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Is your vote reflecting your own values, or someone else's approval?

This is the first episode in a month-long series leading up to the midterms. Heather shares the moment her daughter, in tears, asked her not to vote for Trump again, and what that moment forced her to confront about whose approval her politics had actually been seeking. She offers a thought experiment built around three questions to sit with privately this week.

In this episode, you'll learn how to:

• Ask whether your vote reflects your values or someone else's approval
• Name what it would cost you to change your mind, and who you'd be afraid of disappointing
• Recognize whether your child feels safe bringing you their hardest political and personal questions

Press play for three questions worth sitting with before you vote this midterm.

Hi, I’m Heather Hester, and I’m so glad you’re here!

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At the heart of my work is a deep commitment to compassion, authenticity, and transformative allyship, especially for those navigating the complexities of parenting LGBTQ kids. Through this podcast, speaking, my writing, and the spaces I create, I help people unlearn bias, embrace their full humanity, and grow their capacity for courageous connection.

For parents, allies, and those pioneering a way to lead with love and kindness, I’m here with true, messy, and heartwarming stories, real tools, and grounding support to help you move from fear to fierce, informed action.

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More Human. More Kind. formerly Just Breathe: Parenting Your LGBTQ Teen is a safe and supportive podcast in a heartfelt and empowering space where a mom and advocate offers the wisdom of lived experience and practical guidance and education to parents and allies, teaching empathy, kindness, love, and strong boundaries while supporting LGBTQ teens and the diverse LGBTQ community, including gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, transgender, and queer individuals, through conversations about mental health, grief, gender identity, sexual orientation, human rights, social justice, parenting, parent support, and meaningful LGBTQ allyship and allyship in action.

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In today's episode, we are going to take a deep look at what your vote reflects.

Welcome to More Human, More Kind, the podcast for parents of LGBTQ kids and anyone trying to stay human in a world that keeps hardening.

I'm Heather Hester, and here we talk about fear, belonging, boundaries, courage, love, and what it means.

Means to protect what matters without losing yourself in the process.

Your child doesn't just need a parent who's informed.

They need a parent who is grounded and strong.

Let's take a breath and let's begin.

Welcome to More Human, More Kind.

I'm Heather Hester.

We are officially in the final month before the midterm elections.

And this cycle, everything feels more urgent, more detrimental, just more to our continued democracy and way of life.

Every week this month, we are going to look at different aspects of this election.

How our country got to where we are right now, and why it isn't too late to pay attention.

In today's episode, you will discover how to tell whether your vote reflects your own values or someone else's approval, and why that distinction matters more than you might think.

I'm going to offer you a thought experiment to sit with privately this week, built around one question your child may be afraid to ask you.

And we'll talk about what it looks like to make your home a place where your kids feel safe, asking hard questions about politics, faith, and the world.

Eight years ago, my daughter Isabel said through tears to me and to Steve, please promise me you won't vote for Donald Trump again.

We were discussing politics, human rights, and the environment one evening after dinner.

And as she shared her concerns, her fears, her thoughts, cycling through topics as teenagers often do.

She was probably about 15 at the time.

She suddenly burst into tears.

And I remember being stunned, kind of sitting there in that moment and feeling like everything around me felt really, really big.

Please promise me you won't vote for Donald Trump again.

I literally was just speechless.

I loved that she and Connor, especially, felt more and more comfortable expressing all of their thoughts about politics, the world, religion, and other humans.

And in that moment, I realized I was still hovering in that am I still a Republican space.

And I hadn't taken the time to really consider all of the ways I was shifting and what felt more aligned then at that moment in time.

And that moment was the wake up call that I really, really needed.

So today, I want to offer you a thought experiment.

It isn't about telling you how to vote.

It's a question I want you to carry with you and ponder this week.

Take some time.

Go someplace where you can kind of just be quiet and alone, where the input of the world and the other distractions around you are muted.

And ask yourself, are your politics more important than your child?

Are your politics more important than your child?

This question isn't abstract for our kids.

90%.

78%.

That same research keeps finding that feeling accepted at home is one of the most powerful protections they have.

This past spring, the Harvard Youth Poll found that half of Americans aged 18 to 29 feel like people like them and their age group have no say in what the government does, and only 26 feel hopeful about the country's future.

And just a third trust that this year's midterms will be run fairly.

The good news is that they haven't completely checked out in a survey by Circle.

And when we all vote, 56% of young people said they are extremely likely to vote in the midterms.

And among LGBTQ young people, the number rises to 66%.

Economic pressure, especially inflation and the cost of housing, sits at the top of their worries.

I will tell you, my kids were home this past weekend, and that was a huge topic of conversation, was the cost of living, how.

