The Politicization of American Parenting

For better or worse, parents may have to choose a side.

Jason was absorbed in a game on his phone, so I asked his mom, “how long has Jason had this stomach ache?” Mom responded, “I’m thinking it’s been about two days.” Jason then piped in, “shut up, mom. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And he gave a snooty laugh, without looking up from his video game. Jason was ten years old at the time. Mom gave me a sheepish look, as if to say, “what can you do?”

I have been a family physician for more than 30 years. Twenty years ago, behavior like Jason’s would have been unimaginable. Now it’s common. More to the point: 20 years ago, I did not perceive a political dimension to parenting. Some parents were too strict, some parents were too permissive, and some parents were just right—and I saw no connection between parenting style and parental politics. Back then, I could tell you about parents who were left-of-center, ACLU-card-carrying liberals who were also strict, authoritative parents. Not anymore. Today, left-of-center parents are more likely to be permissive, and permissive parents are more likely to be left-of-center. That’s new. Jason’s mom is left-of-center. I know this because she wore Harris-Walz buttons during the 2024 Election. But even without the buttons, I could have guessed her political affiliation.

Left-of-center parents are now uncomfortable exercising their authority as parents. Their kids are now more likely to be defiant and disrespectful. That wasn’t true 20 years ago, in my observation. But it’s true today. In my book, The Collapse of Parenting, I explored how changes in American culture have undermined the authority of parents. American popular culture—the culture of YouTube and Instagram and TikTok, of the Disney Channel and the Billboard Hot 100—has become a culture of disrespect, teaching kids that it’s cute and funny to disrespect their parents and one another. It’s a culture that is harder for left-of-center parents to push back against and reject.

Let me tell you another story that illustrates this point.

Brett was a good student in elementary school. But in middle school, his grades tanked. Teachers reported that he wasn’t paying attention. They filled out Conners scales, a validated measure of attention in the classroom setting. Across the board, he was off the chart; not paying attention in any class. His parents took him to a board-certified child psychiatrist who did an assessment, looked at the Conners scales, and said, “it certainly looks like ADHD. Let’s try Vyvanse and see if it helps.” Vyvanse, a popular ADHD medication, was in fact tremendously helpful for Brett. A teacher called Brett’s mom the very first day he was on it. “I had no idea Brett was so bright. So smart. What a difference!” But Brett soon developed side effects from the medication: Jitteriness. Loss of appetite. A facial tic. His parents saw articles I had written for The New York Times and TIME, expressing concern about stimulants such as Vyvanse and Adderall. They came to me for a second opinion.

I did a more careful sleep history. “Does Brett get plenty of sleep?”

“Absolutely,” his mom said. “We make sure he’s in his bedroom every night at 9, we wake him up at 6 the next morning. That’s nine hours. That’s enough, don’t you think?”

“Do you have a video game console in your bedroom?” I asked Brett.

“Of course,” he said. “Doesn’t everybody?”

“Were you playing last night?”

“Absolutely.”

“What were you playing?”

“RDR [Red Dead Redemption] 2.”

“Excellent game,” I said. “When did you finish?”

“1:30.”

“You were playing video games at 1:30 last night?” Mom said, astonished.

“Is that pretty typical?” I asked.

“Yeah. Sometimes 2. Usually 1:15, 1:30.”

Brett, like most children, needs at least eight hours of sleep a night. Yet he tells us he’s getting less than five. Sleep deprivation perfectly mimics ADHD of the inattentive variety, which was his diagnosis. Vyvanse was very helpful. What’s Vyvanse? What’s Adderall? They are amphetamines. Speed. They compensate for the sleep deprivation. But the appropriate remedy for sleep deprivation is sleep, not Schedule II amphetamines.

“No more video game console in the bedroom,” I said. “No more smartphone in the bedroom. No screens of any kind in the bedroom. No more than 40 minutes a night playing video games.”

“That’s totally unacceptable!” Brett said. “I want to be a professional gamer. I want to be the next Ninja (Brett is referring to Ninja a.k.a. Tyler Blevins, who earns millions of dollars each year as a professional gamer). That’s my dream. I’ll never get there with 40 minutes a day.”

