This is the third presidential election in a row where I’ve had a 2-year-old daughter. I was a new mom with a toddler daughter in 2016, tucking her into bed that night, fully convinced I’d get to wake her up in the morning by telling her America had elected its first female president. In 2020, I masked up with her, now 6, and her 2-year-old sister, promising them I’d vote for someone who would protect us and this imperfect country we love. And now, I’m making sure the 2T Future President shirt from Target — the one my big girls wore when I voted both those years — is washed and ready to go for my third daughter, who turned 2 this year. I’m now voting for a woman president again, hoping beyond all belief that I’ll wake them up on Nov. 6 full of joy and excitement and relief.
Except I’m hoping my 10-year-old daughter will already know that joy. Because I’m letting her stay up for election night.
Election night in America is a big deal, and I don’t mean for the obvious reasons. It’s just one of those things you truly just need to witness. Learning the process of the electoral college, watching John King with his interactive board on CNN break down all the possibilities, seeing American democracy in action.
Of course, now, election night comes with a hefty dose of anxiety coursing through my veins. I don’t want my 10-year-old to know the anxiety, but I do think it’s important for her to watch the process unfold. My 10-year-old votes with me every election and understands why it matters and asks me, excitedly, to calculate if there will be a presidential election the year she’s eligible to vote. (There will be, look out, 2032.) She’s invested, and I want her to keep her that way. And that means the next step is seeing it through on the first Tuesday in November.
“Our kids are out there in the world where politics are very real. The world is going to influence our children, whether we want it to or not, so part of our approach when we think of ourselves as the grown-ups in our kids’ lives is what do we need them to know about the world, about themselves, about our family values, and how do we want to get them ready for hearing or seeing things that might challenge their — or our — views, or even make them feel scared or uncomfortable?” Dr. AnneMarie McClain, assistant professor of media science at Boston University, tells me. “If we want them to be open-minded, empathic, respectful, curious, bold, and brave, if we want them to really consider the values that we hold about the issues that matter to us, then we need to show them how to walk the walk.”
But I also want her to watch to see the whole process. To know what it’s like to vote in this country and to understand why it’s so important. How some of these states will be so close, they may have to take another look at the margins. How people unhappy with the results will suggest someone in America cheated, how emotions will run hot for everyone. Elections bring out the best and worst in America — and I can’t shield her from that. A few of my friends have shared that they don’t want their kids to watch and be confused or upset or try and figure out how someone could vote for a misogynistic, unqualified dictator-wannabe instead of a qualified woman with oodles and oodles of experience — but she’s already witnessed all of that. She hears political chatter outside of our home, she is well aware that it’s bullsh*t for there to have never been a woman president in the United States. She knows the policies each candidate has, and has already made it clear that she thinks “this is like the suffrage movement all over again.”
As McClain shares, kids are already hearing everything out there. “The issues that we might sometimes think of as ‘grown-up’ and very ‘distant’ from children actually affect children nonetheless, and sometimes in deeply powerful ways; our kids need to be ready to face the world and know that we believe that they can,” she says.
So why not watch election night with my kid? Why not explain what’s happening in a way I want her to know? Why not make sure that the stuff she’s going to hear about the election comes from her parents first, and the rest of the world later?
I know we probably won’t have the results on Tuesday night. I know our country will be in a weird kind of limbo for a while, all of us vibrating with anxiety and nerves. But she and I will have that night together, just like we had that Election Day 2016 together — full of hope.
