Kids’ political concerns are surprisingly grownup

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.

Sahasra Yellepeddi, 16, has lived in Allen, Texas, all her life. Last year, a gunman killed eight people and wounded at least seven in an outlet mall there, one “I’ve been going to since I was born,” she told me.

“I realized that these issues that we’re hearing about in the news, gun violence being one, are not abstract, but they’re affecting everyday Americans,” Sahasra said.

Sahasra is the development director of the High School Democrats of America, the country’s official high school Democratic organization, and while she won’t be old enough to vote in November, she’s an enthusiastic supporter of Kamala Harris. She appreciates the vice president’s stances on gun reform and reproductive rights, and seeing a Black and Indian American woman in a leadership role “really resonates with me as an Indian American myself,” Sahasra said.

Sahasra may be more politically engaged than some of her peers, but according to scholars and educators, lots of kids are paying attention to politics right now — and not in the ways we adults have come to expect. 

Media outlets (and adults more generally) tend to associate young people with a particular subset of issues such as climate change and the war in Gaza.

In fact, teens’ top political concerns look a lot like those of many grownups: They’re just as likely, if not more so, to worry about affordable housing or the national debt as they are about rising sea levels. Indeed, Sahasra listed “the housing crisis and the increased cost of living” alongside climate and safe schools as big issues that matter to people her age.

While kids may not be radically different from adults when it comes to their priorities, they are at a different stage of life, coming to political debates with a fresh perspective and not yet exhausted by decades of gridlock and argument. And though they are far from immune to polarization, they may have some lessons for adults about how to have productive and respectful conversations about politics.

“They are always surprised how much adults will argue,” said Shari Conditt, a government teacher at Woodland High School in Washington state.

Kids crave economic stability right now

Children have some concept of government as early as kindergarten, said Christopher Ojeda, a political science professor at UC Merced who has studied how people form their political ideologies. Asked about the government, young kids might draw a picture of a police officer or the White House, he said. 

In elementary school, children might start voicing support — or distaste — for a political party, but often “they don’t really know what that means,” Ojeda said. “They’re kind of just parroting either parents or peers.”

By middle and high school, kids start to have a “deeper understanding of where the parties stand on different issues,” he said. Historically, they’ve mostly gotten that understanding from their parents, but Ojeda thinks parents have gotten less influential since the rise of social media, which allows kids to hear political messages not just from classmates and other peers, but also from influencers and activists all over the world. 

Kids are getting a lot of their political exposure from TikTok now, said Conditt, who teaches 11th and 12th graders in Woodland, a small town in a purple district of Washington State.

Surprisingly, however, they care about a lot of the same things adults do, even the boring policy issues. When Conditt asked her students to write down the top issues for them in November’s election, responses about the economy were by far the most common, with some students listing specific concerns like “affordable housing,” “inflation,” “gas prices,” and even “the national debt.” 

That’s a lot like what adults tell pollsters every day: The economy was also the top issue in a September Pew poll of registered voters, with 81 percent listing it as very important to them. It’s also in line with polls of 18- to 29-year-olds, who consistently rank the economy as a top concern.

Conditt’s students listed “border control,” “abortion rights,” “affordable health care,” and both “gun restrictions” and “gun rights” as key issues for them. Climate change, in another surprise, didn’t come up at all. (Despite record temperatures and the increasing threat of extreme weather, climate is not a top issue for most adult voters this year, either.)

“I think that 17- and 18-year-olds want to feel a sense of stability in their world,” Conditt told me. For her students, many of whom are not college-bound, that often means “they want to figure out how to transition into the next stage of their life in a stable way,” and they want to see an economy that makes that possible.

Political divides look different for kids

Some recent polls have shown young people, especially boys and young men, skewing more conservative than their elders. In one large national survey of 12th graders, about a quarter of boys have identified as conservative in recent years, while under 15 percent identified as liberal — the largest split in decades. Among girls, the results were reversed, with about 30 percent identifying as liberal and just over 10 percent listing themselves as conservative.

Among boys, however, the most popular answers in the survey were “none of the above” and “I don’t know.” Some fear this is a sign of political disconnection — the results seem “to show how young men feel alienated from both sides of the political aisle,” Arwa Mahdawi of the Guardian wrote in 2023. 

“A lot of teenagers and youth have political apathy and tend to not care about politics because they don’t think it affects their lives,” Katie Mirne, a 16-year-old high school junior and the chair of the New Jersey High School Republicans, told me in an email.

But there are also signs that kids care about issues that don’t map neatly onto electoral politics.  A 2024 survey by the market research group YPulse found that 75 percent of 8- to 12-year-olds were passionate about a social cause or issue. The top issue they cited was animal rights, followed by cyberbullying, poverty, racism, and mental health care. When the child-focused nonprofit Common Sense Media this year asked 12- to 17-year-olds for their top concerns regarding the health and well-being of kids, mental health challenges topped the list, followed by gun violence, the effects of social media, and drug abuse.

Conditt, meanwhile, spends a lot of time discussing local politics with her students, like a recent ballot measure to raise money for education. And when it comes to more nationwide issues, she said, her students have learned to keep an open mind when talking to one another, and to “acknowledge the value of the dialogue, versus trying to assert that somebody is right or wrong.”

It’s a mindset she’s teaching them, but also one they’ve taken deeply to heart, she said. “My students live in this world where we’re talking so calmly with each other and acknowledging diverse perspectives.”

For Sahasra, growing up as a Democrat in a red state has taught her to respect differing opinions. “Living in Texas has shown me the power of politics to facilitate real change,” she said, “but it’s also shown me that politics, at the end of the day, is one aspect of my personality.”

What I’m reading

Schools are failing to support the victims of nonconsensual deepfake images, according to a recent survey of teachers.

A bus driver shortage in New York City is leading to long waits and late arrivals for students, another example of a problem I wrote about last week.

More than half of US states have now moved to ban or restrict cellphones in schools, according to a new analysis.

Do you want a Skibidi Toilet Halloween costume? Here.

At my house we are revisiting Circle, Square, and Triangle by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen. These books are about three shapes who alternately support and torment one another in an eerie landscape of rocks, waterfalls, and darkness. I think Circle is the best but they are all so good.

From my inbox

A while back, I asked readers for their thoughts on the proliferation of toys in the lives of kids today. “It’s a part-time job to keep up on sorting them, rotating them, removing from the rotation and keeping hidden from the child until they can be taken to the consignment store/goodwill,” reader Lynne Marie responded. “Forget trying to remove broken toys, that’s a lost cause. My kid loves to make a ‘nest’ which is a pile of every single one of his possessions which can cover the entire floor of his room and make it impossible to get in and out.” 

My children have also been known to nest in toys. More on this issue soon! 

For an upcoming newsletter, I’ll be dealing with the childhood torment that is lice. Do you or the kids in your life have experience with these itchy insects? Get in touch at anna.north@vox.com.