From the 3,500-person Village of Paw Paw, Michigan, Rick Reo, 53, spoke with clarity about his controversial efforts in March 2020 to rename his school district’s mascot from “Redskins” to “Redwolves.”
“Talking with students, you’d have a middle school student who would say, ‘I will never be proud to be a Paw Paw Redskin,’ and every kid should be proud to go to their school,” said Reo, the superintendent of the district.
One of those students was his son, Michael, who was part of the student-led process to pick a new nickname for the district. Michael, 19 and now a sophomore majoring in journalism at USC, cites the experience as his first introduction to anything political.
Michael Reo remembers it as the most political activism in Paw Paw in years, with people speaking out at student council meetings and school board meetings about the “touchy subject,” some even sporting buttons proclaiming their position on the issue. Despite criticism aimed at their family, Rick Reo had hard conversations with the school board to make the change happen.
Parents often introduce their kids to politics, whether it be through their personal beliefs, the media they consume, or their own politicized actions. Families of USC students have influenced their children’s political ideas, involvement and outlooks — and some students have even managed to influence their parents back.
Parents often value ethics over politics
Sheila Holsinger never considered herself particularly political. But when Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams made his infamous rape joke during her time at Texas A&M, she found herself changing.
Despite having fun being the “off-putting” liberal in a sea of conservatives, she just couldn’t continue coexisting respectfully in the face of beliefs she found amoral. In 1990, Williams likened bad weather to rape, saying “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.” The “joke” led to a rift between Sheila and her roommate, to the point where Sheila moved out.
While at Texas A&M, she met Jeff, a fellow Democrat surrounded by those with conservative views. Political involvement has stayed with the now-married couple throughout their lives, and both are still proud frequent voters.
Jeff, now 54 and a software engineer for DirectTV, and Sheila, 52 and a public high school English teacher, imparted their values onto their 21-year-old daughter Molly Holsinger, a junior at USC with majors in political science and sociology. As rare Democrats in Plano, Texas, the family often discussed politics in relation to their own lives, and Molly Holsinger cited her faith in her parents’ morality as a reason for agreeing with them on many political issues growing up.
“I think that my parents are good people, and so if they approve or disapprove of something, that affects how I view the issue,” she said. “In that very formative period, I was definitely really influenced by watching the news with them and then gauging their reaction.”
In a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, just 4% of parents said it was “extremely important” for their children to “have similar political beliefs to their own” as adults, while slightly more respondents, 12%, said it was “very important.” However, 94% of parents said they valued their children growing up to “be honest and ethical.”
Sheila Holsinger echoed the importance of empathy and ethics in how she and her husband raised their children, citing her basic beliefs in human decency and human rights as the center of her politics and values. When people in their hometown put up signs saying, “no panhandling,” and “keep your windows rolled up,” in response to people experiencing homelessness, Molly remembers her parents saying, “This is ridiculous, these people are struggling, why are we not helping them?”
Jeff Holsinger grew up attending an evangelical Christian church, and despite the conservative politics he saw there, the biggest lesson he gleaned was “the underlying radical message of what I learned in Christianity” — caring for those less fortunate than himself.
“The people that are shunned by society are the people that need our help,” he said. “It was about doing what was right for my fellow man.”
After one of Molly’s childhood friends came out as transgender, Jeff and Sheila Holsinger saw a weight lifted from his shoulders. Jeff had previously reached out to him, taking him to a local game shop to play Dungeons and Dragons when he was struggling, and Jeff had never seen him happier than once he chose his name and began living his life authentically.
“It just drives me crazy that people don’t respect those things,” Jeff said. “It’s a simple thing to let somebody else have joy in their lives.”
As a public school teacher in Texas for more than two decades, Sheila Holsinger has seen the destructive influence of repressive LGBTQ+ policies on children. While she begins her classes by asking for students’ preferred names and pronouns, even asking if they are out to their parents so she can respect their boundaries, her office-mate refuses to use students’ chosen pronouns.
Her parents may have their disagreements with some of her political beliefs, but ultimately the Holsinger family is tied together by their ethics and their commitment to “basic human decency,” Sheila said.
Disagreement can breed understanding — or create barriers
Not everyone has the luxury of starting from a place of agreement with their parents. Before the coronavirus pandemic, 21-year-old Michelle Lu, a junior at USC majoring in business administration, was too busy to pay attention to politics between school and extracurricular activities.
When she was stuck inside for months during lockdown, Lu became more politically aware and felt a responsibility to combat the misinformation her family consumed from Vietnamese news outlets. Growing up in a heavily Vietnamese community in San Jose, California, Lu lived with her mom and her mom’s eight siblings, who faced a language barrier in American media.
“There’s so many Vietnamese immigrant kids that … end up in arguments or are trying to educate their families,” Lu said. “It’s really hard to translate from Vietnamese to English, so it’s hard to help our families understand what we understand.”
