What factors influence whether the children of politically active parents themselves become politically active, politically engaged, politically informed, or generally apolitical? In activist families with two or more different styles of political participation (for instance, one parent focusing on grassroots activism and one parent focusing on elite activism), how do children decide which tactics to employ in their own lives? Do personality similarities create a tendency to adopt one parent’s beliefs or methods over the other’s? Does activism change as children mature? Lastly, how do the children of activists integrate their parents’ and siblings’ values and activities into a distinctive political personality? Using a single-family auto-ethnography, this father-daughter research team will explore these questions through semi-structured open-ended interviews with three generations of an extended North American family whose members live in both Canada and the United States. Some, but not all, members of each generation self-identify as political activists, but their engagement takes many different forms. Topics to be explored within this diverse single-family setting include socialization into the national and local political environments, styles and tactics of political activity, identity formation, issue education and issue choice, and development of children’s political self-image in relation to both parents and siblings.
