Train up a child…

What to Tell Kids About Elections

When elections come around, it seems there is always talk about untruthfulness. There are many derogatory remarks from some candidates about others. It seems to happen in all elections, but some are worse than others. What do we tell our children when they hear these things and even worse things about people under investigation for breaking the law, while they are telling us to uphold the law? It certainly presents a challenge! We try to teach our children to be good citizens while our officials are not showing proper examples.
We should always tell our children the truth. In some cases, we may need to limit what is told, but whatever is told should be the truth. Following is what I might tell my children if they were still young:

Our country was founded on Biblical principles. Our constitution and laws are based on the Ten Commandments. There is even a relief of Moses bringing the Ten Commandments down from the mountain on the front of our Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. We have a constitution that we can be proud of and God has blessed our country for more than 200 years.
Our country has some problems. Those problems are not because of our constitution, but because some of our elected people haven’t followed the constitution and laws. When we go vote, we should do our best to vote for the people who we believe will follow our constitution. It is hard to know the right ones and some times there may be none that are really what we would want. In those cases, we do our best to find out all we can and vote for the one who is better, but still not perfect.
One of the nice things about our constitution is that it was set up with checks and balances. Our founding fathers designed it so that no one person has too much power. We have three branches of the government. The president is in the executive branch. The congress, made up of the Senate and House of Representatives, is the legislative branch. The courts and law enforcement is the judicial branch. Each has ways of checking the power of the others, This way, if one does something wrong, the others can do things to correct the wrong.
In being a good citizen, as in all things, we each are responsible for doing the best we can do. In the end, we are not judged by how the actions of others have affected us, but rather whether we did right or wrong. We are supposed to respect those in office, but we don’t have to agree with them. What the Bible says is more important than what any person says or does.