We were excited to have a chance to talk to Lindsey Cormack for this podcast episode. Lindsey is the author of the book How to Raise a Citizen (and why it’s up to you to do it.) Most of us don’t spend much time thinking about how our students learn about how the government works, how government affects our lives, how to register to vote, and why it matters. In our conversation, Lindsey helped us understand why schools often avoid teaching civics, and she helped us learn how parents can approach these topics with their kids – even their grown-up kids! Lindsey is clearly passionate about the importance of this topic (you’ll hear that in her voice) and her enthusiasm is contagious – especially as she explained how raising a citizen can give us hope. This episode will fuel your interest in learning more about government along with your student.

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Lindsey Cormack’s book,How to Raise a Citizen (and why you need to do it) is a must read for parents – of kids of any age. We were excited to have Lindsey talk with us about her book and why civics is important and why kids are no longer getting all the information they need from schools. Civics can sound dry, but as Lindsey explained to us, understanding how our government works is essential for so many reasons.

Lindsey explained that raising a citizen is like the difference between raising an athlete and raising a spectator. The image made so much sense about the difference between raising a citizen and raising a partisan.

We learned about why schools seem to be deprioritizing civics – reasons that are sad but seem to make sense – and why it’s up to parents to help prepare their students to participate in the political process and government.

Does your student know how to go about registering to vote? This can be a great way to get started with some important conversations – and Lindsey says it’s never too late to start touching on politics.

Another topic that is so important is helping students get comfortable having hard conversations with others – especially others who might not share our opinion. We could all work at getting comfortable with difficult conversations – especially with holidays coming. There’s a key question that can be a good way to start, “What have you heard about that?”

Lindsey’s book also gives us all a primer about how government works, so no excuses that you don’t know enough to talk to your student. This would be a great place to start together.

Lindsey also mentioned a couple of organizations that might be good resources for more information – We the People.org, and CivicsBee.

As we so often do, we asked Lindsey if she had any books she might recommend to parents – on any topic that might interest them.  She gave us three suggestions –

How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott Haims (read our review of the book)

Democracy in Retrograde: How to Make Changes Big and Small in Our Country and in Our Lives by Sami Sage and Emily Amick

Democracy: A Love Letter and a Guide for Everyone Fighting to Save It by Kelly A. Clancy

And, of course, you want to read Lindsey’s book and get started talking to your student about what it means to be a citizen.

And finally, and perhaps most important of all, Lindsey talked about how this work of helping our students understand government – well beyond just the civics of it – is that all of this work helps with good mental health and that “there is hope.” Knowing how much room we have to grow can give us a vision of a positive future.

This is a conversation you’ll want to hear and you’ll be inspired to start some great conversations with your student.

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Transcript:

Announcer: 0:10

Welcome to the College Parent Central podcast. Whether your child is just beginning the college admission process or is already in college, this podcast is for you. You’ll find food for thought and information about college and about navigating that delicate balance of guidance, involvement and knowing when to get out of the way. Join your hosts, Vicki Nelson and Lynn Abrahams, as they share support and a celebration of the amazing child in college.

Lynn Abrahams: 0:47

Welcome to the College Parent Central podcast and our role in parenting as our kids move from high school, through college and out of college. My name is Lynn Abrahams and I am a learning disability specialist. I have worked with college students my entire career, working with students and their families. I also come to this as a parent. I have two sons who have been to college in out around through. They did it their own interesting ways, and I’ve parented them through that. So we talk about this from both a professional and a personal place. I’m here today with my friend and my colleague, Vicki Nelson, and another guest, but I’ll let her introduce herself.

Vicki Nelson: 1:45

Okay, I will start with me. I’m Vicki Nelson and I am a college professor of communication. I am also the parent of three daughters, who have all gone to college and come out the other side, and we’ve all survived the situation. Lynn has the boys, I have the girls, and so I also am always thinking in terms of both professionally and what I see in the classroom, what I see in my students, and also my experiences with my girls. But we are, as Lynn mentioned, we are not by ourselves today. We’re very excited about the guest that we have with us today and this is a very timely conversation.

