… for being a good role model to boys—or, more precisely, an excellent cautionary tale.
I watched most of the debate with my 10-year-old son last night (he bugged out ~20 minutes from the end because “it’s getting boring and just repeating itself.”) Overall, he was baffled and appalled, and more than a little embarrassed.
I think we all saw the embarrassment coming (including the good folks who advised not letting children watch): Talk of the #TrumpTape had my kid covering his head with a blanket (in part this owes to the boy being a tad non-neurotypical; the concept that someone might purposefully touch someone who didn’t want to be touched is sort of existentially dreadful to him).
As for the bafflement, my kid just couldn’t get his head around anyone wanting anything to do with Trump, based on what he was seeing on the screen, let alone thinking the man would make a good president.
And the idea that he might ever be considered to anything like that man? That appalled him. In his own words, Trump was “not responsible, reliable, or trustworthy.”
So, if nothing else, we’ve at least got a new and effective bogeyman, a debased, debasing bad-touching Struwwelpeter of the soul:
“Dammit, kid: Wash your hands, do your chores, then help the lady next door by shoveling her walk—or else you’ll turn out like Donald J. Trump!”
UPDATE Oct 11, 2016: Another debate nugget that just came to mind: When the issue of Trumps “ban on all Muslims entering the country” was raised, my kid shot up, aghast, and shouted “But that violates core democratic values!” (He has a class at school called “Core Democratic Values”—which is basically, content wise, the class we called “Civics,” but that clunky phrase, latched to his very real and visceral distress, really cracked me up, so I thought I’d share.)