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When you raise a child, you are carrying out a project that balances the tension between the world you live in and a better, yet imagined world.
That tension is personal: parents and caregivers come to work with the problems we have built up since childhood. It is well known that we tend to impose a version of this on our own children, no matter how hard we try to free them.
The tension is also social and cultural – even political. We all try to teach our children to stand up for themselves in the harsh, pushy, and sometimes violent world out there, even as we coach them to lean vulnerably into grace, compassion, sharing, and forgiveness. And a lot of it involves hiding uglier truths about the world from them. But even those only work for so long, because they will eventually outgrow our ability to deceive and distract—and nothing breeds resentment in adulthood like realizing how much you were lied to in childhood.
This is beautiful, impossible work. We all mess up all the time, no matter how hard we push and strive – and no matter how many times we try to let go and retreat.
Parenting is even more difficult in moments of public anxiety and stress. As a father of two, I spent much of Donald Trump’s first semester struggling to guard my children’s belief in virtues like patience, kindness, honesty, personal integrity, and responsibility. I tried to coach them to believe in the power of peaceful, democratic institutions that represent the will of the public. In other words, I tried to swim upstream against the current the prevailing Trumpist political currents.
Facing four more years of Trump, Democrats are wondering: how did they lose their parents?
Now I am a father of three children. I fear the consequences of his second term – for my children, for the work of raising them, for our schools, and for our democracy. It’s a much more difficult project this time. How can families teach our children to believe in a better, kinder, and fairer world… when they see glory, honor, and power repeatedly awarded to a man like this? Can advocates for better educational opportunities for all children build a safer, friendlier country with Trump inevitably at the helm?
It’s hard to imagine. His return has ushered in a truly bleak era, driven by a movement that targets and marginalizes people – often children – to gain power, whether they are immigrants or transgender children who just want to go to the toilet in peace. This is a nightmare for parents trying to raise their children with basic civility, to stand up for the weak among us, to choose mercy over contempt and peace over violence.
If you think this is an exaggeration, please remember that Trump first came to power asked A national peak in hateful behavior in schools. Were al to see more of the same this time all around. That’s not an accident. Trump is a persistent, constant bully, a withdrawn person special contempt for women, regularly belittle And derogatory every woman who presents him with the least resistance.
This is relentless harassment that any high school student would recognize, and that any parent would hate to see inflicted on their child. It’s sexism that any young girl would immediately find infuriating, and behavior that any decent parent or caregiver would find unacceptable in their son.
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Moreover, Trump is cynically nihilistic. That’s why many of the presidents-elect former colleagues don’t trust him. He’s been caught in tens of thousands of lies and never admits his deception, even when are lies hurt other people. This year, Trump baselessly accused Haitian immigrants in Ohio of stealing and eating pets: innocent people – both immigrants and native-born Americans – immediately received dozens of bomb threatssome close schools. Note: immigrants are reliably less violent and dangerous community members than native Americans.
Trump’s responses to the pandemic were probably his distortions with the greatest consequences. He repeatedly And prematurely emphasized that the pandemic was under control and easily manageable. He got his PhD quackery And unprovenunscientific COVID “treatments” — without any proof. People died because she believed it.
Any family would recognize a child with Trump’s propensity for selfish betrayal and deliberate deceit as a terrible friend or classmate. No family would want an adult who treats people so carelessly and is responsible for their child’s safety or well-being.
FinallyTrump’s world is gloomy violent. He routinely muses about the use of violence against political opponents, journalists and demonstrators. It is no coincidence that in an October 2024 poll only 1 in 5 young American adults were confident that there would be a peaceful transfer of power after the elections, which was once an unshakable tenet of our democracy.
Even if you’re confident that you can set a strong enough example for children to be a bulwark against this behavior, that still won’t solve the most substantial problem: Trumpist politics have consistently failed to succeeded in tackling the very real problems facing the US. faces – including and especially those that young adults in the US engage with.
While a 2023 poll, for example, showed that American children are concerned about violence, having enough money and the state of the environmentthat Trump and his party are pushing for make weapons more accessible, raise taxes on all but the top 5% of American earners, adopt energy policies that will increase the pace and severity of climate changeAnd Close the Ministry of Education. None of these are real solutions.
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Families in my community tell me they struggle to explain the current state of American democracy to their children. One says their high school student continues to bring them media articles in which Trump supporters express surprise that their preferred candidate has every intention of making good on his campaign promises. vaccines, rates, the war in Gaza And mass deportations. “Then why did they vote for him?” they say their child is asking for it. ‘What have they done? think would happen?”
Trump has put families in a terrible situation. It is difficult to explain why men who violently attacked law enforcement en route to desecrating the U.S. Capitol are being touted as heroes and a pardon could be granted. It’s hard to look at all the violent, undemocratic revenge Trump has promised and convince children that nonviolent politics is the core of our democracy.
Look, kids are relatively sophisticated risk detectors – they know the real dangers of partisan hysteria. That is why it is particularly difficult now to tell them to be patient and trust the democratic process, to believe that the adults will get their act together and work on real problems. It’s hard to believe that the system will correct itself after you’ve spent another computing period at your desk because there’s another active shooter in the area, or worse: on your campusas happened again last week in Madison, Wisconsin.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of families in my social circle are grimly hoping that they might be able to defuse the situation. They hope that Trump will not be who he has been for the past decade, that he will instead step up and behave like a cautious statesman they can safely ignore. Most plan to actively distract their children from American public discourse, to try to avoid internalizing the next four years as “normal.”
Many education reformers are making similar noises. They want to put all this aside and just get on with their lives and careers and work with Trump to overhaul the federal role in education or expand school choice or something. They want to pretend that Trump’s behavior can be tolerated or ignored.
I hope they’re right. But I think we all know that’s not the case – and so do the kids.
The views expressed here are solely those of the author and not those of any organization with which he is affiliated.
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