This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - How To Raise A Citizen with Lindsey Cormack | 241

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

In an age where information is everywhere, it seems we know very little about how to have a discussion while practicing respect and curiosity. It seems it’s easier to talk about leadership than it is to demonstrate it. We all need to do better. For our country certainly, for our personal and professional relationships definitely, and for the next generations, emphatically. Lindsey Cormack helps us understand how to raise a citizen. Lindsey is an associate professor of Political Science and Director of the Diplomacy Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology. She earned her PhD in Government, currently serves as the Secretary for Community Board 8 in Manhattan, and she created and maintains the digital database of all official Congress-to-constituent e-newsletters in the DCInbox Project. Her book, How To Raise a Citizen is a practical guide to becoming better civic role models by showing how to have conversations about the important functions of government, citizen participation, and political issues with children of all ages, even in these polarizing times. The way that children learn best is by experience and observation. Who do you want your kid to become? Do you want them to be kind, curious, brave, confident? Do you want them to be a leader in some way? Well, then for the love of them and this country, demonstrate it. Connect with Lindsey: Website:  https://www.lindseycormack.com/  Book: https://howtoraiseacitizen.com/  IG: https://www.instagram.com/howtoraiseacitizen/  Like what you heard? Please rate and review  Thanks to our This Is Woman’s Work Sponsor: Head to zenimals.com/NICOLEMKALIL and use my code NICOLEMKALIL to save 10% off your Zenimal!  Whether you’re looking for yourself, your kid(s)/teens, as a gift for someone else - everyone will benefit from more moments of zen!  

I am Nicole Kalil, and I got to tell you, I find our current state of politics entirely disheartening. I can't speak intelligently about other countries, but here in the U.S., it feels like we've gone off the deep end. And while this might sound like a commentary about our politicians, I mean it more as a statement about our citizens. I don't know about you, but I am craving, searching, hoping for people, normal, everyday humans, to demonstrate the kindness, curiosity, empathy, respect,

and the leadership we claim to espouse. But it feels like arrogance, closed-mindedness, pig-headedness, name-calling, accusations, and insults are revealing people's true colors. And it ain't pretty. It's truly amazing to me that anyone would think they somehow exclusively have the answers and know what's best. Let me be clear. I don't have the answers. I don't know enough about most of the big complex issues that face our country today. But neither do most of the people claiming that the answer is simple and obvious because righteousness doesn't require any of the hard skills, like openness, learning, or even attempting to consider that there's a different perspective and opinions

that are also valid. And the numbers don't lie. American civic knowledge is alarmingly low. Most of us dread and therefore avoid talking about politics, which isn't making any of us any smarter. Studies continue to reveal how little Americans know about their government, and yet social media is inundated with people that think they have the only best right answer and instantaneously write off anyone who sees it differently as an idiot or on the wrong side of

history. As if you know, as if you somehow have the insider information, your conspiracy theory is somehow better or more intelligent than someone else's, or your party is somehow all good and the other all bad. In an age where information is everywhere, it seems we know very little about how to have a discussion, how to choose respect, how to practice curiosity. It seems it's easier to talk about leadership than it is to demonstrate it. And if you're listening to this and thinking she's right, those people, those Democrats or those Republicans need to do better, then country, certainly, for our personal and professional relationships, definitely, and for the next generations emphatically. Because your kids may not read yours or other social media posts about politics, and in

some cases, God help them if they do, but they are watching and they're witnessing and learning from our apathy, our fear, our rage, our finger pointing, our foaming at the mouth. And most of us aren't teaching them anything good. I worry immensely about us as citizens, but even more that nobody is teaching our children what it means and looks like to be a citizen. So I've invited Lindsay Cormack to be our guest on the This Is Woman's Work podcast to help us understand how to raise a citizen. Lindsay is an associate professor of political science and director of the Diplomacy Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology. She earned her PhD in government, currently serves as the secretary for Community Board

