Our children are watching

As people around the world were celebrating Easter, Donald Trump saw fit to mark one of the holiest days on the Christian calendar with an expletive ridden diatribe about Iran. He managed to threaten violence, call people bastards, and taunt the entire Muslim religion — all in just 44 words. It is a horrifying post, disrespectful of both his office and really the entirety of humanity. While other world leaders sent messages of hope and faith, our country’s ‘leader’ sent a message of violence and threats of widespread.

And our children are watching.

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For the decades I worked in the domestic and sexual violence field, I had the great pleasure of delivering and overseeing prevention programs for youth. The programming emphasized focused on teen dating violence and sexual assault. But it wasn’t just about what not to do, it was also about what youth should strive for in their relationships. These educational programs pushed young people to think about what relationships should look like. We covered topics like:

• The essential components of a healthy relationship
• How you define respect (without using the word respect — it’s hard!)
• What do you need to feel safe in a relationship
• How to manage conflict without violence
• Who is a trusted adult you can turn to if your relationship doesn’t feel safe

And we talked a lot about anger. How anger is a second emotion, meaning that it’s likely not the first thing you feel, but instead a response to some other feeling like embarrassment or shame. How anger unto itself isn’t a negative emotion, it’s how you express your anger that can be positive or negative. That anger can actually be protective, signaling that something is unjust or unsafe. That you have a right to your anger but also a responsibility to deal with it in a way that doesn’t cause harm to others. That you also have a right to your bodies and your boundaries along with a responsibility to respect the bodies and boundaries of others. That your safety is important, and that you also play a role in protecting the safety of your peers and dating partners.

We would have young people make lists of red and green flags in relationships. They would brainstorm healthy ways to deal with conflict and anger and divide into groups to debate whether jealousy was okay or not. Most importantly, we would encourage young people to examine their relationships and their emotions — to not just feel but think about those feelings and actually name them.

I would say over and over again, young people do not spontaneously know how to have a healthy relationship. They have to be taught. And they especially need to be taught when healthy relationships are not being modeled at home.

Or by the leaders of their country.

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On what feels like a daily basis, I lament what the President of the United States models to our youth with his words and behavior. I worry that our youth are seeing the bullying, the racism, the misogyny, the lying, and the hate and that what they are learning is that power comes with a license to abuse. After all, according to our president “when you're a star... you can do anything". What does this teach them about their responsibility to respect and protect the safety of others? I also worry about the children who come from communities that are being targeted by the lies and the hate. What must it feel like when they themselves are attacked by the man who occupies the highest office in the land?

And then I think about the countless teens I worked with in schools around eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. I think about their curiosity and willingness to engage in hard conversations. And trust me, some of those conversations were hard. There were times when the pushback was significant and the disagreements were thorny. And that was okay. The harder the conversations were, the deeper the engagement. We leaned into the hard moments and also stepped back to let youth work things out amongst themselves. We saw lightbulbs go off and witnessed moments of clarity. We handled disclosures of past and current harm and got kids connected with the services they needed. We created spaces where youth could wrestle with hard questions of identity and their roles in their families and relationships. We got young people to think. And they sure made me think too. I am still thinking about them — and the lessons I learned from them — to this day.

I would suggest that we need this education now more than ever before. That in this moment, as school based mental health programs are defunded and sex ed programs are threatened by the Trump administration, that the Trump administration is making these programs even more necessary. Trump is a deeply violent man who has filled his administration with deeply violent people. If we want the next generation to understand what it means to engage in the world without violence, we have to teach them how to do so.

And now, even as I write this, I am seeing updates about Trump’s cavalier comments about “blowing up everything” if Iran doesn’t make a deal. It is terrifying that a world leader would say such a thing. It is shocking to me that more people do not understand that the security of this country is incompatible with having a leader that quips about blowing up someone else’s country. And whatever happens over these next days and weeks (may we all be safe and may the violence come to an end) we have to contend with the long term impact of such words. Not just on our foreign relations and place in the world, but on the impact on the very people of this country. Including our youngest people, who are just finding their place and learning from what they see and experience.

Everything that Trump does gives our youth the absolute wrong messages about how to be a good partner and decent community member. And I cannot overstate the danger of that. I also cannot overstate how important it is for all of us to play a role in teaching them something different. We have to give them the tools they need to have healthy relationships, to respect their communities, and manage anger without violence.

Certainly our country’s current leaders will never be able to teach them any of it. In fact, if we don’t work very hard to clearly name Trump’s abuse as abuse, how will our children understand it? If we don’t explain to our children that abuse is never okay — even when the President of the United States is the one doling it out — we will only have an even bigger problem on our hands in the years to come. A whole lot of people are wringing their hands about the manosphere and the increasing disaffection of boys and young men. Those hand wringers need look no further than our own President. It’s way past time to stop wringing our hands and start using our words to teach them a different way of relating to others.

Our young people are seeing Trump’s abuse and the hate. What they aren’t seeing is enough politicians holding him accountable for it. So we have to hold Trump accountable. Publicly and loudly, so that our youth see us and hear us call out the abuse for what it is.

The future of this country depends on it. Our next generations need us to do it.