Jake on The Law - Adventure Time

Honestly, I’m not sure how you’d really explain it without also unraveling the very idea of America. One of the big things I’ve been doing these past couple of decades has been trying to unlearn all the mythology I was taught and it goes all the way back to the founding of the country, ya know? Zinn’s A People’s History was a big first step for me and they have a website with resources for teaching kids that might help as yours get older, because it’s not just gonna be cops you have to teach them about. They’re gonna get taught that Presidents are all good people, our military is always the good guy, etc…

Teaching People’s History | The Zinn Education Project

Real History: Myths of the Founding Fathers (FULL) Michael Parenti - YouTube

My kids school is basically across the street from a police station, and cops come into the school to give copaganda presentations regularly. My kids are white, but the majority of the school is racialized kids.

I also want to have a don’t talk to cops/dont trust cops talk, and it hurts me when they roleplay as cops and talk about sending bad guys to jail. I do tell them that I don’t like that kind of playing, and try to have a talk about bad guys – that there aren’t really bad guys on the sense that they’re taught.

I hope that someone here might have a good answer to your question, as I don’t have a lot of insight into this. And countering the full on propaganda that is taught to them by daycare and teachers and the cops themselves is going to take some care. Luckily, I think they do listen to me about knowledge stuff.

I do know that my kids are taught about racism, and a lot of their friends are non white, so I’m considering starting from that angle.

By the time I was about 10 years old, my family had a collection of cop stories. They found my mom on the side of a pitch black mountain road with a flat tire and two kids in the car and got on the loudspeaker and told her to move the car somewhere else, then drove away, offering no other help. When a deranged neighbor shot me in the face with a BB gun, the cops shrugged. Another one gave my brother a ticket for bringing his skateboard to the beach that had faded out “no skateboards” signs. Another cop we knew personally was later arrested for [you really don’t want to know, let’s just say he died in jail]. Cops gave themselves the reputation they deserve in my house

“The police only protect rich people we aren’t rich. Don’t talk about it at school much cause it makes people upset. Here is a juice box”

I don’t have kids so take this with a massive grain of salt.

I don’t think it’s time just yet. If she’s that young, then a lot of what you say will be too hard to understand. Also if you unintentionally sound too bitter/angry when talking about it, she might assume she’s done something wrong. Just accept that you live in the kind of society where kids are taught that stuff and hold out until she’s a little bit older.

Then you can get into the history of the police. Talk to her about what police to homeless people. Kids have a lot of empathy so that’s a solid, real example to grasp. Police beating up people who have nothing, taking what little they do have, etc. Start pushing the relationship between the police and protecting property.

The racial aspect of it will probably be a little harder to get across. The best thing here is to make friends with non-white children and expose her to people who live under different circumstances. Kids will start picking stuff up from that.

Anyways, don’t get too caught up if she’s not a communist at a young age. I wasn’t. I don’t know many people who were. You also have people like Pete Buttigeig who was steeped in that stuff and then turned into a ghoul anyways.

To explain cops you first must explain whiteness to your children.

I’m a zoomer who has absolutely no insight on parenting. However, I have a lot of middle class white friends who grew up to hate the cops. I think what happened, besides the 2020 protests, was bad experiences many of us had in high school. There was a school cop who clearly did absolutely nothing except make kids feel uncomfortable. There were also an awful lot of kids who got in trouble for things like possessing a single joint, while nothing happened the kids who did actual bad things. Also, a lot of us knew kids who had the book thrown at them for small things like shoplifting once. And of course many of us got speeding tickets and such when we started driving (which maybe we deserved).

At some point, your kids are going to encounter situations like this. I would think that the best thing to do is talk to your kids and get them to tell you about their and their friends experiences with cops. At some point, they’ll have some negative experiences, and that seems like the perfect time to explain the broader history of policing and its impact on minority communities. It’s probably not a conversation that they need to have right away, they’ve still got lots of time to figure it out.

My son is seven years old and white. The way I’ve explained it to him is that the Cops (and our troops for that matter) are basically the Stormtroopers from Star Wars or the Fire Nation in Avatar. When they say they’re “keeping us safe”, what they really mean is they’re making sure that they and the empire they serve stays in control and that we are behaving the way they want.

He tells me “All cops are bad” regularly and when they’re around says we have to be like Obi-wan and Luke in Mos Eisley with the stormtroopers laying low. No…I don’t know if I have gone about this in the best way, I’m 100% certain many of my peers would call it brainwashing, also mostly sure he’s saying it because he knows its what I want to hear more than anything else, and I am genuinely worried I may have to explain myself to a teacher or god help me somebody in a family courtroom…but this is how I have parented my child and I will own it for better or worse.

Tell them that the only good cop is a dead cop and to murder as many as possible before they can legally be tried as adults