8 in Manhattan, and she created and maintains the digital database of all official Congress to Constituent e-newsletters in the DC Inbox Project. I normally wouldn't read this list of all of her publications, but in this case, I think it serves to both reinforce her credibility on the subject, which is important, but also I may not know a lot, but she knows more than most. So her research has been published in Political Behavior, Congress and the Presidency, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Science Research and Methods, American Politics Research, Politics and Policy, Politics, Groups and Identities, Politics and Gender, the Journal of Gender Studies, Energy Economics, the Legislative Scholar,

as well as popular outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, ProPublica, Roll Call, the New York Post, The Conversation, NBC News, The Hill, and more. And her book, How to Raise a Citizen, is a practical guide to becoming better civic role models by showing how to have conversations about the important functions of government, citizen participation, and political issues with children of all ages, even in these polarizing times. So Lindsay, thank you for joining me and being here to speak intelligently about a topic that I know I can't. So I want to start by asking just any reactions or thoughts or opinions about my opening. Am I off base here?

Nicole, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. I don't think you're off base, and I wrote a few things down when you were talking. The first thing that I wrote down is when you said, I don't think you're off base. And I wrote a few things down when you were talking. The first thing that I wrote down is when you said, I don't know enough. And so you're inviting someone else to do this. And this is something that I hear from moms and dads that I talk to all the time, which is, you know and we're all participating in this system regardless. And so that feeling of like, well, you know, I just don't want to put anyone in the wrong direction or I just don't want to say the wrong thing. I don't really think you can if you come at it with curiosity. I don't think you can if you say to your kids, you know what? I don't know a lot about that. Let's go figure this out together. And so that feeling I think sometimes is demobilizing,

but it shouldn't be. It's one where we say like, okay, no one knows all this. We're all busy and we have a lot of things to do, but let's go ahead and figure it out. I also think that you're really on point when you say we kind of think the other side, no matter which side you're on, is either evil or stupid. And that's not true and not helpful. It's just like not a good way to go about the world because we're in this all together, whether we like it or not. And so we can't just keep thinking, you know, if they don't agree with me, they either don't see it correctly or they see it in a different way and it's evil.

It just doesn't make sense to me. I think you're totally on base here and I'm excited to have this conversation with you. Well, and I feel like it's a, I don't know, measure of arrogance to even think that. Like I think for myself, obviously I have my beliefs and my opinions and my desires and my experiences, and that frames how I see the world and how I see it. I believe I'm, and I put in air quotes, right about, but I can't make the leap to thinking I know all the inner workings and intricacies and all the conflicting ideas and opinions and what is connected to what and who knows best. And it goes back to, I think what you said, like, Hey, this is what I think.

This is what I know up to this point. This is what I believe based on my experiences, but let's go find out more or, you know or the openness, the curiosity. I guess then my next question is, why do you think it's up to parents to teach or raise the next generation of citizens? Is there something to be said for raising them to be open and curious and maybe non-party affiliated for them to figure it out on their own. What I'm asking is teach us about some of your learnings about raising children into politics. Sure. So I think there's two pieces there. There's this question about raising a citizen versus raising a partisan. And then why is it a parent's job to do this in the first place? I'll take the first one.

When we talk about raising kids, a lot of times parents will say they want to transmit their values. They want them to have the same sort of religious identities or any other sorts of values that they hold dear. Politics is no different. Increasingly on surveys, people say it's important for them, for their kids, to have the same sorts of views as them. But what the political science research shows is that it's actually really hard to guarantee that. You are probably someone who's raised kids or you were a kid yourself where you know that teens can sometimes say like, sure, mom sounds good, or other times they can rebel. And so we don't really have a good track record on saying like, here's how I think about it. You should think about it in the same way. And so I don't even really think that's a goal that people should have. They should have goals of raising people, their own children, who understand

the system that they're going to be creating for themselves in the future. It doesn't really matter which side of a political divide they find themselves on if they know the rules because they can figure things out. And so I don't ever care so much. People are like, oh, I want to raise a little Democrat or a little Republican. I say, good luck. It might not work. A better use of your time is making sure they understand the rules that they're getting into. And on this second question about why parents have to do it, I wish another institution was up to the task, but they're not. And this is why I wrote this book in the first place. I teach at a university that has really bright students who go on to do great things, but they are so underprepared to understand the political or governmental landscape that they're graduating into.