Vicki Nelson: 2:28

We’re excited to be joined today by Lindsey Cormack, who is the author of the book how to Raise a Citizen and Why it’s Up to you to Do it. She’s also an associate professor of political science and director of the Diplomacy Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. She has a PhD in government from New York University and is also raising a daughter in New York. So, like us, I guess Lindsey is looking both from the professional and the parental standpoint. Lindsay also created and maintains a digital database of all official Congress to Constituent e-newsletters in the DC Inbox Project, which has to be a fascinating collection of material, I can only imagine. Lindsey’s work has been published in all sorts of scholarly publications, but also in places like the New York Times, The Washington Post, Propublica, The New York Post, NBC News, CBS News, Fox News and so many more publications and media outlets, and we are so honored and so excited to have Lindsey here with us today, post-election, to talk about raising a citizen. Lindsay, welcome to the College Parent Central podcast.

Lindsey Cormack: 3:52

Thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to talking with you both. Thank you.

Vicki Nelson: 3:56

We want to learn all about what we should be doing with our kids. So to start, your book is titled How to Raise a Citizen and you say at one point in the book that raising a citizen is not the same as raising a partisan. Can you sort of set the stage for us and talk a little bit about what you mean by citizen in this context?

Lindsey Cormack: 4:21

Sure. So I think there’s two things here. When I use the term citizen, I’m not referring to it in like an exclusive legal marker, like you’re entitled to these rights and not those. I’m referring to it in a far more general sense. I think about being a citizen as being a member of a community, contributing to our shared life and understanding the government apparatus that we’re operating under In order to change it. When I talk about people as raising a citizen or a partisan, I think it’s best to describe it with an analogy about raising an athlete versus raising a spectator.

Lindsey Cormack: 4:52

So if you were trying to raise someone who understood how to play soccer, you would teach them the rules of the game, you would do practice drills with them, you would maybe have them scrimmage and they would learn to hone the muscle memory that it takes to sort of be successful in that sport.

If you were teaching them to just be a spectator, you might say here’s all the chants and the songs that we sing from the sidelines, here’s the colors we paint our faces, here’s the people we cheer really loudly for, here’s the ones that we don’t like at all. But in politics we don’t really have the option of being a spectator. We’re really all athletes. We’re raising children who are going to be on that playing field whether they like it or not, and so the way that you sort of get the politics that you want or the government outcomes that you desire is by being a better athlete, being a better citizen. Partisanship is more about which team you’re going to cheer for, which side you get excited for if they happen to have a victory, and so it’s related to it, but it’s not the same, and we’d all do better to think about ourselves as raising citizen athletes versus partisan spectators.

Vicki Nelson: 5:52

That analogy makes so much sense. It’s so clear. Thank you for that.

Lynn Abrahams: 5:58

I love that analogy. You know one of the things I think about. I feel like I never did a very good job with my kids in terms of talking about politics, and one thing I really love about this book is that you give it’s sort of a guide to how to have these conversations. So why do you think we, as parents, don’t do such a good job with this?

Lindsey Cormack: 6:24

Well, I’m glad you brought that up, because I don’t think about this book as like a finger scoldy book where I’m saying like, oh, we’re not doing this. It’s like most of us grew up in systems that had a few institutional failures that made it hard for us to hone this skill. It really depends on what sort of part of the country you grew up in or sort of like your family culture. But there’s two big things that operate in a lot of parts of the United States.

Lindsey Cormack: 6:50

One is the idea that politics is an off limits topic, like it sits in a taboo basket with things like talking about how much money someone makes or their religious beliefs or maybe sexual identity, and so it’s like not considered a polite conversation.

It’s one that a lot of children just don’t have because their parents, their families, don’t do that. But then in other parts of the country we have this sort of idea that all politics is awful and negative and bad, and so our kids hear things like you know, everyone who’s in it’s corrupt, they’re liars, it’s rigged, they’re egomaniacs, they’re in it for themselves, and so if those are the two sorts of messages we get in our home environments. It’s not surprising that most of us don’t know how to do this, because we’re either underpracticed or we really just have a view that’s all bad and doom and gloom. And so if those things exist in our family cultures, coincident with schools who are actively deprioritizing civics, it’s not surprising that a lot of us feel like we can’t do this because we haven’t had practice and we haven’t been socialized to do it that well.

Lynn Abrahams: 7:45

You know, you give a statistic in your book that was surprising to me and that’s that let’s see in 2020, only 25% of 18 to 24-year-olds reported having political discussions with their parents. That’s really dramatic. Go ahead.

Lindsey Cormack: 8:05

Yeah, that is dramatic, but it’s something that I think was borne out in the way that I sort of understand my students in the classroom and this was from a really large nationally representative survey, and so it’s something where I know that it’s not just the kids that I get, it’s kind of everywhere in the United States. Most of our children are getting through childhood never having had intentional conversations about what it means to be a citizen or what it means to understand their politics.

