Seattle might be a hub of progressivism — but Stacy Manning and Katy Faust say raising conservative kids there is entirely possible, if you parent with purpose.
In their new book “Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City: Teaching Historical, Economic, and Biological Truth in a World of Lies,” the two Seattle moms share how they’ve managed to inoculate their seven children between them against wokeness.
Faust and Manning teamed up to write the book in the depths of the pandemic, when they realized that “the world was melting down, but our kids were actually thriving.”
“The culture of fear was so palpable — but not in our families,” Manning, a 51-year-old mom of three, said.
All in all, they say it’s about striking a delicate balance between sheltering your children from outside influences and allowing them to freely engage with ideas.
“We have friends who are uber-sheltering their kids and not exposing them to any of the progressive ideology, and those kids are easily captured.
But then you see the other extreme which is the total over-exposure,” Faust, 47, said. She and her husband Ryan, who is a Baptist minister, have four children aged 14 to 20.
“Both of those are failure options.”
Instead, the moms advocate what they call a “trivium approach” to parenting, a phrase taken from how Medieval universities were organized.
The “trivium approach” separates child development into three distinct stages: grammar (developing knowledge), logic (developing understanding), and rhetoric (combining knowledge and understanding).
In the elementary school years — the “grammar” phase — the authors suggest going into protection mode.
“Those are the sheltering years — filtering out all the garbage and nonsense in these years is so essential because they are little sponges at that point in time,” Stacy, a stay-at-home mom and self-described “side-hustle professional” told The Post.
She and her husband, who works in the automotive industry, have three children who are 11, 16, and 18.
The middle school years — or the logic phase — is when the moms say kids need to be taught to critically engage with ideas, especially competing ones.
“This is where they’re ready to do something with the information that you’ve instilled in them in the elementary school years. This is when they are ready to critically think through competing ideas,” Katy, who is the founder and president of a children’s rights non-profit called Them Before Us, explained.
She says she expects her kids to know more about competing ideologies — like critical race theory, socialism, and the 1619 Project — than any of their peers.
Both Manning and Faust sent their kids to public schools in Seattle and say, in their experience, the middle school years are when “woke” ideology comes at them full force.
“Middle school in a blue city is the season where the gloves come off, and there’s nothing but social justice activism. So they need to be prepared,” Stacy said.
Katy added that parents must also be ready to answer tough questions as a result: “It’s so important to be prepared to give them honest, satisfying answers to honest questions, whether it’s about religion, the political landscape, or friendships.”
By the time kids get to high school, they say the “work is done” and parents need to transition from an instructor role to a consultant role.
“This is the opportunity for you to step back and just watch your kid take on the world and start changing hearts and minds on their own,” Stacy explained.
“When you are parenting in a hostile culture, you need a very intentional age-appropriate strategy for making sure that your kids are grounded in what is true and beautiful so they can fight back against the lies that the culture is throwing at them,” Faust told The Post.
They hope that their success stories from a far-left city can inspire hope for other parents fighting the culture war.
“It doesn’t matter if your kids are home schooled or private schooled or public schooled or if you live in Seattle or if you live in a small town in Iowa,” Katy said. “Every parent is concerned with protecting their kids from this insanity.”
