Don’t Tweet “deep” Things Your Kids Say

You can understand the impetus that prompted Chelsea Clinton to tweet a “cute” joke about her 4-year-old son celebrating Joe Biden’s inauguration this week . Of course, Hillary Clinton’s daughter has many reasons to celebrate the shameful departure from politics of the man who vilified her mother for half a decade and encouraged his supporters to cheer for her imprisonment (or worse). That doesn’t mean she had to do it – and you shouldn’t do it with your kids. Obviously, the children of politicians and celebrities do not deserve to be attacked, criticized or put under the microscope by the public. or the media – whether we are talking about Barron Trump , Claudia Conway or even most of Chelsea Clinton, the treatment of which the right-wing media in a child takes one of the first places in the ranking of the most horrible things that Rush Limbaugh said (this is a really big chart). Clinton seems to understand this – she defended Barron after the then very tall teenage son was criticized by the then very tall teenage son for dressing like … a teenager – so she could also understand that she shouldn’t use her their own children as a mouthpiece for self-expression. her personal policy. Because that’s exactly what she does: Little Aidan’s joke might seem particularly noteworthy to his mom, but instead she should have written this story to her mom and told her child, who, as a four-year-old, had no political views. opinions on everything but his right to snacks on demand is a hell of a lot of privacy.

Not all kids are political (and kids are not)

Speaking of the Clintons, I was about 11 years old during Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. All my life my parents were staunch Republicans (instead of music, I grew up listening to conservative radio in my car). My main interests at the time were collecting old Nintendo Power releases ; my political views were, so to speak, unformed. My assessment of the Clinton-Gore ticket was fully shaped by what I heard from my parents, so I have to thank them for the humiliating memory of spending the night at a friend’s house and of telling his Clinton-supportive parents that Al Gore was an idiot because that he only cared about the spotted owl (political controversy used to be so bizarre ). I remember my friend’s parents kindly poking fun at me, but in hindsight, I’m also pretty sure they stopped at first to think how little asshole I was (or jumped at me after I went home; that’s cool , I deserve it). Mind you, this was back when a larger percentage of political arguments were about substantive issues like financial policy and the environment, rather than questions about whether the other side was made up of pedophile vampires who kill children . At 4, Chelsea Clinton’s son is celebrating Joe Biden’s first day as president, not because he’s excited about his political platform, but because he knows his mom is happy that Joe Biden became president, and Biden’s praise is probably great a way to get positive attention from her. We are all subject to our animal nature, especially when we have malleable little children’s brains, so it is important to be careful when discussing politics with and around our children . It’s great to hear your older child ask, “Why does Donald Trump want to destroy America?” (using a completely hypothetical example that definitely didn’t happen to me), but that doesn’t mean he understands the meaning of what he is asking about (and thank goodness for that).

“Yeah, he’s my son [blushing smiley]!” Clinton tweeted – and yes, he literally is, and you probably didn’t sit him down to discuss the intricacies of the GOP position on abortion rights. Talk to your children about your values, take them with you to protests, make activism a family business – great – but make sure you practice what you preach and not teach them to repeat audio passages.

Don’t assume your kids will believe what you do.

Research (like this one cited in The Atlantic ) has shown that children raised with strong beliefs are more likely to rebel against them when they grow up, so you certainly can’t take what they say like kids at face value. … Consider the famous 1961 Bobo doll study mentioned in the aforementioned Atlantic article, which showed that children will behave aggressively towards a stuffed toy if they see adults do the same. Back to my own youthful political commentary, I wasn’t grinning too much about Al Gore’s obsession with owls, but I was talking to adults and wanted to sound like an adult, so I just repeated some vaguely political things I overheard in my home. Almost 30 years later, my real opinion, let’s say, is very different from that of my parents, and I would not appreciate hearing that my father widely shared my comments with his circle of friends, not to mention the whole world through social networks, which did not exist yet (I suppose he could have used the CB radio, which he inexplicably kept in the car throughout my childhood). I’m generally against sharing too much about my kids on social media (a topic that Lifehacker has covered extensively in some detail) and try never to do so in public messages. You never know when something will go viral, and our job is to protect our children from such unreasonable public scrutiny. Because…

They may be confused

I chose Clinton’s example to open this post because she really needs to know better, but there is another from the recent turbulent political season that further emphasizes my point: that mom who shared her daughter’s extremely unpleasant story of exclaiming “Rutkanda forever!” and took a pose from a Marvel movie immediately after learning of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. While I’m sure Mom had the very best intentions of sharing this story with the world, the Internet’s response to it – passionate support mixed with derisive ridicule and seasoned with outright ulceration – was completely predictable. And while I don’t think we know exactly how the girl in question treats attention, I’m sure she didn’t say it in the hopes that it would help her mom gain trust on social media (assuming she generally said it.).

If I had to place a bet, little Rutkanda really wouldn’t have been happy when, for the first time in school, someone googled and added two and two. Her mother had to keep this story in the family. Don’t make the same mistake.