And when I went to start researching this book, I thought it was going to be a book about different school curricula, because in our system, all the 50 states have the abilities to teach civics in 50 different ways. And within states, they devolve that to counties and school boards and all sorts of like even individual schools get to make these choices in private and charter school locations. And what I found is that there's sort of these like four big things that make schools not able to teach civics in the way that we need it. The first one is a lot of times we wait until the second semester of senior year to talk about politics or government at all. And if you remember how you were in your second semester of senior year of high school, it's not

like retention mode. You're out, ready to get onto college or whatever's next for you. It's not where people are like, oh yeah, let's learn a bunch of new things. And so the structure of how we do that in most states is problematic. The second thing that's kind of hard is that when we think about preparing kids for the future, the way that most high schools look at it is test scores on the SAT or the ACT to get into college. And neither one of those assessments has any component of civics, government, social studies, what have you. The ACT did for a while, but since the 80s, it hasn't. And so there's no sort of incentive for schools to really spend a lot of curricular time on this because it doesn't help test scores for them. It doesn't help test

scores for students getting into the next piece. The third reason that's kind of hard is state legislatures have tended to make it harder, not easier to teach civics that works. I'll give you an example in Texas. In Texas, in some of the schools for a few years, they had what's known as action civics, which is sort of group-based. You tell the teens in your class, like, find something that's bothering you, whether that's maybe like illegal marijuana stores or perhaps your parks aren't being maintained, whatever. And then they have to go figure out a plan on how to get something changed, and then they contact whatever elected officials should be responsible for that.

Texas' state legislature has said we're no longer going to allow schools to facilitate interactions between individual students and elected officials or appointed officials, what have you. And so instead they go back to teaching sort of theoretical civics, theoretical ideas about how government works. So state legislatures tend to make it a little bit harder versus easier. And finally, in this last one, and I think is a big piece, parents don't make it easy for teachers to talk about civics. Teachers, especially after the pandemic, when they've had just so much more oversight of parents listening in on Zoom school or however they're delivering instruction. They're afraid to wade into even vanilla political topics because they're

concerned that a parent might hear this and then maybe send some mean emails, organize parents in a Facebook group, or contact the administrators. And so they're just hesitant to do it, and kind of rightfully so. Their incentives are such that they don't want to inflame things if they can teach something that's easier to talk about and more attributable to high test scores. And so despite the fact that nearly every teacher, myself and my team of five research assistants interviewed, wanted to do this, they expressed hesitancy because parents, the blowback that they can give sometimes is painful. No doubt. So little known fact is I actually went to get my teaching credential. I thought I wanted to be a teacher. So I have a great deal of admiration for teachers. And I also constantly think about how hard their job must be with parent interference. And I have a bias against interfering as a parent because I believe

our job is to raise humans that can think for themselves and that can have discourse or discussion about different viewpoints and things like that. Now, obviously there might be extremes, but for the most part, I'm kind of a, I'm not going to get involved type parent. Back to, I think what you said earlier is how do we teach kids to understand the system and then how do we teach them to think for themselves? How do we teach them to take in various viewpoints and then create their own decision or belief or opinion about something. So how do we start political conversations at home? Let me start there and then I have a few follow-up questions. Sure. So I think something that's important is that we are doing this sort

of work, whether we know it or not. And something that I say to people who have little kids, like, you know, under five years old, you can't always approach the negative of politics in front of them and expect them to want to learn more. And I think we sort of have this challenge where there are plenty of negative things that happen in politics. But if we come home and we say in front of our kids, to our spouse, to our friends, or even to them, like, you know, all politicians are corrupt, or it's a riggedged system or they're all just egomaniacs. That sort of like focusing on the negative exclusively turns them off. It makes them not want to learn more. It shapes the way they dream or think about, you know, are these people worthwhile to ever consider as a career for myself? That's like the first piece is make sure that you find some good in the way that you

