You Might Also Like: Civic Parenting

**Julie Silverbrook** (0:00)
I'm the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. This is Civic Parenting. I'm Julie Silverbrook, Chief Content and Learning Officer.
Where were you when you first learned about civics? Were you outside or inside? Were there dusty textbooks? Who was with you? In this podcast, we are exploring the many ways civic learning happens, how to make it fun, social, surprising, and even funny.
How a game night, a family road trip, and dinner table conversations all become opportunities to explore big ideas together. And how we can create spaces and moments for children to discover a civic life of their own. Our guest today is on a mission to educate the public on civics. He is a former executive producer in the entertainment industry who says he took a pivot to politics when he realized how little people knew about how government works. He wrote the best-selling book with the most amazing title, OMG, WTF, Does the Constitution Actually Say? And the children's version, What Does the Constitution Say? A Kids Guide to How Our Democracy Works. Ben Sheehan's work has helped reimagine civic education for a new generation. In Civics Made Easy, a PBS show, he explores the fundamentals of American government. Through humor, storytelling and a fresh approach to explaining government, history and the Constitution, Ben shows how civics can be accessible, entertaining and genuinely enjoyable for people of all ages. Ben, welcome to Civic Parenting.

**Ben Sheehan** (1:22)
Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

**Julie Silverbrook** (1:24)
And as always, we're joined by the wonderful Lindsey Cormack. Let's get into it. I want to talk about how we make civics fun. Ben, you've of course made a career out of helping people see that civics doesn't have to be boring or intimidating. Why do you think so many families assume civic learning belongs only in a classroom instead of being a part of everyday life?

**Ben Sheehan** (1:45)
Maybe it's because that's how they ingested it. And if you never worked in government or you never had parents who worked in government, then your education came from schools. But as we know, civic instruction in schools has been a rocky road.
We used to teach civics a ton in schools and then we kind of lost our way and lost these classes or they got shrunk or combined with history or social studies. And there has been a resurgence in the past few years. But I think it's an opportunity for parents to basically take things that are happening in the news and have dinner table conversations about it and treat their kids like equal partners and talk about unusual, strange things that happen in the news and ask their opinion on it. I think the less we rely on schools and textbooks and the more we can work in everyday examples and humor and approachable language, I think we can, you know, crack that code.

**Julie Silverbrook** (2:44)
Lindsey, I know that we talk all the time on this podcast about how we're trying to do this with our own families. I really want to focus on the humor, the relatability piece of this. How do we make it fun?

**Lindsey Cormack** (2:59)
Yeah, well, I think the home is actually a really natural setting for this because that's where we first learn about things like power or disagreement or who gets to side things. And so if you can sort of like express that as like, here's what we've done in our home, we're picking this dinner, we're going to this movie, we're taking this trip.
And then the sort of decision sets that happen at that bigger local government level or state government level or federal government level are just like magnified versions of that. And so if it's fun to figure out what you're going to do with your limited resources for your house, it can be fun to think about like, oh, are we going to get a park? Are we going to get some new like hiking trails? Is this going to be something where we get something boring like paved roads?
So like having those conversations to say like, sometimes we decide we're going to eat vegetables and sometimes we're going to have ice cream for dinner. That's how government can kind of be. It's like sometimes we're going to plant a bunch of flowers and sometimes we're going to make sure that like the tap water isn't full of lead. And I think sort of showing kids that like there's good and bad, fun and boring and all of it, but that's sort of like the richness of this sort of civic life and civic care is knowing that there's like, it's not all like carnival games, but you do get the fun when you get the stuff that like it's hard work as well.