It's easy for Alex Behr to talk about her son Eli, but she describes him as a generous and thoughtful college senior who was serious about skateboarding.
It's much harder for her to talk about his politics. Baer, 59, is a Democrat from Portland, Oregon, who enthusiastically voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in November's election. She and her ex-husband were stunned that 20-year-old Eli decided to vote for Donald J. Trump for the first time in this fall's presidential election.
When Eli brought home his “Make America Great Again” hat from college this summer, Behr threw it in the corner of his bedroom. They discussed guns, immigration, and abortion, and struggled to do so without permanently damaging their relationship.
“Facts don’t matter to you,” Ms. Behr wrote in a frustrated moment during a text message exchange about Mr. Trump’s legal battles. “I love you. Have a nice day.”
Months after Trump's victory, the two sides are at an impasse. Behr worries that her son is being swayed by conservative opinions on YouTube and Instagram. Eli feels he is simply learning to think for himself. He praises that as a quality in Trump.
“He's not afraid to say what he thinks,” Eli said in an interview. “His statements seem to come from himself, rather than him telling you what to say from some big cabinet behind you.”
For nearly a decade, Trump has cultivated political rifts within the family, opening new fault lines in the process. In 2016, as young voters turned to Hillary Clinton over Trump, it was common to see left-leaning children loudly lamenting the politics of their pro-Trump parents online and on the news.
This time, there are fresh wrinkles. Young voters generally supported Harris, but Trump's improved performance among young voters ensured his second term as president. This has exposed a different dynamic in some families, with liberal parents competing against conservative sons.
In one of several articles of its kind published in 2016, The Cut interviewed Clinton supporters about their fathers who voted for Trump. By 2024, one of the magazine's columnists was instead asking, “Can parents prevent their sons from sliding to the right?” On behalf of progressives like her.
Some liberal parents aren't sure whether to intervene. Many see his sons' embrace of Trump as an act of expected rebellion or a choice made by independent young people who deserve respect. For others, it felt like a painful rejection of the values they had tried to instill in their children.
“I had to look at myself a lot and read about it so I didn't feel like a failure as a mother,” said Behr, who adopted 10-month-old Eli from China. During tearful therapy sessions, she came to believe that pressuring her son to share her views only entrenched him even more deeply.
During Christmas break, they avoided talking about politics by watching The Godfather II and hiking in Forest Park. Eli said he believes his close relationship with his mother can overcome political differences.
“I love my mom,” said Eli, who now refrains from wearing a MAGA hat. “I want her to continue to be a part of the family.”
“Who captured my son?”
Research generally supports that parents' political loyalties are transmitted to their children. When children are young, parents have more control over their political influence. The closer you get to voting age, the more difficult it becomes to monitor the onslaught of messages.
Christopher Ojeda, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced and author of two studies on cross-generational party identification, says parents' influence may be weakening in a hyperdigital world. He said that there is a sex.
Parents decided which news channels were on the TV and which newspapers were delivered to the door. Although children may have encountered opposing political views at school, “they did not have an endless supply of information about alternative ideas to those presented by their parents,” Professor Ojeda says.
But today, thanks to social media, young people have access to a world of political information far beyond their parents' visibility or control. Many of them are aimed at young people.
In the months leading up to the election, the Trump campaign aimed to appeal to this demographic by running a full courtroom press, using podcast hosts and YouTubers to provide irreverent entertainment while validating young people's dissatisfaction with the status quo. It aligned Trump. . The move appears to have had a widespread effect, with support for Mr. Trump strongest among young white men but also expanding support among young black and Latino voters.
Before 2020, Chris and Melanie Moran, a Democratic couple in Spokane, Washington, mostly heard their son repeating political beliefs similar to their own. Moran said his tone began to change around the time of the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland and Seattle, and it became too out of control. He started listening to YouTube channels like “Better Bachelor,” which disparaged feminism, diversity, equity, and inclusion. (The organizers also support Mr. Trump.)
“I thought, 'Who's got my son?'” said Moran, 64, a marriage and family therapist.
Moran said her 24-year-old son, who voted for Trump in the 2024 election, seems to have become more masculine and drawn into online realms that affirm his fears and weaknesses. . As she became more immersed, she said she came to see the Republican Party as a defender of more traditional notions of masculinity. When she tried to fight back by explaining how much she was hurt by Trump's treatment of women, she told her that Trump's most inflammatory statements did not reflect who he really was. I remembered.