think about government, because despite narratives to the contrary, there are good things. If you have functioning public schools, if you have roads that work, if you have clean water, government's at hand in those. And it's not always the sexiest topic, but it's something where like saying a little bit of good in that is a nice way to sort of start raising kids who can be politically active instead of politically turned off before they even have the opportunities. My next question is kind of a starting back to what you said with the I don't know enough. How do we teach people about a system we don't understand? Obviously, it's, you know, let's find out together, as you said earlier. But what are your recommendations of where to start? What about the system do we need to be teaching?

I love this question. Because the way that I wrote this book was like, you know, we have to do this work as parents. But then the second part is a primer, because I understand that a lot of parents who are raised today had traditions where their own parents said, you know, it's not polite to talk about this. And we also came up in school systems that were at a time increasingly cutting the amount of civics hours instruction that we had and the money going towards it. So the second part of the book is like, look, if you feel like you're out of your depth a little bit, why don't you go ahead and brush up right here? Here's the fastest way to get into it. But when I think about the specific pieces that parents need to talk about with their

kids before they get out of their homes, it's pretty straightforward. They need to know how to register to vote. And we might think schools take care of that. They don't. On average, the people who turn 18 in the United States, only 25% of them are registered in that year. And so we have to do more work as parents, teaching our kids how to register to vote and letting them know that when they move, they have to do it again. It's not something that travels with you. And this is hard because right after high school, a lot of people do move. Either they go to college or they go start a life working somewhere, and that's different. So that's like the very fundamental piece that I say that parents need to help their kids handhold them a little bit,

because if you don't have that piece, nothing else can fall into place. The second one is we need to really talk about the difference between primary and general elections. And I know that that sounds like it's getting into the weeds, but truly in most parts of the United States, the competitive election is the primary election. By the time you've gotten to the general election where you've got Democrats versus Republicans, you kind of know who's going to win based on what your sort of registration rates are. And so we all tend to focus, you know, like right now we're focusing on a presidential election or in the midterms, we focus on like the final elections where we're having the general elections, but that's not where the action's at for the most part. And schools don't teach that at all. There's like hardly any focus on primaries other than the presidential primary, which is

extraordinarily unique and not how most other things go. I think we need to talk to kids about the difference between local, state, and federal government. Our media focuses almost exclusively on federal politics, despite the fact that most of our quality of life decisions happen at the local level, and many big things happen at the state level. So if you think about orientations to marijuana, that's something that's happening at state levels. There's different sorts of licenses on whether you're going to go hunting or fishing. That's state level politics. Those are things that tend to not get covered in schools. The fourth thing is I do think that every child should have read the constitution before they are 18. And you might say, hey, that happens in schools. And you'd be wrong because for most of our students, it doesn't.

And the constitution is not that hard. It's our charter of government. It's something that a lot of parents could do well to go through again. And in the seventh chapter of my book, I have like a bunch of questions. That's like, if you want to do this alongside them, here's some questions you can ask yourself and them as you do it. And finally, I think we just need to practice having hard conversations instead of shying away from these conversations or telling your kids like, oh, don't do that. You might, you know, upset someone or offend someone. Practice it. Let them stumble.

Let them perhaps even offend you and then talk it through. I think those are like the key pieces that we need to have done before our kids leave our homes. Something that you said, and I almost hesitate to say this, but I'm going to in the spirit of having more conversation about politics, even though it's wildly uncomfortable, is at the end of the day, I'm not sure it's going to impact my day-to-day life very much, no matter who gets elected president. I obviously have my bias or my belief, but at the end of the day, I'm probably going to be about the same. I mean, I'm about the same now as I was four years ago, as I was four years before that, and so forth and so on. It's really, as you said, these local and state level politics that is more impactful and meaningful to our day-to-day

lives. And yet, I don't know that very many of us are approaching it that way. So I'm so glad that you said that. What are some tips for getting more involved or educated on the local and state level? I think at the very basic level, knowing who the people are who represent you is a wonderful first start. I was just on a vacation with my family and I have a seven-year-old niece and she was like, Lindsay, who's the mayor of my town? And I was like, you know what? I don't know, but let's go find out together. And so we went online-year-old niece. And she was like, Lindsay, who's the mayor of my town? And I was like, you know what? I don't know. But let's go find out together.