Lynn Abrahams: 8:30

You mentioned also that this is a way to move from protecting our kids to preparing our kids. Can you talk a little more about that?

Lindsey Cormack: 8:40

Yeah. So something that I hear a lot from parents is, you know, like well, I want them to have a childhood. I don’t want them to have to think about these bigger things. It’s scary out there. Politics is complicated and I get that for some of our more fearsome topics. If we’re thinking about, you know, international relations, or if we’re thinking about war activities that could be really daunting for young kids and that might not be something you want to do and that might not be something you want to do, but there is a time in which your kids are getting ready to leave your house and if you don’t equip them with this knowledge, we know that they might not get it. A lot of our K-12 schools just simply don’t give enough time to this subject so that students are adequately prepared, and unless they have to take a political science class in college, they may never have another intentional time in which they can work through these questions because they’re on their own.

Vicki Nelson: 9:26

I really like that you use that idea of preparing, protecting to preparing. We talk so much on this podcast about preparing students for college, preparing them and what they need to do to be able to handle things on their own. So this fits right into what at least what we think parents need to hear that the job is really to get them ready. You mentioned K-12, and you emphasize a lot in your book about starting these conversations early, that we need to start at the level that kids are, when they’re young, and bring the conversations in. A lot of the listeners that we have for this podcast are sort of past that stage with their high school parents, their parents of students who are already in college. So my question then is is it too late? Will kids of that age even listen to what parents have to say, and how do we really need to talk to them as adults? How do we do that if we haven’t built up to this before now?

Lindsey Cormack: 10:43

Yeah, so I never think of these as too early or too late conversations. You know, as long as you have a child in your life, whether they be four or 40, you can have a relationship with them that touches on politics, you can get into these discussions with them, and so for people who have high schoolers who haven’t yet left, or these young college students who maybe haven’t had an opportunity to vote yet, there’s time to do really good work, and what I say in the book is I think there’s five sort of things that those kids at that age need to know in order to be able to navigate the system best on their own, and I’ll give it to you sort of quickly. The first thing is they need to know how to register to vote, and a lot of times, parents think this is going to happen in the schools. They’ll teach them, but we know that in 2022, the last federal election that we had only a little bit more than a quarter of our 18 year olds were registered to vote and ready to prepare in that election. So it’s something where, when we think about why that is part of it is, it’s kind of tricky. You have to have your social security number to register to vote and many 16-year-olds don’t know where their card is like. Maybe mom or dad has it in an envelope somewhere, and so they just don’t have this basic information that they need to do it.

Lindsey Cormack: 11:48

The second thing is a lot of the teachers that we interviewed in talking to this book said we don’t really teach about the primary election system. You know they’ll talk about the general elections and they might talk about the presidential primary, but for so much of our politics the pivotal election is that early one that happens when you’re picking who’s going to be the Democratic nominee or who’s going to be the Republican nominee. So parents, if they really want their kids to understand their politics around them the state and local level especially, it’s talking about primary elections. The third is that our kids need to understand at least read the constitution once, and I know that that sounds really hard to a lot of parents, like I’m not going to sit down and quiz my kids on 19 pages of the constitution and that’s not my goal. But my goal is that in the course of the 18 years you have with them, make sure you have opportunities to do it and, if you haven’t done it yourself as a parent, something that you can brush up on too and, like chapter seven of the book, is just like here’s questions you can ask while you do that. Here’s how you can make it relevant to their lives. They also need to know what federalism is.

Lindsey Cormack: 12:45

This is something else in talking to teachers, where I said here’s something that we don’t quite impart in the way that we wanted to, which is simply, local government does different things than state government does different things than federal government, and sometimes there’s overlap.

Lindsey Cormack: 12:57

And then this final piece, which you can do at any age, is practice having hard conversations and show them what that looks like, because something that I see in my classroom and I imagine you see it in yours as a communications person is that a lot of college students are very uncomfortable with the idea of themselves being uncomfortable or making someone else experience discomfort, even in conversation, and we know that politics is going to have discomfort, so we have to practice that.

Lindsey Cormack: 13:25

We have to do that in a setting like a house. Now, whether or not your kids are going to listen to you, you’re going to know them better than I, but I will say something that I find, and something that I find with other practitioners in this area is sometimes the best place to do this is when you’re on a commute, when you’re in a car side by side or when you’re walking side by side, so you’re not, you know, looking each other in the eye, but you can sort of have these conversations without that intensity. That tends to be something that works better with those kids who maybe just don’t want to sit down across the table from mom or dad and have these sorts of hard conversations want to sit down across the table from mom or dad and have these sorts of hard conversations.

