The collateral damage of a vicious US election: children

Last month Kelly Gosey received a phone call from her seven-year-old daughter Georgia after school. She was in tears because a girl in her class told her that when Donald Trump becomes president of the United States, all black people are going to jail, including her father.

Horrified, Gosey took to Facebook to express her anger about the fears of a young child stirred up by a rancorous presidential campaign that has percolated down to the country's classrooms.

“To hear my daughter on the other end of the phone terrified that Lloyd is going to jail is absolutely heartbreaking and wrong!” she wrote in a post on the social media website.

Kelly has Irish-born parents. She and her husband Lloyd have been together for 18 years and have two beautiful children. She does not remember any time growing up in Texas when colour was an issue. At school, friends were friends and that was good enough.

“This is 2016 and I am appalled that children are hearing these types of things being said. So, support who you choose but do our children a favour and remind them that what they hear at home should not be repeated to their African-American classmates at school,” she wrote.

After the incident Georgia's teacher told the class that they were not allowed to talk about Trump or Hillary Clinton, only about the election process itself, Kelly told me.

Concerns

It is hardly surprising, given the volume of this vicious election, that children’s ears should prick up to the rhetoric on TV or overhear heated conversations between adults about the candidates. They have become the collateral damage amid all the name-calling and insult-spewing.

In the second debate, the first question to the candidates from an audience member was whether they felt they were models of appropriate and positive behaviour for the country’s youth.

Clinton, raising concerns she has heard from lots of parents and teachers, replied that "it is very important for us to make clear to our children that our country really is great because we're good". Trump said he agreed and went off on a tangent about the Iran deal and Obamacare.

Michelle Obama’s advice to her daughters – “when they go low, we go high” – has become one of Clinton’s catch-calls. One of her most effective campaign ads, called “Role Models”, shows the reactions of children to a collection of Trump’s inflammatory comments, including his use of an expletive and calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”. “Our children are watching,” says the ad.

The ad is right: the election has crept into our homes, sometimes without us realising. On Wednesday, I did not notice that a news programme had started playing a clip of Trump in full flow at a rally until I spotted my six-year-old daughter transfixed by what she was seeing and hearing. I rushed to the remote control to switch the channel. It is not so easy to flick off a conversation in a classroom or playground.

Bullying

Dana (41), a teacher in a rural town in North Carolina who did not want to give her full name, said she was concerned that teachers were struggling to help children cope by taking a neutral approach, by not addressing the issues in the classrooms that the candidates were discussing.

“I feel for teachers who don’t know how to approach that, who don’t know how to mediate this. On November 9th, we are all still going to be in the same classroom and that is the part that concerns me,” she said.

Dana’s daughter Cate (13) has heard school arguments between Clinton and Trump supporters.

“It got people really riled up,” she said. “They were saying Hillary was a liar and that she should be in jail, and they were saying that Trump’s ideas were not very good and that he was also a liar.”

Cate’s teachers do not talk about it much, she says, and sometimes she is left to intervene. “I can’t break it up,” she said. “They get right back at it later.”

At her first solo campaign appearance on Thursday, Trump's wife Melania told her husband's supporters in Pennsylvania that as first lady she would like to become an advocate for children and teenagers to prevent cyberbullying. She called on people to respect each other.

“Our culture has gotten too mean,” she said without mentioning her husband’s propensity to bash others on social media.

Afterwards, Trump’s supporters defended him, arguing that he was not setting a bad example. “I don’t know if children actually listen to adults any more,” said Gayle Schultz, an unemployed industrial manager leaving the rally at a sports centre in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.

“I don’t think he is bullying anyone . . . that isn’t in the arena that could accept it,” said Pat Smith (66), who works for her husband’s construction firm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. “He is not a child. He is not bullying children.”

No, but they are watching and listening.