How much groceries are costing them.

They're all, almost all of them out on their own paying for all of these things in some capacity on their own.

Their rent.

And the thought of actually owning a house someday is not something that they even entertain, which broke my heart.

Our kids are paying close attention, and many of them are carrying fear, frustration, and determination all at the same time.

Isabel's tears, eight, nine, ten years ago, whenever that was, were one version of that stress.

And I will be forever grateful they happened at home with us, where she felt safe enough to say it out loud.

So why am I sharing these personal stories a month out from the midterm elections?

Well, I felt it was important to share some really personal things that might just resonate with you as well.

I grew up in a conservative, kind of quasi evangelical household.

I was the oldest of three, and I naturally assumed many of the rules that that birth order and being a female and that type of religious and political structure would dictate.

Mealtimes were my father's pulpit.

We were there to be seen and not heard.

We're There to pay attention and not offer feedback or our thoughts.

We were lectured on his views of politics, religion and success, all of which we were expected to absorb as our own.

And we learned plenty of narrow, judgmental and unkind ideology along the way.

Love and acceptance were transactional.

They were earned by our behavior.

I can still tap into that terrifyingly strong feeling of doing something to hopefully gain my parents approval or love or acknowledgement.

Whether it was voting the same way as them or being a business major, because that's what I was told to do.

Even though I should have been an English major, really, I should have been anything other than a business major.

But the fear of my parents overruled my courage every single time I got close to questioning something.

And this lasted well into my adulthood.

I'm not proud of that, but I share that because I think that there are others out there who have experienced the same thing.

The more I lived in other places though, the more I surrounded myself with new and different and interesting people, with wildly different ways of thinking, the less shame I felt for questioning my upbringing and the more validation that that little voice inside of me felt.

That little tiny bit of courage that was there.

And then I met Steve and he saw in me a person I could not believe existed.

It will come as no surprise that Connor coming out really made me examine my belief structure.

When I talk about the expansion I had personally after he came out, I'm not kidding.

I had to face the fact that my critical thinking skills were rather underdeveloped and that fear and shame popped up with every tiny shift.

I had to learn to put trust in myself and in my gut, not any outside forces.

And I had to establish a truly safe place in our home for all of us to keep expanding, growing and asking questions.

Politically though, that moment with Isabel was it.

So here's the thought experiment.

Imagine your child saying to you what Isabel said to me.

What would you say?

How would it feel to say that out loud?

Sit with that and then sit with these three questions.

Question 1.

Whose approval is my vote seeking?

In other words, are you voting a certain way not because that it is aligned with your values, but because you are seeking external approval approval from someone else?

For years my vote was seeking my parents approval.

I didn't see it as approval seeking at the time of course.

I just saw it as who I was.

And it has only been in the last decade or so of untangling and healing that I realized how much of my soul I had stifled because I wanted them to see me and approve.

The next question I want you to contemplate is what would it cost me to change and who would I be afraid of disappointing?

Again, for me, that cost was that old fear, the one that had overruled my courage for most of my life.

Naming who you'd be afraid of disappointing doesn't mean you have to act on it today.

It just means you can see it.

And naming it takes a lot of the power out of the fear attached to it.

You might be able to make quite a list here, and that's okay.

Grab your journal and get to it.

And Question three Does my child feel safe asking me these types of questions or sharing their thoughts that they fear differ from mine?

Isabel's tears and words were really hard to hear and to experience.

My heart just broke.

They were also proof that she felt safe enough to say what had clearly been weighing on her for quite some time.

If your child has gone quiet around you, around politics, that quiet may be telling you something too.

We all have defining moments in our lives, the ones that inspire change or action or introspection.

And that moment that I've been talking about with Isabel was one of mine, and I have never, ever looked back.

And as I continue the process of learning and unlearning, I continue to see how much more aligned I am with the morals and the values of the left.

That is the gift of this process of honest reflection and of giving yourself permission to align with your morals and values, not someone else's and not with a rulebook you were given a long time ago.

If this story resonated with you or awakened something you want to explore further, take time with those questions and be honest with yourself.

It can feel quite vulnerable and scary when we find ourselves in those moments of questioning something that has always just been part of our belief structure and even our identity.

It's hard not to immediately jump to what am I going to say to so and so?

Or how am I going to face this situation?

It's so uncomfortable.

It's okay if it's messy.

Doing the work and becoming aligned is never linear.

This podcast, my substack, and my coaching all exist to walk with you through it.

Finding an ecosystem of support is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.

Go to heatherhester.net/start here or click the link at the top of the show Notes to access free guides and connect with the type of support you need the most.

Until next time.

Until next time.

Keep choosing to be a little more human and a little more kind.

Sam.