Vicki Nelson: 14:03

There’s so much in what you. You know everything as you got through that list. You know, and it occurred to me as I read the book and again now as you’re talking about it I have three daughters and they’re all grown now families of their own. I cannot remember how they registered to vote. I know they did, I know they vote, but I don’t remember teaching them. I don’t remember taking them. I don’t know whether it happened in the schools. It’s a mystery to me and that’s. The fact that I just can’t remember that process at all with any of the three of them is really shocking.

Lindsey Cormack: 14:38

That might be a fun conversation for you to have with them, be like how did you figure this out? Or where did you do this, or when? Yeah.

Vicki Nelson: 14:43

That’s going to be one conversation at Thanksgiving and this is coming out just before Thanksgiving and so I want to sort of take a little detour here because you know you talk about practicing having those conversations and there will be hard conversations. Thanksgiving is coming up and you know, for a lot of families who are going to be sitting around the Thanksgiving turkey, the families may not all agree on everything. Do you have any suggestions and I’m springing this on you, but do you have any suggestions for how we can have conversations around that Thanksgiving table and how we can include our kids in those conversations in a civil sort of way?

Lindsey Cormack: 15:35

Yeah. So I send all my college students out to have conversations and I give them a little sample script to start from, because I know that it can be really daunting to do this, and I ask them to talk to two people that they’re going to see over Thanksgiving and say here’s these sets of questions that I want you to ask them and I sort of like that they can say my teacher said we have to and then they have to have the political conversation, but the starter question that I always use, no matter the context here, is what have you heard about that?

Lindsey Cormack: 16:06

And the reason that I like what have you heard as the first question versus what do you think or what’s your opinion, is that the person who’s answering that is not responsible for justifying something or convincing you that they’re right or wrong.

They’re just sort of like setting the table with what have I heard and that can be, you know, I saw it on Instagram or I read it in the paper or so-and-so said it in school or whatever and just saying what have you heard, so that we all sort of understand where our starting points are. And when you go into a conversation like that, I think it’s also important to sort of level set with yourself and with others. We’re not going to convince other people that we are correct. We’re usually not convinced that we are incorrect, and so the real exercise here is what can I learn about this person in terms of how they got from point A to point B or why they maybe preferred this candidate or that candidate. Not, how can I show them they were wrong for picking that candidate, or how can I show them I was right for doing this. It’s more understanding that you’re learning about someone else versus convincing them, and vice versa.

Vicki Nelson: 17:06

That’s really really good advice and some practical things that they can think about and do to get through the holiday.

Lynn Abrahams: 17:24

You know, one of the aha moments I had reading your book was that there’s a difference between talking about sort of emotional stuff like who did you vote for and why, and what’s democracy or what’s you know some of the just plain information about how our government works and I think when my kids were young I did assume the school was going to do that and they don’t do that, so that that was an aha moment for me, that oh my goodness, I they’re not doing it. And then the other aha was I can do it in a way like more like a teacher than as a emotional, you know you should vote, you know Democratic or Republican. So so this book really was eye-opening for me. So let me go back. There’s no question in there. I was just talking.

First of all, the one question is just why is it that schools don’t do this any more?

Lindsey Cormack: 18:29

That’s a really hard question. Do you have another one? You said one, no, no, go ahead, we’ll just stick with that one for now.

Okay. So there’s a lot of reasons and I kind of get into this and you know I had six research assistants sort of help me do all these interviews and look at sort of the data on time in the classroom that we give to civics and money that’s dedicated to civics. But it sort of boils down to we do it a little too late, and one of the reasons for that is because the teaching environment in K through 12 is really constrained, and what I mean by that is, you know, with every other subject math, science, literature we scaffold from K through 12. We like start with little vocab, we build into harder concepts, we let kids wrestle with things, maybe advocacy, but throughout the United States there’s not a standardized curriculum on civics. Every state gets to do it their own way. States further devolve that down to school boards. Depends on, if you’re like, independent schools, public schools, religious schools they all have different approaches. But there’s a modal form of delivery which is usually in seventh or eighth grade. That’s the first time students touch something. That’s usually like US history, or sometimes it’s called world history, and it’s sort of this umbrella social studies class, and then we mostly wait again until your second semester, your senior year of high school, and teach you a government class, which is like voting some founding father stuff, a few primary documents, westward expansion, the end, and so we really don’t have enough time to do this. If that’s sort of the method of delivery, because it’s complicated, it’s an intricate system, there’s a long history, there’s contemporaneous things, there’s stuff to think about in the future, it’s just too much to do in a year and a half, which is how most students get it in a year and a half, which is how most students get it.

