“They’re rude.”
That’s what my daughter’s friend said to me last week as she glanced over my shoulder at the newspaper. On the cover was a photograph of someone, a senator I think, newly victorious in his quest for re-election.
I looked up at my daughter’s friend. I’d known her since she was five years old and I don’t think she’s ever missed a “please” or a “thank you”. She holds the door open for me when I’m walking behind her with groceries, and she never misses the opportunity to ask how I’m doing.
In other words, this girl knows manners. She inherently appreciates the benefits of civility. Now, judging from her bluntly stated opinion, it asppears that she knows the other side of the coin as well.
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
“I heard them talking on the radio while my parents were driving.”
“Who’s them?” I continued. “There’s just one guy in the photograph here.”
“He’s one of them,” my daughter’s friend said. “I don’t know who he is. I just know he’s a…a politician.”
Then she paused and gathered her thoughts.
“If I talked at school like how they talk to each other, I’d be sent to the principal’s office.” She even looked a little bit flushed now, like she was enjoying the image of an adult sitting shamefully in those little chairs reserved for school kids who transgress.
“What do they do, anyway…the politicians…besides yell at each other?”
I don’t know if my daughter’s friend got these opinions from her parents or if she came to them on her own, but I know this much: kids are very much aware of the level of rancor that has come to characterize American politics. As I thought about her observations, I recognized that I had grown unfortunately immune to the bickering and chafing that our elected leaders seem intent on pursuing. I also know that negative political tone wins votes, so I have little business telling these leaders to avoid their negativity. After all, if they’re in it to win, then they need to go negative. That’s been shown time and time again.
But, I do have a responsibility, as an expert in child development, to at least make our leaders aware of the fact that our youngsters are paying attention. The ability to detect civility (or the lack thereof) starts early. After all, how often do you say “what do you say” when your child is handed something special. For goodness sakes, we just muscled through Halloween. I must have said “what do you say” about a million times. Every time a kid got some candy there was a chorus of parents on the sidewalk reminding every child to pay proper respect.
Kids know polite and kids know rude. They know it on the playground and they know it when their parents have arguments and they know it when they hear it on television shows. This has perhaps gotten even worse with the advent of reality TV. In chasing the fifteen minutes of fame that reality TV affords, I’ve seen some downright nastiness on shows with deceptively innocuous names like “Cupcake Wars.”
As I said, kids know rude. But they also are for the most part able to separate the rude they see on TV from the rude they’d really rather not see among the adults in their lives. It’s this latter issue – that adults in positions of power are increasingly rude – that has me worried. The polarization that is indicative of our current political discourse is so intense that it plays directly into the developmentally regressed state to which we are all prone but from which our kids look to us for ways to avoid.
Think about it.
Until adolescence, the developing brain is particularly drawn to a binary view of the world. There is good and there is bad. There are rules and there are punishments for breaking the rules. It isn’t until adolescence that children begin to be comfortable playing around with opposing ideas. School-aged kids? They want people to behave.
And then my friend’s daughter hears our leaders, adults important enough in her estimation to have made it onto the front page of newspapers, and it strikes her in a wonderfully un-nuanced way that the adults she’s being told to respect are anything but nuanced.
How does she know this?
Well, schools have entire curricula devoted to teaching children how to disagree amiably. We know, as a matter of fact, that the willingness to hold fast to what you believe in and at the same time remain civil is associated with healthy development and admirable self esteem.
Our politicians, however, sound like school children in the absence of the principal’s office. I know this sounds old fashioned, even alarmist, but I’ll predict right now that if we continue unabated towards a land without compromise, then we will create a generation of adults who refuse to cooperate. Can you imagine another fifty years of gridlock?
I can’t see the climate in politics changing anytime soon. I can’t see reality TV going away. And it feels a bit like the efforts of the proverbial ostrich, head buried in darkened sand, if we decide to protect our children from our culture by not letting them know of our faults. In other words, you can turn off the TV and the radio, you can hide the newspaper, you can avoid the headlines altogether, but kids are naturally programmed to soak in the ambient milieu. They’re going to know that we’re increasingly rude even if we try and hide it.
We’ve got talk about it. That’s really our only hope.
“Tell me what’s rude about that person,” you can ask.
“Well,” your child might say, “he sounds mean.”
“But what if he disagrees with the person he’s talking to?” you might innocently continue.
And there your child will hopefully just stare at you. What a silly question! Just because you disagree doesn’t mean you have to be jerk about it. That’s the entire substance what they learn at school.
Maybe our politicians need to go to the principal’s office.