Due to the language barrier, Lu said her family got most of their information from Vietnamese outlets, many of which promote “very extreme takes.” Despite voting for former President Barack Obama, Lu describes her family’s views as conservative and remembers trying to convince her family in 2020 not to vote for President Donald Trump due to his views on international isolationism.
“We ended up fighting or arguing and then I ended up crying and that’s how it ends,” Lu said. “And then from there, my mom was like, ‘We’re not talking about politics in this household anymore,’ so we just did not talk about it.”
Since heading to college, Lu has been able to have nuanced conversations with her mom about other salient issues such as abortion rights that end in a much more understanding fashion. More than anything, Lu cites her experience with her family as allowing her to interact with those who disagree with her.
“It helps me see both sides, and I’m able to not be as closed-minded when it comes to a different view,” Lu said. “But it definitely shows that you can come from the same environment and think differently.”
Sofia Coen, 20, came to USC from Nicaragua, where she was active in the 2018 political crisis, after which her family had to flee the country due to their political beliefs. As a junior majoring in international relations, Coen has become more involved in U.S. politics and been exposed to a more socially progressive environment.
“I had never really seen queer people in public,” Coen said. “College was really monumental for me in just strengthening and learning more about the political opinions I thought I had.”
Despite her family advocating for civil rights in Nicaragua, Coen says they avoided confrontation about major political divides. Coen attributes that partially to her parents infantilizing her and her siblings.
“We were very much dismissed as children in our political opinions,” Coen said. “They would not engage with us in any sort of discourse [in which] we didn’t agree with them.”
When it comes to personal issues, though, confrontation cannot always be avoided. Coen recalls a conversation with her dad about a year after she came out as queer, and she again felt like her experience was invalidated due to her age.
“Essentially, the conversation ended on his belief that I have no idea what I want because I’m young,” Coen said. “I kind of had the choice of whether to keep defending my queerness or just kind of give up.”
Coen says she has mostly stopped having those conversations with her parents in an effort to protect herself. While some families can push through disagreements to come to a wider understanding of one another, respect for children’s opinions is still a barrier for others across cultures.
Growing up in the thick of it
Jennifer Nehrer, 20, has been attending protests and political events for as long as she can remember. Growing up in the District of Columbia, life was always political. From watching Obama’s first inauguration up close at age five to attending a protest outside the Cuban embassy after gymnastics practice, Nehrer’s parents didn’t shy away from exposing her to politics.
Nehrer, now a journalism major at USC, describes her parents as “resist lib-types,” being fairly establishment Democrats, while she is more left-leaning or progressive. D.C. is largely Democratic, and Nehrer said that being surrounded by that opinion certainly shaped her own views.
The influence of parental political ideology is evident in younger teens who are likely to still be living at home. Among teens aged 13-17, 81% whose parents are Republican or lean Republican identify the same way, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. Similarly, for teens whose parents are Democrats or lean Democratic, 89% percent share those beliefs.
For Nehrer, that not only included her home life, but also her formative years at school. Nehrer went to a Jewish day school for elementary education as well as Jewish sleepaway camps, and these places colored her views on the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
“I’m pretty sure the first time I ever heard the word Palestine was seventh grade,” Nehrer said. “They didn’t say anything negative [about Palestinians], they just didn’t mention them at all.”
Nehrer said it wasn’t any one person who broadened her perspective, but the internet. She cited the Great March of Return in 2018 as a pivotal moment in her thinking, saying that it was a gradual change from “twelve years of cognitive dissonance” to recognizing the narrative control of the “American Jewish establishment.”
While Nehrer agrees with her parents on most issues, this is not one of them. She described both her parents as subscribing to that American Jewish establishment, and that her father believes the boycott, divest and sanctions movement is antisemitic. She attributes those beliefs largely to the education both she and her parents received that came solely from one side of the issue.
College has generally pushed her further to the political left, but her views have not changed fundamentally. She said the greatest influence has been meeting more Palestinians and people from all backgrounds.
On the topic of defunding the police, Nehrer has differed from her parents, but she has been able to find enough common ground to have a productive discussion with her dad.
“Neither of us were yelling at each other … that was lovely,” Nehrer said. “It was like, so what’s going on? Where are you coming from? Where am I coming from?”
Ultimately, Nehrer recognizes that changing her dad’s beliefs won’t change the world, but she is still willing to have those deeper conversations.
“He’s a 60-year-old man and he goes to rallies sometimes, but he’s not a lawmaker,” Nehrer said. “He’s not being actively bigoted, so he’s not really my biggest problem right now.”
Lessons learned across generations
Parents may not intend to impart their politics on their kids, but they certainly do. Whether it is by promoting morality in their political beliefs, opening kids up to more viewpoints or shaping their worldview entirely, the politics expressed in a child’s formative years have an impact.
And for the older generation, there is hope for the future.
“I want [our kids] to be able to be more outspoken and change the world where I wasn’t able to,” Jeff Holsinger said. “Putting my kids out in the world, maybe they can change it where I failed.”