Bad President/ Good President: How Children Today View the Presidency and its Officeholder as Opposed to Children of the Past.

The study of the political socialization of children has seen a significant lapse in research since the 1950's and 1960's. Indeed, most scholars still look to Fred Greenstein's Children and Politics (1965) for information on youth political socialization when they conduct research today. The purpose of this paper is to update contemporary understanding of children's political socialization and development, and specifically political comprehension and cynicism regarding the President, by asking questions such as "What changes have taken place in children's political beliefs since the Greenstein work?" and "Are the children of today as politically optimistic as they were in the last century?" and "How do the children of today view the President of the United States?" Using survey data that replicates Greenstein's original study, we examine the political viewpoints of over 2000 children in 2005 in the third through the twelfth grades. Specifically, we look at today's children's evaluation of the office of the presidency and their approval rating of the officeholder, compared with the children of the past. We find here that although the children of the new millennium still view the office of the presidency with high importance, they are willing to negatively evaluate the President himself in ways not even suggested in the studies of the past. In addition, we find that optimistic presidential evaluation is directly related to education level, and that the highest approval ratings emerge with the third grade responses, while the lowest come from the high school students. A lack of consistent evaluation of children's political development over the past fifty years makes the suggestion of an evolution of political socialization impossible. However, these new data propose that children today begin to form political opinions, significantly, negative opinions, in ways that were never observed nor recognized in the past. As a result, there needs be a call to arms of sorts to re-examine the voters of tomorrow for the changes and cynicisms that are taking place in their political beliefs far prior to their voting ability at eighteen years old, and possibly as early as the third grade. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]