“Doctor,” mom said, “I’m really not comfortable taking the game console out of the bedroom. That seems so . . .controlling. So intrusive. How about if we first talk to Brett about limits, and moderation, and making better choices?”

This mom is clueless. She had no idea that her son was staying up past midnight playing video games. And now, instead of exercising her authority, she wants to leave the console in his bedroom and talk to him about limits—which is analogous to talking to an alcoholic about limits while giving him unlimited access to alcohol. It won’t work. This all happened two years ago. Mom had a Biden button on her purse.

An Unfortunate Choice

It’s not just a parent’s personal decisions that have become politically tinged, however. Large organizations once seen as bipartisan bastions of Americana have effectively split in two, with a liberal version now sparring against a conservative counterpart.

A generation ago, Brett might have been a Boy Scout. Membership in the Boy Scouts peaked at about 6.5 million in 1972, and the organization was an integral part of American life. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, was a Boy Scout. So was Bill Gates. But membership has declined ever since, and the organization eventually found itself being tugged Left ideologically. In an attempt to modernize, the Boy Scouts announced in 2014 that it would allow gay boys to join. Four years later, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church, announced that it was cutting ties with the scouts. By 2020, membership was down to 1.8 million, less than one-third the 1972 peak, and the Boy Scouts continued a leftward ideological shift, transitioning to fully coed and formally changing its name from Boy Scouts to Scouting America. Membership is now down to about 1 million kids total, including about 176,000 girls. “Our number one job is to get kids in this program,” proclaimed Scouting America President and CEO Roger Krone—not to form boys into men of character, I might note, but to boost the sagging numbers.

In response, a cohort of men launched Trail Life USA, specifically as an all-boys alternative to Scouting America. “Our number one job is not to get kids into the program. Our number one job is to grow godly men,” said Trail Life USA CEO Mark Hancock. But Trail Life USA, which now has 1,500 locations across the United States, is an avowedly Christian and right-of-center organization. Fifty years ago, the Boy Scouts were not a political organization. Jimmy Carter, Steven Spielberg, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden were all Boy Scouts. But a left-of-center atheist Democrat would feel uncomfortable at a meeting of Trail Life USA, which proclaims that “salvation is by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ alone.” Likewise, a conservative Republican parent might be uncomfortable with the new requirement from Scouting America that anyone wishing to attain the rank of Eagle Scout must obtain a merit badge certifying that they understand the concepts of diversity, equity, inclusion, and intersectionality.

This is the choice which increasingly confronts American parents: secular/left-of-center or religious/conservative. The dichotomy is even more dramatic in our schools. Over the past 25 years I have visited more than 500 schools: public and private, urban, suburban, and rural, from Alaska to Florida, Hawaii to Maine. In 2001, when I first began these visits, I didn’t see much difference between schools in blue states and red states. There were good schools and bad schools, authoritative teachers and permissive teachers, and the variation did not vary by political affiliation. Not anymore. Today, I can tell you within five minutes, and with my eyes closed, the political affiliation of a school. If a teacher says, “boys and girls, please line up quietly!” then this school has a conservative, right-of-center affiliation. Guaranteed. Many urban, left-of-center school districts no longer permit teachers to use the phrase “boys and girls” because that term is not inclusive of nonbinary individuals.

This polarization into Left and Right is unfortunate. It tears at the very fabric of what it means to be an American. Our nation’s motto is E pluribus unum: out of many, one. When I was growing up, I attended public schools in Ohio. More than one-quarter of my classmates were students of color, many from low-income households. My mom was a single parent, a left-of-center Democrat, a card-carrying member of the ACLU. She struggled financially. But in high school, I dated the daughter of Richard Pogue, a wealthy Republican lawyer who became managing partner of the huge international law firm Jones Day. My girlfriend’s family lived in a mansion. Oddly, I don’t recall us ever discussing politics or the fact that her parents and my mother were at opposite ends of the political spectrum. It just never came up. Today, an affluent Republican would be very unlikely to send his daughter to a public school attended by low-income students of color. That’s what I see in my school visits: Schools have become segregated, not only by race, but by political ideology and party affiliation.