“I always say to him, 'I might be worried about you and I might be sad because I think there are things in the future that you don't understand,'” Moran said. “'But I love you more when you're hurting. It's just politics.'”
Mr. Moran, 57, an architect, did not immediately accept his son's support for Mr. Trump. “At first I was like, 'Are you crazy?'” he says. But over time, Mr. Moran backed down, believing that trying to discredit his son could result in no political discussion at all.
“Once they become young people, you can't tell them how to think anymore,” he says.
Some parents still worry about what kind of people their children will grow up to be. Kevin Bromberg, 58, a Democrat who lives outside Charlotte, North Carolina, said he was frustrated by Mr. Trump's lack of empathy for immigrants like his wife. Mr. Blomberg's offending insults and shocking remarks did not seem to alienate his sons, ages 22 and 20, from a previous marriage, who both voted for Mr. Trump.
Bromberg said he's glad they're paying some attention to politics and has told his sons he respects their opinions. But he still worries that the callousness he sees from Trump and the Republican Party will rub off on his children.
“Look, I'm not worried about whether our kids will be educated on this issue,” he said. “The last thing I want is for my children to turn out to be such cruel people.”
“I feel like no one is listening.”
Parents who have been warned not to hover like helicopters seem to understand that micromanaging their children's political affiliations is probably not setting them up for independent lives. Still, they didn't necessarily consider that the children they taught to think for themselves might one day vote differently from them.
That applies to both parents. Ten years ago, conservative talk show host Dennis Prager wrote in National Review that right-wing parents were staring down their progressive kids. “As a father of two sons, I freely admit that I would be very saddened if they went left-wing, although of course I will always love them,” he wrote, before adding that young people are left-wing. It was concluded that children have internalized the values of “Radical” universities.
Mike Rothschild, a therapist in Austin, Texas, says he often hears from families where political friction arises from sparring between older, more conservative generations and younger, more progressive generations. By the time they arrive at his office, he says, typically “no one feels heard and everyone feels invalidated.”
Rothschild added that parents often fear that their children will become a disruptive force in society as they reach adulthood. And young people are instinctively hard-wired to reject parental pressure, such as getting a nose piercing or voting for a candidate that older family members despise.
“The more strongly our parents feel about something, the more we tend to think, 'Okay, now we know where you stand and we know exactly how far to run.' becomes stronger,” he says.
In an article published in the Guardian in August, Sam Delaune, a special education teacher in California, said his political identity as a Democrat was similar to that of his father, an “old-school” Reagan Party member. I wrote that it was built in conflict with the Still, Mr. Delaune was thrown out when his own son joined a far-right message board as a teenager and eventually embraced Mr. Trump's political platform.
“Now that I think about it, I wonder if Nick's obsession with MAGA was a reaction to my upbringing,” Delaune wrote, using a pseudonym for his 21-year-old son.
Conservative young people are quick to push back against the idea that their ideology is a spectacular reversal of their parents' beliefs or the byproduct of brainwashing by right-wing podcasts and influencers. In interviews, they said they feel underrepresented in a society where gender roles are rapidly changing and are concerned about a lack of economic opportunity.
Some see the Republican Party as a safe place to voice those concerns. Max Sorokin, 19, said he was frustrated by the progressive atmosphere of the Bay Area where he grew up. Because he felt that people on the left were quick to “cancel” anyone who disagreed with them on any issue.
His decision to align himself with Trump in the 2024 election was strengthened by what he saw as a total lack of interest from Democrats in ingratiating themselves with his base.
“They didn't even try to make the young people feel sorry for them,” he says. “They kind of ignored it.”
Max's father, Alexei, usually considers himself a liberal, but says he has been careful not to impose his political beliefs on his son. He talked to Max about how some Americans fear their lives will be disrupted because of their sexual orientation, religion, or immigration status.
“I told my son, 'Look, you're blessed,'” said Sorokin, 44, who immigrated to the United States from Russia with Max in 2013. “I don't feel weak because I'm young and healthy. ” he said. And white. ”
Alexei said he still considers himself to be on his son's left, but his perspective on himself has changed. In particular, he feels Democrats have too little tolerance for conversations about ideas that question the party's legitimacy.
He began to explain what he saw as the Democratic Party's eagerness to “censor” opposing views, then interrupted his train of thought. “A lot of this is the same as what my son was saying,” he said.