Lindsey Cormack: 19:58

But it’s also something where we do not prioritize the training of social studies teachers, the employment of social studies teachers. And a joke that we heard repeatedly was you all know who teaches AP government, his name is coach, and that’s because a lot of our social studies teachers are not employed on full-time contracts unless they also do something like coach swimming or track or football, and so there’s sort of this prioritization where those teachers, those professions, aren’t as in demand as the science, the English, the math.

And that’s also related to the third point, which is our obsession with ACT and SAT scores means that if it’s not tested, it’s not taught, or it is the easiest first thing to get squeezed out of a curriculum If you say you know, we got to get this stuff before they get to those college entrance exam and there’s no component of social studies on either of those exams. There is a move in the SAT to have some of the reading assessments have some like US primary documents that they’re reading. So there is a little bit of a push that’s coming back. But not since 1987, when the SAT, when the ACT excuse me took out social studies, have we had any sort of you know, end of the high school experience test on this. So it’s just not something that happens.

Lindsey Cormack: 21:09

And then, finally, it’s really hard to do this work.A lot of the teachers we interviewed, because parents themselves make the classroom environment one that’s a little bit more fraught, even if teachers are trying to give a very straightforward lesson, like there’s three branches of government and the Congress is the first branch because it’s Article I of the Constitution, it’s supposed to be more powerful.

Lindsey Cormack: 21:27

If a student comes home and tells their parent, oh, I learned this and you know, first branch, that parent might hear oh, your teacher doesn’t like the president and I don’t like that, and they inflame a Facebook group or email a principal or administrators or even badger the teacher themselves. And so they nearly everyone we talked to was like yeah, we’re getting a lot more parental sort of like pushback or fear that if we talk about these things. Brainwashing or indoctrinating is the words that people throw around, and so their incentives make it such that you know it doesn’t feel good to wade into something, even if they really want your kids to learn this or they know they should. If they’re going to get blowback on the other side, it makes it like a less desirable thing to do.

And so schools are just K-12. Schools are a really hard environment to get all this done for like time constraints or the sorts of ways that teachers operate in the classroom and for the ways that we sort of test. Overall, it’s a hard place to do it.

Lynn Abrahams: 22:20

So if schools aren’t doing it, then that means that we should do it as parents. What are the consequences of it not happening, which is what happens, I think,

Vicki Nelson:

For a whole generation.

Lynn Abrahams:

Yeah.

Lindsey Cormack: 22:33

Yeah. I mean, when we look at the nation’s report card assessment on civics, which weighs in at eighth grade, we have the same test scores now in 2024 as we had in 1998, which means for a very long time we have not improved in the way that we are teaching civics or at least in the way that our students are understanding it. If you sum all these together, only 23% of our eighth graders have what’s considered a proficient understanding of civics at eighth grade. So if we are graduating a bunch of students who just do not know the systems that they’re getting into, they’re less likely to participate because they don’t know how to pull the levers of power or exercise it themselves. They’re less likely to trust the systems, because how can you trust something if you don’t know anything about it? That’s like a really big ask for people. They’re more prone to taking positions that look like apathetic, like I don’t care, it doesn’t matter, it’s a big system, I’m a little person and we’ve seen it worse. That sort of like mistrust environment can lead to political violence or the idea that you’re like on the outside of a system, versus how I kind of see this, which is you know, governments have problems everywhere.

Lindsey Cormack: 23:37

There’s different styles of governing that are better or worse, and say what you will about the United States, we have one of the best decision-making styles of governance ever. We have a collective decision-making where we can change our outcomes. That’s something to be celebrated, not something to like hide from our kids and make sure they can’t figure it out until they learn it on their own. But we really aren’t doing that and the risks are we have, you know, people who are disaffected by politics, don’t believe in the system, don’t want to get involved, and nothing gets better if people are feeling that way. Stuff gets better if we value it, if we have attention and we’re trying to make it better, and we can’t do that if we don’t know about it.

Lynn Abrahams: 24:09

That is so huge.

Vicki Nelson: 24:12

Yeah. And you know, as you’re talking about this, really generation that doesn’t have the background that they need. Is that part of why these younger voters are the least likely to vote? I mean, I’m old enough, I remember when you had to be 21 to vote and we fought, fought, fought to bring it down to 18. But now you have that age group that is less likely to turn out and vote in an election. Where does that come from?