And so we went online. We found his website. And we sent him an email together. And I said, you know what? I'm going to be coming to town in a few months. Do you think my niece and I could meet you? And we haven't heard back from him yet. But I trust that we will.

Because a lot of state and local politicians want to get to know their constituents. It's like the easiest way for them to kind of curry votes or have someone who's going to support them in the future. And I don't know if we're going to like this person or not, but I do think knowing who they are and sort of humanizing the politics by saying like, it's an individual person, you know, it's a dad or a mom or a brother or sister, it's someone. That is a very good first step. And that's never that hard to do. It's really just a search on the internet. Okay, great. So you ended our last question on something I wanted to make sure to ask about is how

do we have a debate or discourse that doesn't turn into a fight with our children? Sure. But I mostly think in fight with our children? Sure. But I'm, I mostly think in front of our children. Yeah. I like this question a lot because people say, you know, I'd want to do this, but I don't really like conflict. And the way that I do this in my classroom, which I'd be fine for debates, but the way that I do this is we sort of set the table and we say, look, we're not out here to convince one another. We're here to sort of understand each other. And if there's something you take away from that, that helps change your position, so be it, but that's not the goal.

And so I sort of have like four steps that I follow. The first is set the table, say what we're doing here. Are we trying to convince each other? No, we're trying to learn from each other. The second thing that I do, and I have to tell parents this a lot, is to check our own biases. And what I mean by that is our lived experiences are different than everyone else's lived experiences. Even our children, they're growing up in a world that is not the world we grew up in. And so we just have to like understand that they're not going to see things the same way we are because they haven't lived the same life we are. I think you need to go into it with curiosity. So you need to go into it with the idea of I'm going to learn versus I'm going to teach. And if you go into it like that, you are going to learn, but you're also going to teach because it helps everyone stay

open to the conversation. And in the end, to make sure that you can come back and do it again with someone, I always thank my classes for doing this work or anyone I have an individual conversation with. I thank them for it because I really am grateful for it. But it also, I think, sets the ability for us to come back and do this again on a different topic or the same topic with a different perspective at a later time. Okay. Again, I love all of that. Great for kids, but great for us as adults too. I have to ask about information. I mean, I feel like the older generation who always thinks it was better back in the day. But like, there is so much information out there today that wasn't there many years ago or wasn't as accessible many years ago. And there are so many people claiming to be experts, conspiracy theories,

people who have, and I put in air quotes, insider information and people sharing opinions as if they're facts were inundated by so much information. Do you have any advice about how to discern correct information or factual information in a sea of misinformation without only taking in what speaks to your already existing bias? Yeah, this is really hard to do because you're right. We're drowning in information or we're drowning in sort of like content I don't know if it's all informative and it's hard to sort of sift through what makes sense and what might just be noise I'll tell you what I do Is the way that I tend to think about things is how people themselves say it not how someone else says they said it

And I think one of the best ways to assess that sort of thing is go read what that person says. Go figure out what they say in video. It doesn't take a lot of time. It's not that hard. But I think it's a better way to understand someone versus whatever sort of mediated thing you're going to get with someone else reporting on it or someone else saying this. And I'll give you one other example that I like. When the conventions happen, there's always this sort of stuff about like which businesses support or which businesses donate things, like who's giving coffee to a convention or who's going to be the person who's providing alcohol. And you might say like, oh, that means they support Democrats or Republicans. But what I tell my students to do is to go to this website called opensecrets.org, which is just the Federal Election Commission sort of aggregated donations

