New York Times (Opinion)
By Sarah Lyall
March 10, 2016
It
was mortifying enough when last week’s Republican debate introduced the
question of whether it was appropriate for one presidential candidate
to accuse another of wetting his pants. But
the final straw for Gary Goyette and Andrea Todd, who were watching at
home in Sacramento with their 10-year-old son, was Donald J. Trump’s
jarring, out-of-left-field boast about his sexual endowment.
“We
were just incredulous,” Ms. Todd said, when Mr. Trump leeringly
declared that there was “no problem” with that part of his anatomy. She
and her husband looked at each other, she recalled,
and then looked at their son. “Gary said, ‘Tommy, you’ve got to leave —
you’ve got to get out of here.’ And Tommy actually got up and ran out
of the room.”
Many
unforeseeable things have happened so far in the raucous Republican
presidential race. But the 2016 election — with its rudeness, crudeness,
bluster and bullying — has also presented
adults with an unexpected, unpleasant dilemma: How on earth do they
explain Donald Trump to children?
“Quite
frankly, it’s been quite embarrassing when I have an 11-year-old who is
better behaved and more polite than some people who are the potential
next leaders of our country,” said Maury
Peterson, who runs Parenting Journey, a nonprofit group in Somerville,
Mass., that provides support for families. “This name-calling and making
fun of people is basically the opposite of what he’s been taught at
home and at school.”
Kathy
Maher, a sixth-grade teacher in Newton, Mass., said that election years
usually presented an excellent opportunity for students to observe the
virtues of the American democratic process.
But this year, she said, she worries about mock-debate season, when
someone will have to play Mr. Trump — a candidate who, if he were a
student, would be sent straight to the principal’s office.
Her
school has a program encouraging students to speak up if they see
someone being mistreated, Ms. Maher said, and for that reason she has
felt obliged to address the subject of Mr. Trump.
“I
try really hard, when we discuss politics, to take a balanced view,”
she said. “But I felt I had to say something this time, because the
things Donald Trump says wouldn’t be tolerated
in our schools. He bullies people, he name-calls, he makes fun of
people because of their race, their ethnicity and the way they look.”
What
about students whose parents are Trump supporters? “I say, ‘People
might like some of the things that Donald Trump stands for, but there
are better ways of saying it,’” Ms. Maher said.
“I did say that some people like that he says things for shock value,
like the crazy old uncle who just says whatever he wants. But as an
educator, I can’t support that. It’s not funny — it’s mean.”
For
some children, Mr. Trump’s message has filtered down in extremely
upsetting, possibly dangerous, ways. Social media has buzzed with
parents relaying their children’s fears that they or
their friends would be deported, walled in or walled out if Mr. Trump
were to become president.
Jon
Michaud of Maplewood, N.J., who is white and whose wife is Dominican,
wrote on Facebook about a conversation he had with one of his two sons:
“So if Donald Trump becomes president, he’s
going to bring racism back,” he said his 8-year-old had told him. “That
means Marcus, Mommy and I will be separated from you because we have
darker skin than you do, right?”
Speaking
on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday, Cokie Roberts put the question
to the candidate himself. “There’ve been incidents of white children
pointing to their darker-skinned classmates
and saying, ‘You’ll be deported when Donald Trump is president,’” she
said. “There’ve been incidents of white kids at basketball games holding
up signs to teams which have Hispanic kids on them, saying, ‘We’re
going to build a wall to keep you out.’”
“Are
you proud of that?” Ms. Roberts asked. “Is that something you’ve done
in American political and social discourse that you’re proud of?”
Mr.
Trump replied that he had no knowledge of such reports. “I think your
question is a very nasty question,” he said, “and I’m not proud of it
because I didn’t even hear of it, O.K.?”
As much as they might want to, parents and educators cannot keep their children insulated from news about Mr. Trump.
“He’s
omnipresent. It’s going to come up, so you better be prepared,” said
Carolyn Lee, a substitute kindergarten teacher in the Hawaii public
school system.
With
very young children, she advised remaining calm and refraining from
retaliatory anti-Trump name-calling. “Let’s say the family’s watching
the news and they see this man on TV tossing
water bottles and making fun of people,” Ms. Lee said. “I would say
something like, ‘We try to treat people the way we would like to be
treated, and somehow he’s showing the exact opposite of that.’”
Richard
Klin of Stone Ridge, N.Y., said he saw little point in trying to shield
his 11-year-old daughter from the campaign. “I had this impulse to lock
her away in an enchanted land where
Donald Trump doesn’t exist, but you can’t,” he said.
Mr.
Klin said he had traumatic memories of watching his own father erupt
into “paroxysms of rage” whenever he saw President Richard M. Nixon on
television. “I didn’t want to be that guy yelling
at the TV, so I’m trying to cool it,” he said.
In
Los Angeles, Andy Behrman, a single parent of two girls, 8 and 10, said
that his daughters continually accused Mr. Trump of violating “the
double v’s,” a reference to their school’s “virtues
and values” program.
“They’re
not picking up on the innuendoes of his hands, they’re not catching on
to the genital issue,” Mr. Behrman said. “But they’re catching on to the
fact that Trump, Rubio and Cruz are
all talking at the same time, which they’ve learned doesn’t make sense.
It’s not polite and it doesn’t allow anyone to voice their own
opinion.”
Parents
who support Mr. Trump disagree, of course. They say that his
authenticity and his refusal to pander to his critics are more important
than the words he uses. And they ask why America’s
children are so sensitive that they cannot be exposed to robust views,
forcefully expressed.
“This
is not about him being rude to people randomly,” said Jeremy Diamond, a
marketing executive who lives in Manhattan and has a son, 12, and a
daughter, 15. “He shows passion and aggression,
and that he’s going to fight for his point of view.”
He
said he was “confident in the integrity and behavior and values” of his
children, both of whom have been impressed by Mr. Trump’s
take-no-prisoners approach, which Mr. Diamond called “strategic
aggression.”
“My
son said, ‘Daddy, he just wants to show that he is stronger than the
other candidates and that he’s not going to get pushed around,’” he
said.
Ruth
Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York
University, who has a 15-year-old daughter and has written about Mr.
Trump for CNN.com, said that for older children,
it helps to place Mr. Trump in the context of a society driven by
celebrity and social media.
“My
daughter asks, ‘Why are you so obsessed with Trump? So what if he did a
retweet?’” Ms. Ben-Ghiat said. “But we can tell our children that he’s a
product of our branding culture and our
selfie culture and our attraction to reality-show television, where the
behavior is so brutal.”
The ubiquity of Mr. Trump, she said, provides a useful opportunity for children to examine their own preoccupations.
“They
can learn to look beyond flash and glamour, to be skeptical of the
power of messaging and branding, but also to learn that it’s important
that each one of us speak out and use our right
to vote,” Ms. Ben-Ghiat said. “And to listen to the other side even if
you don’t agree with them.”
In
Sacramento, though, Mr. Goyette and Ms. Todd have still been unable to
bring themselves to fully explicate last week’s debate to 10-year-old
Tommy.
“He asked us later, ‘What does it mean about the hands thing?’” Ms. Todd related. “But none of us wanted to tell him.”
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