Lindsey Cormack: 24:49

Yeah, I mean, that’s part of it. They are the least likely to turn out. 18 to 24 routinely has the lowest levels of registration and, in turn, the lowest levels of voter turnout. But when we think about, you know, some of the big political voices, my students will say stuff to me like why is everyone in politics so old? And I’ll say, well, let’s go do an analysis of who participates in voting, let’s see if that matches up with the sort of outcomes that we get. And on average it does.

Lindsey Cormack: 25:14

Voters tend to be older people who understand when to show up, how to register, if they’re going to turn out for a primary or general election. And it’s not fair, I don’t think, to say like, yeah, you guys are eligible to do this, but we’re not going to tell you the rules or how it happens or what day or when you turn in the paper, and so they don’t get outcomes. They like they get frustrated and that’s not really their fault. There’s not a button that turns on when you’re 18. That’s like oh, here’s all the information. We have to do this work with them if we want them to be able to participate.

Lynn Abrahams: 25:41

Oh, I so agree with that.

Vicki Nelson: 25:45

So If we’re convinced we understand why the schools aren’t doing what they’re doing, we may not be happy with it, but we understand that it’s not happening in the schools and we understand more of it then if we want to raise citizens falls to us as parents. What about those of us who say I get this and it’s really important and I want to do this for my kids, but I don’t know enough myself? Where do we start?

Lynn Abrahams: 26:23

The second half of this book.

Vicki Nelson: 26:31

Well, yes, I love the way you snuck that into the book there. Yeah.

Lindsey Cormack: 26:37

Thank you, so yeah, so I mean, I guess I’ll just say the setup. The first part is like here’s the problem, here’s how we can fix. And the second part is like and if you feel like you don’t know enough, here’s a little primer to get you started and go on your merry way.

Lindsey Cormack: 26:51

The first thing I’ll say is you know, a lot of schools aren’t doing this that well. There are some bright spots, so you might make sure that you just like check in and see how your kids are learning before you say like I got to do it all myself. But I also think that there’s two sorts of answers to this Like I don’t know enough and I hear this a lot more from moms than I do, from dads where they’ll say like I don’t know enough and I don’t want to lead them astray, or I don’t know enough and I don’t want to unduly influence them. The first response I sort of have to that is that is not the way that we want to prepare our kids for anything. We want to show them what is it, a model to learn more. So if you feel like you don’t know enough and you want to have a conversation with them, they don’t need you to be government trivia experts. They need you to show them what it is, when you have uncertainty, to go seek more information and figure that out. And so that’s like such a better way to approach this, versus saying I don’t know, guess we’re never gonna learn, or guess I can’t do that.

Lindsey Cormack: 27:41

But the second thing is there are some organizations that parents who want their schools to have an easier go of doing this and aren’t gonna be able to hire social studies teachers there are some really neat experiential civics things that some parents can demand that their school sort of implements.

Lindsey Cormack: 27:56

Something like We the People, which is a national competition where kids you know they think about foundational documents and arguments at the time of the framing and say like, okay, here’s how we’re going to look at these things. Or things like the Civics Bee, which has like a cash prize for winning it and people can enter around the world. So it’s something where there are sort of other things that you can push your kids or your schools to think about. But I don’t think you should say, well, I don’t know, so it’s off my plate, because that’s not good enough. We are the parents in the room right now and if we don’t like the way our politics is feeling or functioning, it’s up to us to try to do something different. And I think that something different is being willing to learn a little bit more and show our kids that it matters that we learn more that we understand these systems. That way we get outcomes that we like.

Vicki Nelson: 28:35

So we learn it together With them In that way.

Lindsey Cormack: 28:39

So much, and that’s something where I think most of the people who I talk to who have read this book they’ll say like, oh, I think actually it’s raising me a little bit too, like talking to my kids, and I’m like, yeah, because a lot of us were really underserved with the schooling that we got, with the orientation that our parents and families might have had, and so there’s something to do. You’re not just teaching your kids, you know this, they’re going to teach you.

That happens with everything, and so it’s like a good feedback loop to have with them.

Vicki Nelson:

And we’ll put those organizations in the show notes and that might be a help. But just to follow up a little bit you mentioned there are some bright spots and so that means in some places some people are doing it right. Are there things? You mentioned these organizations but are there things that parents can do to lobby or encourage schools to do more with this?

Lindsey Cormack: 29:37

I mean there absolutely are, and there’s models of this happening throughout the United States.

