How to raise a kid who gives a damn (without telling them what to think)
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The entry point is simpler than it might feel.
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When my son was in fourth grade, he came home furious about music class. Not in a I-don’t-want-to-practice way, but in a this-is-an-injustice way. He’s the kid of musicians — his father, uncles, and grandfather are fixtures in the punk rock community, with a volume to match — and he was attending an arts-based elementary school. His expectations were high and his experience of sitting in that classroom was missing the mark. Not to mention, he kept getting in trouble for getting distracted. Having sat through a few performances myself, I couldn’t exactly disagree that the music teacher was phoning it in. But instead of marching up there myself, which I was admittedly tempted to do, I saw something worth sitting with. My kid had identified a problem. What was he going to do about it?
We sat down and wrote a petition. He wanted to learn songs like Gangnam Style and Hotline Bling. We compromised on suggesting The Beatles and Taylor Swift. His argument was simple and pretty airtight — if kids are wiggly and chatty, maybe they’re bored of learning to sing in a round via Hot Cross Buns. Better songs, better cooperation. He took the petition to school the next day, got dozens of signatures on the playground, and walked it to the principal’s office. The music teacher listened. Things improved.
I’m not sharing this to brag, though I will fully admit I was insufferably proud of him. I’m sharing it because it captures something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately — the difference between teaching kids what to think and teaching them how to show up. In a political moment that can feel overwhelming for adults, the question of how we talk to kids about any of it, without either over-explaining or under-preparing them, is one a lot of parents are sitting with right now.
Leah Greenberg has thought about this more than most. She co-founded Indivisible with her husband Ezra Levin in 2016, building a grassroots organizing movement with chapters across the country. She’s also a former congressional staffer, a TIME 100 honoree, and the mother of a 3 and 5-year-old. I spoke with her about how she’s navigating all of it.
Raising civically engaged kids starts with what they already know
If you’ve ever had a toddler, you already know that fairness is not a concept you have to introduce. Greenberg puts it plainly. “Anybody who’s ever had toddlers knows that fairness is not something that you have to tell them about. They are obsessed with fairness. They care a lot about who’s got the red plate and who’s got the blue plate and is that fair.”
The jump from household fairness to broader civic values is shorter than it sounds. “So many of your conversations with relatively young kids are really just about asking them to apply the golden rule and think about how their actions impact other people,” she says. From there, it’s about gradually widening the circle — from family, to community, to society — in ways that are developmentally appropriate.
In the Greenberg-Levin household, that looks like a weekly check-in with their five-year-old about what’s working and what he’d change. “You’re inviting people to feel their own agency and to experience and participate in a household where everybody has a say, even if it’s not going to be a formal democracy,” Greenberg says. Her son’s current legislative priority is moving TV time earlier so there’s a gap before dinner. A reasonable ask, to be sure.
Modeling values, not policies
For parents who worry about the line between educating and influencing, Greenberg is clear that you’re not trying to indoctrinate your kid on policy. “You’re trying to give them a solid emotional foundation and you’re trying to give them a sense of what kind of values do you want to see for yourself and for the world around you.” Kindness. Sharing. Caring for others. The civic extension of those values follows naturally.
She also notes that kids are keener observers than we give them credit for. “Kids are really good bullshit detectors. And so if you’re saying a set of values and you’re not actually living them, then they’re going to notice that really fast.” When her family took their kids to a protest about DC statehood and the National Guard presence, she didn’t go heavy on context. She talked about the basic principle — the people who live here aren’t being allowed to make decisions about what affects them. That was enough.
On the concept of protest specifically
Talking to kids about protest turns out to require less explanation than you’d think. “Kids are very familiar with the concept. They’re also quite familiar with the concept of non-cooperation. They are the real experts on that,” Greenberg says, with some well-earned dryness. The core idea — we’re upset, something is wrong, we’re going to get together with people who feel the same way — is a sentence most kids can follow without much trouble.
Beyond protest, Greenberg sees everyday community participation as the foundation. Food drives, faith community service, neighborhood involvement. The content matters less than the habit of asking kids to come along and understand why.
What about when the news is genuinely scary
Greenberg says she feels lucky, in a particular way, that her kids are still young enough to be mostly insulated from the news cycle. But she’s thought carefully about emotional honesty with them. “Putting on a totally happy face, everything is fine is not actually a sustainable posture. They will figure it out one way or another.” At the same time, she tries not to project fear onto them, aiming to speak about what’s wrong without loading it with anxiety. She pairs the reality with a sense of what can be done — and she gives herself permission to say she doesn’t know.
That balance is also, notably, her advice for parents who are drowning in their own anxiety right now. “The antidote to anxiety is action,” she says. “Figure out how to take hold of your little piece of the quilt and start working on it. You’re not going to fix everything. Nobody is going to do it all.”
What you’re actually raising them for
When I asked Greenberg what she hopes her kids take from all of this, she didn’t talk about political outcomes. She talked about agency — about finding their own passions and figuring out how to use their lives for good. “Whether that’s political organizing or whether that’s art or whether that’s engineering, I want to encourage them to use their talents and use their life for good.”
That tracks with the music class moment for me. What my son learned that day wasn’t a particular political belief. He learned that he noticed something, thought about it, made a case for change, and something shifted. That’s the foundation. Everything else — what he does with it, what he comes to believe, what causes will matter to him — is his to figure out.
For parents feeling overwhelmed by where to even start, Greenberg recommends leaning on existing resources. Immigrant rights organizations in particular have developed strong guidance for families navigating hard conversations with kids. For the rest of us, the entry point is simpler than it might feel. Ask your kid what’s fair. Listen to what they say. Work from there.
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