When your kids have fewer rights than you did

We don’t know yet how our tweens and teens will react to, and change, the world they are growing into. Generational trends aren’t planned operations; they are chaos and individual inspiration and chance that only in retrospect take shape and become a quantifiable New York Times think piece.

Which is why I keep getting stuck on what it must be like for a teenager watching the news, absorbing what is going on in the world and thinking, “What the hell am I stepping into as I become an adult?” What must it feel like, on a deep existential level, to learn about a right — like the right to abortion — only as it is being taken away from a significant portion of the country? What does that do to their development and sense of how much agency they have to self-determine their futures? To their perception of government and civic involvement? 

I reached out last week to talk to Rocky Belvedere, a 17-year-old who is living all of the above, to ask about how they learned about and reacted to the Supreme Court’s June decision. I wanted the perspective of an older teen. My 12-year-old son, Desmond, was curious, too, but where some older teens feel (as you’ll discover below) the decision as a visceral threat, for Desmond the decision led more to fundamental questions about sex ed, conception, and the very definition of abortion. I’ll offer a curation of resources for the entire adolescent age spectrum below. 

But first, Rocky: 

Rocky is 17, starting to seriously think about where they will go to college. 

“I don’t want to live where I won’t have access to abortion,” said Rocky, citing higher rates of sexual assault on campuses. “I can’t imagine being forced to have a child when it wasn’t even a choice to have sex.”

They’re also worried about the potential of loss of additional rights: gay marriage, queer adoption, workplace discrimination, privacy. Things that once felt like settled law are suddenly in play again. 

So what is Rocky doing (aside from looking for a college in a more progressive state)? 

Learning as much as they can about what’s happened and what could happen. Then, formulating a plan that is as much about protecting their peers as themselves. 

As we discussed in last week’s newsletter, knowledge is a powerful antidote to fear and anxiety. Rocky primarily gets their news updates via TikTok, where they say they feel more compelled to both follow and care about the news because, they said, “Hearing from people with lived experiences with these issues helps me to look at things from different angles.” 

Rocky follows up what they discover on TikTok with research via more traditional sources: books, media reports, academic papers. 

Rocky had another cool idea:

“When you get to choose your topic for school research projects, use that opportunity to study something that you are interested in,” said Rocky, who recently completed a project about trans youth and health care. 

Merging academic rigor with subjects kids are passionate about creates ideal conditions for developing important critical thinking skills: fact-checking, learning about a topic from multiple sources, and understanding how to synthesize all that information. 

If you’re ready to talk to your kid about autonomy and agency, make sure you consider the following first: 

• Reflect on and understand how you feel about all of this and where you stand before broaching the topic with your child.
• If you are co-parenting, are you and your partner on the same page? If you don’t agree on the Roe decision, make sure you do agree on the approach you will take with your kid. 
• Calibrate your approach to your specific kid. Understand what your child is emotionally or psychologically prepared to think about and how you would even know. This New York Times quiz about reproduction may be a good place to get a better understanding of what your teen/tween knows (or thinks they do) and a jumping-off point for conversations. 
• Think about the impact of this discussion. If the focus is a dire and hopeless erosion of rights, you may end up with a kid who is, well, dire and hopeless. Find ways to point to examples of activism and even triumphs. In Vox’s new Even Better section, Alex Hazlett pulled together some approaches for kids of all ages — for younger kids, you can start with basics, but as you navigate these conversations with your teens, there is value in having an open and frank discussion about how abortion connects to lots of other things: body autonomy, sexism, racism, and family planning. 

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• Show them some examples of their own agency by gifting How I Resist: Activism and Hope for a New Generation, a collection of essays about how a diverse crew of activists found their voices and their way.
• As a Vox colleague and I discussed this week, kids are in many ways disenfranchised. But as this list of 10 documentaries about teen activism show, they are still capable of having a huge impact on the world and their own lives. 
• If your teen has specific questions or is looking for practical answers about rights, gender, and sexuality, Planned Parenthood curates a robust set of guides for teens covering everything from gender to relationships to boundaries and understanding the appropriate conversations to be having with the doctor about sexual health.
• When all else fails, pop culture is there with the movie we need: The 2021 movie Plan B uses a time-tested comedy device — the buddy road trip — to explore already imperfect access to emergency contraception.

I would love to hear from you. How are you approaching conversations about Roe, autonomy, and agency with your kids? Send me your thoughts at liz@vox.com. 

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