In 2012, Charles Murray published Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. He made the argument that white Americans in 1960 lived together in one country, sharing the same culture and the same entertainment, living together in the same neighborhoods; but by 2010, affluent white Americans lived and worked and sent their kids to school in communities separate from low-income white Americans. Murray made a powerful case that America had become segregated by economic class.

Today, we need another scholar to write a new book documenting how Americans have become segregated by party affiliation. Researchers now find that Democrats and Republicans are choosing to live apart from each other. Harvard investigators Jacob Brown and Ryan Enos did a granular investigation of 180 million voters in cities across the United States. They found that “a large proportion of voters [now] live with virtually no exposure to voters from the other party in their residential environment.” They emphasize that this sorting by political party is “distinct from racial and ethnic segregation.” Within the cities they studied, such as Chicago, Baltimore, Houston, Charlotte, Birmingham, Denver, and Columbus, Ohio, some neighborhoods were overwhelmingly Republican, others were overwhelmingly Democratic, and only a few were anywhere close to 50-50. This sorting means that even in public schools, kids are unlikely to encounter classmates from families of different political persuasions. The school will align with the political preference of the neighborhood. If you don’t like it, you can move.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. Montgomery County, Maryland, has one large school district serving more than 160,000 students. As with most large, urban school districts in the United States, the leadership tends to be left-of-center. A few years ago, the district insisted on an “inclusive” curriculum in which teachers were required to read stories of transgender kids and celebrations of gay marriage to kindergarten students. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish parents requested to opt their kids out of the required indoctrination sessions. The school system denied their request. The parents sued; they lost. Then they appealed to the United States Supreme Court, where they won. Cases like these arise when the school district is too large to accommodate the conflicting preferences of its constituents.

I consider myself fortunate to have attended public schools where my classmates included low-income students, children of the wealthy WASP elite, and everybody in between. I was comfortable hanging with everybody, and I still am. But I find almost no schools like that today.

Making the Choice

So what advice do I have for parents? If you can, try to find a school and a community that is diverse, welcoming, and apolitical. But you also have every right to prioritize your beliefs and your values. Your school should not be undermining your faith and your beliefs in the way that Montgomery County Public Schools did to its religiously devout Muslim, Christian, and Jewish parents. Although I attended public schools from kindergarten through high school, I have become concerned that many American public schools today promote a blatantly partisan political agenda: some on the Left, some on the Right. Before enrolling your children in any school, do your homework. Visit the campus. Look at the posters on the walls. Talk to the leadership. Remember that honesty and conscientiousness, not grades and test scores, predict health, wealth, and happiness in adulthood. Look for a school that knows how to teach honesty and self-control to children.

I have become a big fan of classical schools, which prioritize the teaching of virtue and character. These schools are enjoying a dramatic surge in popularity. Most have a religious affiliation, although the Heritage Foundation lists 156 secular classical schools in its online directory. Hillsdale College has established a network of classical public charter schools with 23 member schools, 14 candidate schools, and another 69 schools that teach the Hillsdale classical curriculum. They have no fees, no tuition, and no religious affiliation. I have visited eleven of them and have always been impressed by the courtesy and respect shown me by the students, even when no teachers were around. However, one has to acknowledge that Hillsdale College is expressly right-of-center, with statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher prominent on the college campus.

As a parent, your first priority has to be to help your child to fulfill his or her potential, to become the best man or woman they can be. The politicization of every aspect of American life, from Scouting to schools, has made that task more difficult. You can no longer assume that your Scout troop or your public school will support your beliefs. On the contrary, they may actively undermine them. So you must be mindful and intentional in your choice of school and in the choice of activities for your kids. It breaks my heart to say it, but in many neighborhoods across the United States, that means you may have to choose a side. I’m completely in favor of kids being exposed to the other side, but if you’re a devout Christian, you don’t want your five-year-old being indoctrinated in transgenderism. If you’re a conservative Republican, you don’t want your teenager being required to quote liberal pieties about intersectionality in order to become an Eagle Scout. If you’re an atheist Democrat, you don’t want your son to have to listen to a sermon about Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior in order to go camping overnight. But this is the country in which we now live.