Two years ago I was driving through the countryside with my 10-year-old daughter. It was a picture-perfect summer day. Fair-weather clouds dotted the pale blue sky, and there were swallows darting in and out of the never-ending corn fields. The sun had just started to set, giving everything that orange-red glow that seems new and magical even after you’ve drank it in a thousand times before. My daughter and I were laughing at my insistence that we listen to country music. I’d had enough of the same old pop songs she liked, and there was something about a fiddle and a twangy guitar that just fit the day. It all felt quintessentially American.
But then we saw the little yellow house.
The lawn was nicely tended, and the house itself was surrounded by flowers. There was a hanging swing on the front porch. Off to the right of the driveway, just next to what I think was an SUV, there was a flagpole displaying two flags that were flapping gently in the evening breeze. One flag — the one on top — was the flag of the United States of America. Just below it there was a red and black flag with a swastika. It was the flag of the Third Reich, and it was just sitting there on that tall shiny pole and dancing along under the stars and stripes of Old Glory.
I can’t put into words how shocked I was. The juxtaposition was creepy. Everything in that town was perfect except for the Nazi flag. I actually had a hard time breathing. It was like I was thrust into some kind of dystopian novel.
Now here’s the thing: My daughter could see that I was undone, but she didn’t know why. We’d been laughing a few seconds before, arguing the merits of potentially listening to country music while we sat in our car with the windows down, and then as far she was concerned, I had out of nowhere pulled over to the side of road to stare at a pretty yellow house.
“Why’d you stop talking,” she asked.
“Because of that house,” I muttered, without explaining.
She wasn’t even sure what house I was looking at, and although I think she’d have recognized a swastika if it were shown for a class at school, I don’t think the flag itself would have caught her eye.
“What house?” she asked.
“That house,” I said. “That flag.”
She looked to where I was pointing and saw the two flags strung up on the same shiny pole.
This is where the real crux of my parenting dilemma hit me. Of course it’s jarring to see a Nazi flag flying. Of course I’d rather that flag not be there. But when I said, “I don’t think whoever lives there should fly that flag,” she seemed puzzled, and so was I.
After all, what was the most important parenting I could do at this surreal juncture? Was it to point out how offensive, even threatening, that kind of symbol can be? Was it to talk about all of the history associated with that particular symbol? Or, as I thought about consciously only later, was it to stress that one of the things that quite literally sets the United States apart from almost every other nation is the near-absolute hegemony of free speech? After all, whoever flies that flag enjoys the right to fly that flag, however distasteful some people might find this deplorable practice. You can’t have freedom of speech unless it’s freedom of all speech.
And this of course bursts right into the increasingly murky waters of our increasingly nasty world. How do you explain to a 10-year-old that some people will not only show symbols but also espouse out loud their firm beliefs that certain kinds of people are literally worth less than others? How do you reconcile this fact with the anti-bullying rules at school, knowing that these rules are essential for the well-being of schools themselves? And how do you adjust your conversation to meet the developmental needs of your child?
[Read: Parenting in a Divided Nation: How to Preserve Vital Relationships.]
These are not easy questions to answer. A 10-year-old knows that it’s “wrong” to insult other people and that it’s “wrong” to use symbols that are implicitly threatening. But it is also, in nearly all settings, quite literally a right to do so guaranteed by the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. To a 10-year-old, however, the word “right” is the opposite of the word “wrong.” That sets up some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance in any discussion. Add to this the sad fact that hateful speech and symbols are proliferating, and it’s likely that these discussions will become more common.
The medical and psychological literature isn’t much help here. There are lots of reports about how to discuss with kids the clear dangers of hateful speech, but there’s very little discussion on threading the narrow path between the awfulness of hateful rhetoric and the right to spew that rhetoric as one of the most protected aspects of our civil liberties. I actually recall my dad talking to me about this back in the ’70s when a neo-Nazi group marched through Skokie, Illinois. The ACLU was representing the marchers, and my dad said that the marchers, however awful they seemed, had a right to be protected. I never quite understood the reasoning until I was older, and it so clearly made my dad uncomfortable that I dropped the subject back then when I was the same age as my daughter was when we saw that yellow house.
The best I can offer — as a child psychiatrist, as a parent, and as a firm believer in equal access for everyone to the same civil liberties — is advice regarding what to say based on your child’s developmental stage. Also, I can’t really see the benefit of this discussion with toddlers or very young school-aged children. To that age group I’d simply note that these are adult matters and that you’ll discuss it when they get older. Let’s start, therefore, our discussion in earnest from the perspective of third graders and then work our way up to high school.
