Instructions for the Future: How to Teach a Child Hope in a Dying Democracy
What a failing democracy teaches children about power, and how we interrupt the lesson
We are building a fairy garden while the country attempts to eat its young.
The plans have become elaborate. There will be paths winding through the trees, small houses tucked into roots, flowers planted where they might appear to have arrived by magic, and enough municipal infrastructure to support an entire civilization of creatures who have contributed nothing toward the property taxes. My husband is doing much of the daily labor, while our daughter follows closely behind as an uncompensated site inspector, offering the confident oversight traditionally associated with people who can’t yet read a blueprint.
Our youngest son is conducting an independent investigation into gravity by dropping every available object from his highchair, or really, from wherever he happens to be. Our oldest is learning the more complicated physics of being human, including what happens when a feeling becomes too heavy to hold and how to set it down without throwing it at someone else. Around them, trees are finding their places, strawberries and blueberries are multiplying, tomatoes are recovering from an unauthorized inspection by the deer, and the land we can finally call ours is slowly becoming the world we imagined when it still belonged to someone else.
Then I come inside and read the news, which is where the arrangement becomes psychologically questionable. I spend much of my working life studying what powerful adults are doing to the world, an occupation that’s not especially conducive to relaxed optimism. I read about democratic institutions being dismantled by people who speak of the Constitution with the reverence normally reserved for family heirlooms moments before listing them on Facebook Marketplace. I watch public protections stripped away, cruelty converted into policy, and the future treated like an asset our leaders intend to liquidate before the children are old enough to ask where it went.
Then I close the computer and walk back outside, where my daughter is waiting to show me where the fairies will live. I have begun to wonder what an informed mother is supposed to tell her children about the world. I know too much to promise that everything will be fine, but I love them too much to teach them that nothing can be.
Children are often given a softened version of reality in which adults are generally competent, good people eventually win, institutions exist for the reasons printed in the brochure, and someone responsible is paying attention. It’s an understandable arrangement. Childhood should contain some shelter from the full force of adult failure, particularly because children have limited political authority and are notoriously underrepresented in committee hearings.
Still, they eventually notice the smoke, even when we refuse to tell them what’s burning. They hear adults talking in the kitchen. They see fear move across a parent’s face before it is rearranged into something more reassuring. They notice that the weather is behaving strangely, that people are angry, that money is tight, that certain families are treated as threats, and that the grown-ups who claim to be in charge seem to have misplaced both the instructions and several essential parts.
My children may not understand every headline, but they understand me. They can hear when my voice changes and see when part of my attention remains trapped inside something I’ve read. If I tell them that everything is fine while behaving as though the horizon has caught fire, I’m not teaching reassurance. I’m teaching them that truth is something adults conceal with a pleasant expression.
Telling children that nothing is wrong doesn’t protect their trust; it teaches them to doubt their own perception. The answer, however, can’t be to empty the contents of our adult terror into their laps and congratulate ourselves for respecting their intelligence. Children deserve the truth, but they shouldn’t be expected to carry it at its full adult weight. They didn’t create these emergencies, and “the children will save us” is often a sentimental way of assigning them a cleanup job. There must be a way to tell them the world is wounded without teaching them that it’s lost.
