I was struck by this Naomi Schaefer-Riley piece, found at National Review Online.  Entitled "The Weight of the World", it describes Schaefer-Riley’s fellow volunteers in a New York City Big Brothers/Big Sisters program.  Noting that she is the only conservative among these volunteers (and that is certainly telling), she bemoans the tendency of her fellow mentors to impose their own political beliefs on the youngsters with whom they work:

…liberals have been transformed of late. And so has the way they interact with children. Now their language is filled hate and fear, and ultimately a total loss of perspective on the lives we are lucky enough to lead in America. I have no problem helping children understand that politics is serious business, that voting is important, and that whom we vote for could have a real effect on the future of the country. But the message seeping through to impressionable children is that darkness has descended on this land, that our freedom will all be gone soon, that people are being sent off to the slaughterhouse against their will, and that anywhere else in the world must be better.

Talking to my "little sister," Janice (I’ve changed her name), who recently started paying more attention to politics, I’ve realized how much misinformation she receives on a daily basis not only from her classmates, but from neighbors, relatives, and even her teachers. She has told me several times that Republicans don’t like poor people or black people, that they want to keep them from getting a good education or a decent place to live. She was even convinced that if George Bush got his way and she went to the emergency room, she wouldn’t be able to see a doctor.

But I think we reached a new level recently. In the back of a taxi the other day, I was stunned when she told me President Bush wanted to draft kids as young as ten years old to send them off to die in Iraq; that Bush and Cheney are only at war because they will personally make money off of oil in the Middle East; that since everyone in the world now hates America, we’ll be bombed again very soon, probably with a nuclear weapon. And it will all be the fault of Republicans. Janice announced proudly that 95 percent of her Catholic school in Brooklyn voted for Kerry in their mock election.

Schaefer-Riley is on to something.  Of course, I know plenty of traditionalist Christians who saddle youngsters with "way too much information".  I’ve been to more than one anti-abortion rally where I’ve seen kids barely old enough to stand holding pictures of terminated fetuses while their elders march and yell and chant.   It’s not clear to me that they need to know the details of how abortions are performed at age eight, anymore than ten-year old kids in liberal churches need to watch videotapes of Marines executing unarmed prisoners of war.

Of course, none of this is new.  My parents pushed my baby carriage in anti-Vietnam war marches in 1968.  My mother told me — when I was three — that if the Vietnam war was still going on when I was 18, she would send me to Canada.  (Not a moment I remember, but my mother has mentioned it often.)  As a slightly older child, I remember hearing my parents and their friends talk about President Nixon with a scowl.  I could pick up on the distaste that every adult in my childhood had for the man, even if I had no concrete idea as to why it was they loathed him so.  (At six, I started hearing about "Watergate".  I imagined a large moat around a castle — the sort I saw in my story books — and a huge gate in the middle of the moat to control the flow of water.  Wicked Nixon had done something to this gate, though I wasn’t sure what.  Even now, that childish image comes into my head when someone mentions that old scandal.)

I’ve talked with some of my friends who grew up in religiously conservative families.  They have similar memories of adults imposing their world views upon them.  (One of my friends grew up believing, thanks to her parents’ oft-vocalized fears, that all black men wanted to look up her skirt and all men with long hair wanted to put her in a van and take her to where black men would look up her skirt.  Oh, and Jimmy Carter wanted all boys to wear dresses.  These were articles of faith in her household.)  The point is, what Schaefer-Riley bemoans is a bad habit that almost all parents — and youth workers — have: the desire to mold the weltansschauungen of the young and impressionable.  She’s right about its deleterious effects; wrong to ascribe it only to those of us on the left bank of American life.

I do think adults should talk to their children about politics.  But I also think we must do everything  we can to avoid transmitting our anger and our fear to the very young.  Even with adolescents, I think we must temper our own anxieties and disappointments.  Kids — be they five or fifteen — have enough about which to be uncertain. 

Two Wednesdays ago (the "day after"), we had a terrific time at youth group.  Many of the kids expressed real disappointment in the Kerry defeat, and we let them do so.  I could tell that at least one of the other volunteer youth leaders was positively despondent, and was eager to spend the evening rehashing the election with the kids.  (The kids wanted to play games and talk about other things.)  Fortunately, we had other stuff planned.  I made an extra effort to project enthusiasm and calm, making certain that no trace of despair or sorrow was visible on my face.  Win or lose, we who work with children must make every effort to shield them from our own doubts and fears about the state of the world.  Kids are not our therapy.  They also aren’t made of moldable clay.  We would all do well to remember that.