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Children have a place on the frontlines of the culture wars

What Should We Do When the Culture Wars Invade Our Children’s Lives?

Children have a place on the frontlines of the culture wars
Front windshield and lights of a traditional yellow school bus.
Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash
@cindywangvbrandt
Activist and podcast host Cindy Wang Brandt is a revolutionary voice within the parenting community and progressive causes. Cindy Wang Brandt is host of the Parenting Forward podcast and the Parenting Forward conference. She is a well-known advocate for social justice and healthy parenting through her large social media platform, podcast and published work. Brandt is the author of Parenting Forward: How to Raise Children with Justice, Mercy and Kindness and her first children’s book, You Are Revolutionary, will be published by Beaming Books (October 12, 2021). Cindy is widely published in Huffington Post, Sojourners, SheLoves Magazine, Geez Magazine, Taipei Times, and more. She holds a Bachelors in Business from Wheaton College and Masters of Arts in Theology from Fuller Seminary. Brandt founded and moderates the popular Facebook group (over 20,000 followers) “Raising Children Unfundamentalist,” a space where people share experiences of religious oppression and how best to raise children with healthy spirituality – in whatever philosophy or faith of their choosing.
@parentingforward

You know when there’s a controversy whether to include both sides to the Holocaust in a Texas school district, the culture wars have once again invaded the children’s lives. Similarly, in Southern Pennsylvania, books by people of color were banned (or per the official Central York School statement: “frozen” for an entire year.)

These discussions by the school boards are impacted by the bills passed in government, as in the case of House Bill 3979 requiring public school teachers to present various points of view when teaching about current events and social issues. Often, the impulse to clutch pearls and to “think of the children” is a rhetorical device to further political causes. As the larger climate in a racialized society such as the United States grapple with a history of slavery and the fight for racial justice--with the most current iteration being the black lives matter protests in the summer of 2020--what the children learn in schools have become a new battleground for those who land on opposing sides of this culture war.

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