It wasn’t your typical pre-Election Day tweet: “If you’re in Michigan and 18+ pls for the love of god do not vote for my dad for state rep. tell everyone.”
The author, Stephanie Regan, 23, wrote the message during her father’s Republican primary campaign for State Legislature, which he lost this month. She and her father, Robert Regan, do not always see eye to eye.
As for Mr. Regan, he was not entirely surprised by the tweet. His children have always believed in questioning sources of authority, he explained, something that he had encouraged at home since they were little. He said conflict with his daughter in recent weeks stemmed from disagreements over white privilege and the peacefulness of Black Lives Matter protests.
But he said he was proud of his daughter’s rebellious stance.
“I applaud her for what she did,” Mr. Regan said. “I think she’s wrong, but I’m happy that she’s willing to take a stand.”
In a year of protest and elections, Ms. Regan is far from the only politician’s daughter staging some form of political revolt against her own parents.
In May, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara, 25, was arrested as part of a Black Lives Matter protest in New York City. The arrest came roughly an hour before her father said he respected the peaceful protests but it was “time for people to go home.”
Claudia Conway — the teenage daughter of Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to President Trump, and George Conway, a conservative, anti-Trump lawyer — said earlier this summer that her heroes included the Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom her mother has publicly sparred. (Back in July the younger Ms. Conway tweeted: “@AOC adopt me.”) She has also encouraged her Twitter followers to vote Mr. Trump out of office. Last month she briefly left social media, which, she wrote on Twitter, was because of pressure from her parents.
This week her parents announced they will step away from their jobs at the end of the month, Ms. Conway leaving her White House post and Mr. Conway his Lincoln Project role, both citing a need to focus on their four teenage children. Claudia Conway celebrated the announcements on TikTok, with the proud statement: “Look what I did.”
Conventional wisdom has long held that the most powerful political influence on any child are the parents. A 2018 study in The Journal of Politics found that more than three-quarters of children whose parents share the same party affiliation will adopt their family’s political views. Numerous American political dynasties seem to uphold this finding: Chelsea Clinton takes after her parents’ progressivism, and Meghan McCain’s conservatism follows in the late Senator John McCain’s tradition. The Kennedy family has produced several generations of Democratic lawmakers.
But more recent political and psychological research points to reasons that young people might stray from their families’ political traditions. In part, that’s thanks to the internet and social media.
“Previously, exposure to information about politics was contained to the family,” said Chris Ojeda, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Tennessee who studies children’s political beliefs. “Parents were gatekeepers. Now they have much less control. The internet has democratized learning about politics.”
Amy Gross, a child psychologist, agreed that while young people used to rebel against the family with ripped clothes and dyed hair, now their social media profiles play a larger role.
But public political rebellions have tended to be more common among young men, according to Dr. Ojeda — which makes it all the more striking to see young women like Ms. Conway and Ms. Regan in revolt. Women’s rebellion, he said, is “more noteworthy and less ‘acceptable’ when it occurs.”
Other political scientists and psychologists think parents have always held less sway over their children than they might believe. Jeff Lyons, an assistant professor at Boise State University, said that social factors like friend groups can help shape a young person’s political beliefs.
So does the national political climate during their period of adolescence.
People who were teenagers in the 1980s tend more toward the Republican voting bloc, Mr. Lyons said, because Republicans were in power during the years most formative to their personal and political identities. People who came of age during the Obama administration tend to espouse more progressive views.
“Even if children get a consistent political message at home, their social environments provide a counterbalance,” Mr. Lyons said.
Some political scientists have found that parents’ ability to pass on their political beliefs differs by party. One study, using data that followed a group of Americans who were high school seniors in 1965, found that the children of conservative families are more likely to change their political views after leaving the home than the children of progressives.
“Democratic families typically generate a more sustained inheritance of politics,” said Elias Dinas, a professor of political science at the European University Institute, who examined the data. He attributes this partly to liberal university environments that reinforce progressive views. “More Republican kids leave their parental homes and start changing their views.”
Dr. Dinas’s research found this to be particularly true for Republican children raised in households that frequently discussed and actively followed politics. He noted, too, that his data set tracked young people who came of age during the Vietnam War, and might have been more likely to adopt liberal views because of the social unrest of the late 1960s.
But political differentiation might also be tied to a more timeless aspect of adolescence: teenage rebellion. Carl Pickhardt, a child psychologist, said the phase of childhood when young people emulate their parents comes to an end around 9 years old. Around age 13 comes the phase of detachment, when children look to differentiate themselves and express an individual identity.
