My SD Moms (CNN)When the topic of presidential politics comes up, my youngest daughter, who’s 8, will sometimes ask, “Mommy, what are we?”
I often chuckle because technically “we’re” nothing. (As journalists, my husband and I are not registered with any political party.)
What I tend to do, when she asks, is say “we” support people who care about the same issues that we do and then I mention what those issues are. I’m not sure how much of this is really registering but my sense is she’ll grow up knowing what issues we believe in and who we vote for, and will likely follow a similar path.
But maybe not, based on the findings of a new study, which challenges conventional wisdom and decades of research supporting the belief that most children adopt their parent’s party identification. The study, which appears in the December issue of the American Sociological Review, found that more than half of all children in the United States either incorrectly identify or reject their parents’ party affiliation.
“Our study is important because it recognizes that children have a say in determining their own (political) identities,” said Christopher Ojeda, the first author of the study and a postdoctoral scholar in the Stanford Center for American Democracy at Stanford University, in an email interview. “They think through the information and values that parents attempt to pass on to them.”
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