What to Say to 8- to 12-Year-Olds
This group — typically kids in third through sixth grade — is characterized by having a fairly concrete view of the world. There are rules and these rules are there to be followed. Right is right and wrong is wrong. The developmental theorist Jean Piaget called this the concrete operational stage, and developmental neurobiologists have noted that brain development during these years is characterized by a proliferation of brain neurons.
Information is steadily absorbed but not really thought about with any sophistication. Abstractions are rare for pre-teens, but kids this age take great pride in knowing basic facts. Ask an 11-year-old baseball fan about players’ batting averages, and he or she will tell you the numbers with enthusiastic expertise. Ask that same 11-year-old why some baseball managers have more success than others regardless of which team they manage, and the child will struggle to make sense of the nuanced leadership skills that a good manager brings to the team.
Along those lines, for this group, the concept of freedom of speech and the all-important balance of this concept against distasteful and hurtful rhetoric is best addressed through the lens of rules.
This is why anti-bullying curricula are so often based on what’s allowed and what’s not allowed, without a lot of explanation. To get your discussion of free speech to a more nuanced place, use the example of yelling fire in a crowded movie theater. A 10-year-old can understand the linear progression of a crowded theater becoming a dangerous place as people rush to the exit in a panicked state.
[Read: Modeling Civility at Home.]
By the same token, a Nazi flag in a quiet town has different implications than if it were unveiled at a synagogue or an African-American church. The flag itself is distasteful, but it’s the effect the flag has on the setting in which it flies that makes it legally questionable. It’s not OK to fly that flag outside a synagogue, and there’s legal precedent for those restrictions. (Remember that kids think of laws as adult rules.) Still, whoever wants to fly that flag can fly that flag, with some complicated exceptions.
If we didn’t allow that flag to fly, we’d find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of saying what can be believed and what can’t be believed. No 10-year-old on the planet likes to hear “because I said so,” so you can use a child’s distaste for this kind of explanation to illustrate why we protect free speech in the first place. In other words, we protect free speech because different people believe different things. One person’s “I said so” is another person’s “I would never say that.”
At the same time, it’s important to impress upon your child your particular values, and to let them know that despite what you believe personally, it is a rule that other people can believe and say different things — even things that you firmly believe are wrong – but that these freedoms don’t necessarily apply to younger kids until they’re old enough to face the consequences of these actions. That will help them to understand why the school and the family still dictate what can and cannot be said.
Talking to Teens
As any parent of a teen will tell you, this is where things get a bit more complicated. Brain neurons actually decrease during adolescence in order to make way for more white matter connections. That networking of neurons allows what Piaget called formal operations. Piaget observed that teens start to question rules and even to construct anti-rule arguments. If you ask kids about rules for a game, little kids will say, “The rules have always been there,” whereas 10- or 11-year-olds will say, “The rules are there so that we can have fun.” A 16-year-old’s answer? They’ll laugh and look a bit disdainful and say something like, “To heck with the rules…. Who made these dumb rules anyway?”
This mindset is perfect for the formation of identity, something that the developmental theorist Erik Erikson noted. Teens are obsessed with who they are and what their values happen to be. And as any 11th grade teacher will tell you, these values are as mercurial as New England weather. This makes the importance of free speech easier for teens to grasp, but it’s often harder for them to accept the consequences. “I believe in eugenics,” a teen might say, “and you can’t tell me not to say this because it’s part of who I am.” If you go for the fire-in-the-movie-theater example, you might get some traction, but teens can argue better than the most accomplished trial lawyers. “Those people in the theater are stupid,” they might say. “If they don’t see the fire for themselves and they run to the exit anyway, then it’s on them if they get trampled.” In other words, little kids are better at understanding the consequences of distasteful speech, and bigger kids are better at understanding the value of protecting that speech in the first place.
For bigger kids, the trick is to engage the higher brain. If you start censoring a teen, you’re going to stimulate the reactive brain more than the intellectual brain. Try to get them to put on the other side’s shoes. Use displacement — there’s no shortage of distasteful speech in stories, both written and on the screen. That’s why “To Kill a Mockingbird” remains a standard of American literature. Often teens can better engage both sides of an issue if it doesn’t directly affect them. Stories are amazingly useful in discussing important concepts for adolescents.
Taking It All In
The issue of free speech, especially hateful free speech, is never easy. It’s not supposed to be easy. That’s why the framers of the Constitution thought to put it in writing in the Bill of Rights. I have a hunch, however, that the new world that our kids are inheriting will be filled with lots of these uneasy questions.
[See: Talking to Your Children About Racism.]
Social media and the 24-hour news cycle just puts all this stuff front and center nearly all of the time. We can’t hide our heads in the sand. It’s our job as parents to help our kids to think through these issues, no matter how uncomfortable these discussions might be. After all, they’ll have to teach their kids someday, too.
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Talking to Kids About Free Speech in the Era of Hateful Rhetoric originally appeared on usnews.com
