Why I took my eight-year-old daughter on an anti-Trump protest

On Friday my eight-year-old marched alongside me carrying a banner we had made in our garden that morning. It explains, in her words (“human rights not border fights”), why we are missing school and work to protest against Donald Trump’s visit to the UK.

Children protesting alongside their parents for practical and ideological reasons is not a new concept – particularly for women, who remain more likely to have caring responsibilities that force them to choose between activism and childcare unless they combine the two. There were hundreds of families on the marches this weekend and every young body there brought certainty that the fight against people such as Trump will go on beyond my generation.

I am glad my daughter was there to witness and participate in the ritual of collective action when something feels wrong. I spoke to others who, like me, believe it’s our role as parents to gradually, kindly and sensitively introduce our children to the idea that all is not perfect in the world and demonstrate that our voices have power. It’s hard to balance protecting them from emotional stress and harm with inoculating them against the shock of realising that there are terrible people, huge injustices and violence in the world.

Mothers I met on the march said they had had to overcome their own and their partners’ fears to join the crowds on the loud, thronged streets. And they did so because of a shared belief that it’s important to resist the urge to cocoon our kids and instead to prepare them for the task ahead. Not that I know how best to do it – I don’t claim to be an expert. I’ve been relying on instinct and common sense and listening to my children. I will certainly screw some of it up. But I will keep trying, as I have throughout her life. Having lived in South Thanet at the peak of Nigel Farage’s personal political ambitions, my daughter has marched before, made “no Ukip” stickers in her very first handwriting and her baby brother was breastfed outside the Ukip offices during sit-ins. My daughter remembers all this with pride and a glimmer of understanding of the issues that motivated us.

For me the most important aspect of activism with children in tow is the talking it prompts before and after. Finding ways to tell my daughter that her contemporaries have been dragged wailing from their parents at the Mexican border, searching for age-appropriate ways to talk about reproductive rights and being honest about what climate change could mean for our future has been easier than I thought. We underestimate children so often, but she is eager to understand and critique the world around her, and chanted with awareness and pride. I plan to help her gather the tools she needs to eventually question the perspectives that she has borrowed from me and my husband and try on different issues and ideologies for size.

But for now I need my children to know that we care about human rights. I need them to be prepared – at an unsettling time in global politics – to take up the challenge of making a better world. All too soon they will emerge as the next generation of campaigners, politicians and parents. Our world needs them to be ready.

Sofya Schiller

“I marched today because I want Donald Trump to know that we don’t like what he’s doing. Children shouldn’t be separated from their parents and we don’t want him to come to our country.

“I found the march really fun but my feet are very tired now! I chose to miss my school sports day and it was a very difficult decision because I was really looking forward to it. But this march was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stand up for our rights.

“I think it’s really silly that he’s pushing America out of the Paris agreement. The world might start flooding, the planet will get hotter and people might die. It makes me feel upset and scared to think about it. I am very, very angry with him.

“Politicians should be making sure that everything is equal and should be allowing women to do what they want with their bodies. As a human being I want to tell Donald Trump that women can do what they want. You don’t have to be a man to be strong and you don’t have to be beautiful to be important.

“I might want to be prime minister when I’m older so I can make the country a happier place. I think I would do a better job of leading a country than Donald Trump even now, when I am only eight.”

• Rebecca Schiller is the director of Birthrights, the human rights in childbirth charity