In Rhode Island, their state constitution sort of guarantees that people will have an education that allows them to understand their systems.

And when some students were like, well, that’s not what we’re experiencing now, students and parents banded together to actually file lawsuits to say you have to do more, you have to give us a better education on this front, and that’s not to say I think everyone should go sue their schools, but it is something to say if you have a problem and you feel like you know I want to solve this in my home, but it’d be easier if we had more eyes on this, more brains on this. It doesn’t hurt to talk to a principal, to a school administrator, to a teacher and say how can we do more of this? And you know they might have some ideas, but they’re really afraid that parents aren’t going to like it. We just need more on this, not the idea that, like you know, I have to do it alone. It’s not a book that says schools can’t do this. It’s actually probably symbiotic, but we all sort of have to start somewhere.

Lynn Abrahams: 30:32

What about students who feel like they have no voice in government and they feel like or their voice doesn’t matter? How could they, as a parent, how could I get my kids involved to know that they can have a voice, maybe in local politics?

Lindsey Cormack: 30:54

I hear that a lot and it’s, you know, to a certain degree true at a lot of federal level stuff where you say, you know, I’m only one vote, especially when you consider like the electoral college and how we aggregate votes, I sort of get that pushback, but when we think about a lot of the things that young people interested in Ilike reproductive rights or access or restrictions on guns or the ability to have legalized marijuana, these sorts of like quality of life topics.

A lot of that happens at the state level and then a lot of it gets implemented at the local level. And that’s places where children and individuals are far more pivotal, because there are fewer people in that electorate and it oftentimes takes just a few thousand to win an election, and so if you can sort of make sure that you figure out what the things are that they care about, does that really happen at the state level or federal level? A lot of it’s state. Is there something that’s a local initiative that would make their life better? Then they can really be pivotal. And even if it’s not just I’m one vote, it can be. I’m a voice that amplifies others. I’m doing art for change, I’m organizing something, I have a social media campaign. There are a lot of outsized ways that you can get attention, especially in those smaller forms of government.

Vicki Nelson: 32:04

So that makes me . . . starting locally is at a scale that students sometimes can handle it and it makes sense. And a lot of what you’re saying is making me think. You said somewhere in the book that you know understanding how government works contributes to more to positive mental health for students, and if ever there was a time when we were concerned about students and anxiety and mental health, this is it, and so is that because that it can contribute to positive mental health, because they feel that they can take action and can do something?

Lindsey Cormack: 32:45

Well, what you’re pointing out is like yes, that you know there’s a lot of challenges with our kids feeling anxiety or depression or loneliness or isolation. And sort of understanding what role you play in our political system, versus being like this amorphous thing that just has to like go with whatever political wins, is a way to sort of like root or ground our children. It allows them to self advocate better because if they understand you know this isn’t working for me or I want to change, but I know how to do this then I can understand which levers to pull on to get an outcome. It also means that some of the stuff that you may be hearing in media spaces that are meant to like scare you or make you afraid of something. If you understand the ground level of things, you might not be as influenced by misinformation or disinformation because you’re like I don’t actually think it’s going to be that scary. I don’t think that’s possible.

I think there’s some like guidelines or guardrails in our politics that make that not possible. But at the local level, there’s this additional benefit, which is local politics is so personally social and so it, like it, you know, lives on the repeated interaction of individuals coming together for a shared purpose, and so you have this sort of like community building that’s baked into doing local politics, and so that’s a way for kids who are like confused or think they’re being manipulated, to like see it themselves, do it themselves and be like oh no, I actually understand how this happens and I have agency in this system and I can change it. That’s really helpful.

Lynn Abrahams: 34:09

I think this book is not just for young, I mean adults. This is for us. I mean we need to do this.

Vicki Nelson: 34:18

Beyond parents, you know for everyone, yeah, community. I want to go back to. We talked a little bit about Thanksgiving and I think you sort of addressed this, but I want to ask another question along the same vein, a little more specifically, by the time students are in high school and college age, many of them have developed some pretty strong political opinions. At this point, what do we do if that’s the case? But my students’ political opinions are opposed to mine? How do I handle that in the family that we have some differing political opinions?

Lindsey Cormack: 35:11

I think the first thing is to note that that’s not a marker of failure. That’s probably a marker of success, like, if you can have children who are raised in your home, who have a lived experience that is similar to yours, as well as their siblings, but come to a perspective that is different, that means that you allow them to have some sort of opportunity to individuate and, like, have their own journey where they’re getting to a different place. If your child holds a different opinion than you, I think it’s important that you’re, like, willing to understand their viewpoint and not dismiss them as like oh, you know, you’ll figure it out when you’re older. That’s just a youthful idea that you have right there.