“At that point, you can get the kid who says, ‘I’m going to be of a different political persuasion from my parents to express my individuality,’” Dr. Pickhardt said. He noted that children tend to differentiate themselves first in cultural tastes, like musical preferences, and move on to politics closer to their 20s. “The kid is trying to figure out who they are and what’s the way they want to be.”
Opinion: Brad West been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization
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Published Apr 22, 2024 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 4 minute read
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VICTORIA — Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West fired off a letter to Premier David Eby last week about Allan Schoenborn, the child killer who changed his name in a bid for anonymity.
“It is completely beyond the pale that individuals like Schoenborn have the ability to legally change their name in an attempt to disassociate themselves from their horrific crimes and to evade the public,” wrote West.
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The Alberta government has legislated against dangerous, long-term and high risk offenders who seek to change their names to escape public scrutiny.
“I urge your government to pass similar legislation as a high priority to ensure the safety of British Columbians,” West wrote the premier.
The B.C. Review Board has granted Schoenborn overnight, unescorted leave for up to 28 days, and he spent some of that time in Port Coquitlam, according to West.
This despite the board being notified that “in the last two years there have been 15 reported incidents where Schoenborn demonstrated aggressive behaviour.”
“It is absolutely unacceptable that an individual who has committed such heinous crimes, and continues to demonstrate this type of behaviour, is able to roam the community unescorted.”
Understandably, those details alarmed PoCo residents.
But the letter is also an example of the outspoken mayor’s penchant for to-the-point pronouncements on provincewide concerns.
He’s been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization.
His most recent blast followed the news that the New Democrats were appointing a task force to advise on ways to curb the use of illicit drugs and the spread of weapons in provincial hospitals.
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“Where the hell is the common sense here?” West told Mike Smyth on CKNW recently. “This has just gone way too far. And to have a task force to figure out what to do — it’s obvious what we need to do.
“In a hospital, there’s no weapons and you can’t smoke crack or fentanyl or any other drugs. There you go. Just saved God knows how much money and probably at least six months of dithering.”
He had a pithy comment on the government’s excessive reliance on outside consultants like MNP to process grants for clean energy and other programs.
“If ever there was a place to find savings that could be redirected to actually delivering core public services, it is government contracts to consultants like MNP,” wrote West.
He’s also broken with the Eby government on the carbon tax.
“The NDP once opposed the carbon tax because, by its very design, it is punishing to working people,” wrote West in a social media posting.
“The whole point of the tax is to make gas MORE expensive so people don’t use it. But instead of being honest about that, advocates rely on flimsy rebate BS. It is hard to find someone who thinks they are getting more dollars back in rebates than they are paying in carbon tax on gas, home heat, etc.”
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West has a history with the NDP. He was a political staffer and campaign worker with Mike Farnworth, the longtime NDP MLA for Port Coquitlam and now minister of public safety.
When West showed up at the legislature recently, Farnworth introduced him to the house as “the best mayor in Canada” and endorsed him as his successor: “I hope at some time he follows in my footsteps and takes over when I decide to retire — which is not just yet,” added Farnworth who is running this year for what would be his eighth term.
Other political players have their eye on West as a future prospect as well.
Several parties have invited him to run in the next federal election. He turned them all down.
Lately there has also been an effort to recruit him to lead a unified Opposition party against Premier David Eby in this year’s provincial election.
I gather the advocates have some opinion polling to back them up and a scenario that would see B.C. United and the Conservatives make way (!) for a party to be named later.
Such flights of fancy are commonplace in B.C. when the NDP is poised to win against a divided Opposition.
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By going after West, the advocates pay a compliment to his record as mayor (low property taxes and a fix-every-pothole work ethic) and his populist stands on public safety, carbon taxation and other provincial issues.
The outreach to a small city mayor who has never run provincially also says something about the perceived weaknesses of the alternatives to Eby.
“It is humbling,” West said Monday when I asked his reaction to the overtures.
But he is a young father with two boys, aged three and seven. The mayor was 10 when he lost his own dad and he believes that if he sought provincial political leadership now, “I would not be the type of dad I want to be.”
When West ran for re-election — unopposed — in 2022, he promised to serve out the full four years as mayor.
He is poised to keep his word, confident that if the overtures to run provincially are serious, they will still be there when his term is up.
LIVE Q&A WITH B.C. PREMIER DAVID EBY: Join us April 23 at 3:30 p.m. when we will sit down with B.C. Premier David Eby for a special edition of Conversations Live. The premier will answer our questions — and yours — about a range of topics, including housing, drug decriminalization, transportation, the economy, crime and carbon taxes. Click HERE to get a link to the livestream emailed to your inbox.
New York Times reporter and CNN senior political analyst Maggie Haberman explains the significance of David Pecker, the ex-publisher of the National Enquirer, taking the stand in the hush money case against former President Donald Trump.
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