonderful people they will become. Parenting also means a lot of pain and a lot of tears, from skinned knees to broken hearts, and it’s the parents who fall down and fail as much as the kids. In the end, we know that they need to figure out what they believe in for themselves, and we ultimately have no control over that (in the heart of every progressive parent, I think there is a little part that says: what will I do if they become Republicans?)

So when an eight- and a ten-year-old child, our children, decide to watch a political documentary because they want to know what is wrong with the world, I feel like maybe, just maybe, I am doing the right thing after all.

Sometimes, though, the most radical things we do are the most everyday and ordinary, and often the most important. Which brings me to a story about my daughter.

A week or two before we watched Food Inc., my daughter brought home a note from a girl in her class, thanking her for standing up for this girl against the teasing of some other classmates. We asked what had happened, and found out that my daughter’s three closest friends were among the girls doing the teasing. Which means that my daughter, at ten years old, stood up to her best friends to do what is right. I can remember times in my twenties when I didn’t have that kind of courage.

I would love to take credit for that, and say that it was a result of how we raised her. I hope that to some extent it is. But I also know that she has an inner strength and a sense of self that is deeply her own, (and that she has faith in her friends, who really are good kids despite getting caught up in this dynamic).

When a ten-year-old has the courage to stand up for what is right against a playground injustice, it makes me think: that kid will change the world some day. But that sells her short; she is already changing the world, right here and now, and when she and her generation come into their own, this world is going to be in good hands. –John Chapman

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