Lindsey Cormack: 35:47

Ask about their rationale, try to figure it out, what it is that’s in their context that lets them think this way, and you don’t have to have the end goal of like oh, I wish you saw it my way, or maybe I’m going to change my mind. It’s just trying to figure out. You know we might not have the same goals in this political arena. We might not have the same things that we think are versions of the good life. Can you tell me, like, how you got there or where your rationale is because, like I’ve seen it differently my whole life, that’s fine. I think that’s. That’s actually really a good thing.

Vicki Nelson: 36:15

Okay, yeah, that that helps. And you, you can say I’ve done my work in a way, and, and and I’m launching you to, to your thinking.

Lynn Abrahams: 36:28

To think themselves.

Vicki Nelson: 36:43

Yeah. It’s sort of related to that. We do probably need to try to wrap up. We could go on. This is such a huge topic and so important, especially right now and I think we have people who are listening and people in this country who are disappointed and scared and upset right now, and then we have people who are thrilled and excited about what’s coming over along. But I was really struck by one thing you said in the book, where you said that, in spite of and I’m quoting here “living in a time when politics may seem polarized and overwhelming, there is hope.” Can you talk about this? How does raising a citizen, how does this work that you advocate for in this book, give us hope?

Lindsey Cormack: 37:27

One of the things that gives me the most hope is knowing how much room we have to grow. One of the things that gives me the most hope is knowing how much room we have to grow If only 23% of our eighth graders have a proficient understanding of civics. Imagine how our politics would look and sound differently if that was just doubled. We would have so many more young people who understood how to participate. They’d understand, you know, like what’s something aspirational, what’s not. But right now we really have to, like you know, do all this work with a cloudy vision of what it is is happening at the federal level, let alone state and local government, which most people don’t know anything about.

Lindsey Cormack: 38:00

So I am incredibly hopeful that in having a culture that sort of values communications on this topic, that says you know what politics is everything, it’s going to happen to us, whether we like it or not. So we might as well understand it a little bit better. That makes our world richer, understanding of each other and has better outcomes. Because government, in the way that we have it as a democratic republic, does better work if it can reflect the will of the people it is to govern. But if we don’t understand that, and if we don’t know how to participate, it can only get as good as we let it be. And so we get the government we deserve, and I know that no one feels like this is going that well right now. Even if you just maybe got an outcome that you’re happy with, there’s plenty of things that can be improved upon, so I’m incredibly hopeful that things can get better.

Lynn Abrahams: 38:45

That sounds so good. I like hearing that.

Vicki Nelson: 38:49

It’s a perfect way to bring it together.

Lynn Abrahams: 38:52

You know we could talk all day, but we are going to have to, you know, pull this together. We usually ask every person who we get to talk to one question, and I’m going to ask you that question now, and that is do you have any other books to recommend to parents about either this topic or parenting, besides your own, that you think would be helpful to parents?

Lindsey Cormack: 39:26

I think another book that is related and you’ll understand the similarity in the title is How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott Haims. We love that book. It’s such a good book, you know, and it’s about all the things that our kids need to have so that when they go to college they don’t need us to handhold them anymore. I think that’s one that I really liked. There’s also a new book that’s called Democracy in Retrograde. That’s talking, talking about how young people are sort of pulling away from politics, but there’s ways to get in. And then another book that I really have liked, which just came out earlier this year, is by Kelly Clancy, and it’s a Love Letter to Politics. But I want to get the actual book. Yeah, it’s Democracy, a Love Letter and a Guide for Everyone.

Lynn Abrahams: 40:10

So we’re going to put these books in the show notes for people. This is wonderful. I have to write them down now.

Vicki Nelson: 40:22

I know I’m writing as fast as I can there. This is a wonderful conversation. The book again just a reminder to everyone is how to Raise a Citizen and why it’s Up to you to Do it. By Lindsey Cormack, with us at this specific time. This is the time that everyone needs to think about what do we need to know and how do we make sure that everyone in our family is understanding what’s going on? So thank you for your book, Thank you for your time in talking with us today.

Lynn Abrahams: 41:06

Thank you for your conversation.

Lindsey Cormack: 41:08

Thank you, and thank you for all these thoughtful questions. This was a really nice way to spend this afternoon.

Vicki Nelson: 41:13

Oh, good. Thanks.