Many teens will vote for the first time this election: Parents play important role

When my oldest daughter turned 18, I pulled a total mom move – I registered her and her friends to vote at her birthday party before they scattered off to college.

With my laptop open to the crowd, I asked them who was registered to vote. Freshly adults, some of them didn’t even know you had to register to cast a ballot. By the end of the night, the state of Massachusetts had a few more registered voters for the 2018 midterm elections.

That’s a normal thing to do, right?

I’d never considered myself particularly “into politics.” I grew up in a house where my parents were on complete opposite sides of the aisle: politics and religion were never discussed. For most of my life I actually thought it was rude to discuss them. I later learned not discussing something doesn’t do anyone any favors.

Gen X has been panned for being apathetic in the past.  In 1999 Ted Halstead at The Atlantic noted that Gen Xers “appear to have enshrined political apathy as a way of life. Maybe it’s because we’ve had few world events to galvanize us. Most of us were too young to have strong feelings about Vietnam and the Cold War was a nebulous threat. 

We were latch-key kids who learned to swallow our feelings. “Whatever” was our mantra and it was pervasive. 

When my two daughters entered their teen years, their worldview widened on social media and in real life- so did mine. I was paying attention to how they saw the world which really made me take notice of how I saw the world.

And in 2016 I watched my girls watch this country elect a man to the presidency who made fun of a disabled journalist, who had nearly 20 allegations of sexual assault attached to his name, who’d cheated on his wives, who made a point to attack women in powerful positions based on their gender or looks, and because he was a celebrity, said he could just grab women by the p___y.

Is that who we are? Is that the example we want to set for our kids, for the next generation?

We are our children’s first influencers and that is a great and grave responsibility. I don’t want to pass apathy on to them and I don’t want that to be the example I set or how I live my life. 

Our children listen to what we say even when we think they’re ignoring us. And they sure as hell are paying attention to what we do, how we behave and how we treat others, online and in person.

According to the Pew Research Center, voter turnout for the 2020 election was the highest rate for any national election since 1900. About 66% of the voting-eligible population turned out to vote. 

Pause here. Let that number sink in. 66%.

According to a Census Bureau survey, Americans cited these reasons for not voting::

• Not interested: 18%
• Illness, disability, Covid concerns: 17%
• Too busy, forgot: 17%
• Didn’t like candidates, campaign issues: 15%

Let’s pause again. (Go ahead and reread those.)

18% of eligible voters didn’t vote because they “weren’t interested”? That’s some serious Gen X level apathy right there. And this country has reached a point where we can’t afford to not care.

I am just one Mom, one eligible voter.

But we should all give a damn because we all need clean air and clean water. And don’t we all want the freedom to love whom we love, to marry or not to marry? To have kids or not to have kids? To go to a church we choose or NOT to go to a church at all?

In other words, to live and let live.

We have the power to do something about the things we care about. Imagine if we had 100% voter turnout? Then we’d truly be able to elect leaders that represent everyone, and because we all turn out, we can hold them accountable. 

The best example I can set is to use my voice, my time and my resources to effect positive change- and teach my kids to do the same. Sometimes that’s by volunteering, sometimes it’s by learning something new, sometimes it’s by connecting with new people. When the polls open in November, I’ll do that by burying my Gen X apathy under my compost pile in the backyard. 

And when my youngest turns 18 in a couple of years, I’ll pull out my laptop again and register some more young people to vote.