over time. And I say, if you're really curious about how someone's supporting, go look at where the dollars went. And so it's just like going to the data or going to the source of the things versus trying to find who can package this tightly for me and in a compelling way. And I know that's not how a lot of us get our media. I know that's not how a lot of us get our news. It is the way that I do it. And I think it's something that's kept me calmer in a lot of ways. Like I read a lot of direct from members of Congress to their constituent emails to kind of figure out what are they trying to say versus what is someone else telling me that they're trying to say? I don't know. Maybe I'm making this up. I don't know if being a politician or getting involved in politics is being represented as a fairly attractive choice

right now. And you mentioned this earlier, like we're kind of, I'm saying this, you didn't say this, but sort of turning off our kids engage, be interested? I mean, if we think about the future citizens, we need people who are interested and desire to be in politics. I don't know. I'm going to say for the right reasons, but I don't even know what that means. You know, not just for popularity or publicity, but for really good reasons where they care about their constituents. How do we get our kids to be interested? I think the first step is showing them

how that happens. And while we have this idea that like, you know, people are in it for their own gain or their fame or notoriety or making money, nearly all of the local politicians that exist throughout the United States make no money and are instead volunteers who are just doing what they think makes their community better. And if you expose your kids to that, take them to a local city council meeting, take them to something where they have a street fair and those people are out just meeting people. I think humanizing them is the first step. Whether or not that's going to make someone want to do that is a different question. But if we don't show it to them, they can't dream about it. And that's something I think about a lot when I'm doing my own community board meetings is how few children

or even young people are there. I'm like, they don't even know that this is an avenue because they're not in the room to begin with. And I think if we let them see it, they can make a decision for themselves if they think, oh yeah, that's something I want to do. I care about this community. I care about this state. I want to make it better. But they don't know it if they don't see it. Yeah. Okay. My last question is around how do you define, your book is Raising a Citizen. How do you define being a citizen? What does that mean or look like? I think it's a word that sort of lost its meaning over time. So I'm curious your definition of what it means to be a citizen. Yeah. I think this is tricky because a lot of times citizen is, you know, it's granting legal status to do something. And so the terminology

that I use is I'm referring to it in a much more general sense, not something that's like a legal marker on exclusive rights to something or not. I think the boundaries between citizen and non-citizens are used on like who has legitimate power, who doesn't. And instead, I view a citizen as someone who has agency within the political system in which they're operating in. So if you can activate and use your own power in some sort of public or oriented way, you are a citizen. So in that context, it's not just formal political actions like voting or running for office. It's being someone who has eyes on the community, says, I see something that I don't like or I see something that's wrong, let's fix it. So someone

who has the agency and self-advocacy that they can go ahead and change the life that they're living. Lindsay, thank you. This is such an important conversation. I probably have 1 million more questions, but I know other people listening will want to read more. So howtoraiseacitizen.com is the website and the book, which is available on Amazon or go to your local bookstore and get it from them, How to Raise a Citizen. Lindsay, thank you for your wisdom and this incredibly important conversation and for having the courage to talk about politics. Thank you so much for having that same sort of courage. It was really nice to be here and I'm excited to hear what people think about it. Awesome. All right. Let

me close us out by reminding us all that the way that people, including children, learn best is by experience and observation. You can say all the right things in front of them, but what you do and who you're being will speak louder than what's coming out of your mouth. It's time for us to demonstrate interest, commitment, and yes, even conviction while also demonstrating kindness, curiosity, and empathetic leadership. I'm not saying it's easy, especially when someone challenges a closely held belief or something that matters so much to you, but I don't think the important stuff was ever meant to be easy. What if we assumed that the vast majority of us ultimately want the same things?

We just disagree or don't see another way of how to get there. Sure, there's a small percentage of people that are mostly evil or good and a small percentage of people who actually have all the information. The rest of us fall somewhere in the middle. So a little humility and a lot of civility

would serve us well. Who do you want your kid to become? Do you want them to be kind, curious, so a little humility and a lot of civility would serve us well. Who do you want your kid to become? Do you want them to be kind, curious, brave, and confident? Do you want them to be a leader in some way? Well, then for the love of all things holy and for the future of this country, demonstrate it because that is woman's work.