I spent a lot of my life hiding, or at least obscuring, my political opinions. It didn't do to share them much in grad school, where it might have limited my career options. Nor was it a good idea to share them when teaching, because students often had the (incorrect) idea that if they simply repeated my opinions back to me they'd get an A. Nor also as an HR professional, for reasons I hope are obvious.
A related skill I picked up in grad school is the tendency to be protective of my opinions, to hold them a little contingently, to be aware of ways they might be attacked and prepare against those, to allow graciously for people of good will to differ.
It was sometime around 2020 that I realized I could not do any of this with my family, and especially my kids. They will learn their values from somewhere, it may as well be from me, and I owe it to them to say what I actually believe without qualification or fear of the consequences of saying it.
(Thus a summer study of WWII with my eldest child, which had many aims, but above all to instill "it is never morally acceptable to kill another human being" as a core tenet of morality.)
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