Mayor Eric Adams said this week that caring for migrants will cost the city $12 billion.
Asylum seekers have stretched New York City to its limits, according to Mayor Eric Adams, who described an “unprecedented state of emergency” this week as he called upon New York state and federal lawmakers and agencies to offer more support.
Adams’s office estimated that the city would spend $12 billion over three fiscal years to shelter and support the tens of thousands of migrants projected to arrive over that period.
A number of circumstances have converged to push people to New York City, including the end of Title 42, the health directive originally put in place under the Trump administration during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as efforts by Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas to send people who have crossed the southern US border to states run by Democrats.
But many choose to come of their own volition; New York City has a right to shelter directive, which means the city has an obligation to shelter those who request it. However, a long-standing affordable housing crisis has also helped push the city’s shelter system to the brink, overwhelming facilities to the point that asylum seekers are already sleeping in the streets outside of shelters.
But even as Adams called on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Congress to provide more funding to care for asylum seekers and institute comprehensive immigration reform, Adams’s administration is seeking to amend the rules of the right to shelter decree, which would give City Hall the ability to suspend the right to shelter in some situations.
“This is one of the most responsible things any leader can do when they realize the system is buckling and we want to prevent it from collapsing,” Adams said in late May, when City Hall initially requested the changes.
Though Adams called Hochul and the state government a “partner” at a press conference Wednesday, it’s not clear exactly how closely the two governments are working together, given a recent court order seemingly designed to force the two parties to make a cooperative plan to manage the situation.
On the federal level, immigration policy remains in flux, too. Though the Supreme Court in June decided that President Joe Biden’s administration has the right to set criteria for which migrants to detain at the southern border and which to release, a San Francisco federal judge deemed a separate part of the post-Title 42 policy, meant to limit the number of people able to apply for asylum, “both substantively and procedurally invalid” late last month.
Congress has not passed comprehensive immigration reform since 1990 despite significant changes which have taken place in the intervening decades, such as climate change, conflict, and serious economic hardship accelerating migration. Stopgap solutions like visas for undocumented workers and paths to citizenship programs, as well as more draconian measures, such as labelling any undocumented person a felon, have all failed over the years. As a result, dysfunction has crept into every level of government, from Congress to City Hall, which is contributing to the crisis in New York City.
New York City’s crowded shelters have multiple causes — not just migrants
Over the past year Republicans like DeSantis and Abbott have been sending people to cities like Chicago and New York, despite the fact that the end of the Title 42 policy didn’t overwhelm the southern US border.
New York City’s right to shelter directive means that people without housing — whether they’re New Yorkers or not — who request a bed in one of the city’s shelters are entitled to receive it that day. But New York City is in an affordable housing crisis, the worst in decades, a study by the Fund for the City of New York found earlier this year. And efforts to build more affordable housing failed in the state legislature in April, prolonging and compounding the crisis.
It’s into that context that migrants are arriving in the city — 100,000 over the past year by Adams’s estimate. Of that number, there are currently more than 57,300 in the shelter system.
Adams has repeatedly said that the city is out of room to house new arrivals, though the administration has commandeered locations like a soccer pitch on Randall’s Island in the East River, a parking lot at a former state psychiatric hospital in Queens, and a recreation center in Brooklyn to shelter or provide services for migrants, as the New York Times reported this week.
But the Adams administration is asking to be released from the right to shelter in situations when it “lacks the resources and capacity to establish and maintain sufficient shelter sites, staffing, and security to provide safe and appropriate shelter,” according to a letter City Hall attorneys submitted to Judge Deborah Kaplan in May.
Should the courts allow such a measure, it will have serious consequences for the tens of thousands of people who rely on the right to shelter for a safe place to stay.
“The horrible irony is that, you know, things are so much worse now than they were” when the right to shelter was established in 1981, Edward Josephson, the supervising attorney for the Legal Aid Society of NYC’s Civil Law Reform Unit, told Bloomberg. “If [Adams] closes the door to the shelter, these folks will be in the subways or on the sidewalks.”
The administration has already instituted a 60-day shelter stay limit for single adult asylum seekers, though they can reapply for shelter after that period. It is also attempting to discourage people from coming to the city, claiming that there is “no guarantee” they will find assistance once they arrive.
Adams’s administration has estimated that caring for the migrant population will cost the city $12 billion through the 2025 fiscal year to provide housing, food, education, healthcare, and social services. Most of that cost, according to Jacques Jiha, director of the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, is directed toward shelter.
In June, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, both Democrats from New York, announced that they had secured $104.6 million for the city from the Federal Emergency Management Agency through a new federal Shelter and Services Program, Politico reported at the time. Although that funding will be critical for immediate-term care for migrants, it doesn’t solve the systemic problems — a lack of affordable housing and incoherent immigration policy — that brought about the problem in the first place.
New York City is in conflict with the state over how to manage immigration
Adams’s calls for state and federal assistance come against the backdrop of renewed tension between his office and the governor over the state’s role in caring for the new arrivals.
Last week, New York Supreme Court Judge Erika Edwards ordered the city to provide “a proposal identifying the resources and facilities owned, operated and/or controlled by the state” which could be used to help provide shelter and services for migrants. The state is set to respond to the city’s request by Tuesday, according to the New York Times.
Though Hochul has set aside $1 billion in the state budget for the city’s migrant programs, she has also expressed concern that the city’s right to shelter decree could be interpreted to expand past its borders. Earlier this spring, the governor had to mediate Adams’s efforts to move migrants upstate, angering some conservative municipal leaders.
“We believe — and I’m convinced — that the right to shelter is the result of a consent decree undertaken by the City of New York,” Hochul told reporters in Albany last Thursday. “The state is not a party to that, so right to shelter does not expand to the whole of the state.”
Hochul and Adams are, however, united in their calls for the federal government to do more to support migrants in New York, and have particularly asked to get expedited work permits for asylum seekers.
“There’s more [the federal government] can do, including expediting pathways to work authorizations for asylum seekers,” Adams said at a press conference Wednesday. “I have heard it directly from all the asylum seekers I’ve spoken with, they want to work.” Adams also asked the Biden administration to declare a state of emergency to “allow federal funds to be allocated quickly to help address the urgent challenges we face.”
For Adams and Hochul, high immigration levels are becoming a reality they can’t ignore; how they’ll be able to successfully maneuver that shift remains to be seen.
Despite Adams’s urgent calls for assistance, the reality is that the people who suffer most from dysfunctional immigration policy and inaction are the people seeking asylum.
Just this week, a three-year-old child died en route to Chicago as part of Abbott’s policy of busing migrants to Democrat-led cities and states, and in May, an eight-year-old girl died in the custody of US Customs and Border Protection in Texas, despite her mother’s pleas for medical attention.
The Court’s Republican majority has ground the Constitution’s establishment clause down to a nub.
Last June, a previously obscure Oklahoma state board voted to allow two Roman Catholic dioceses to operate a charter school in that state. Lawyers from several civil rights organizations, including the ACLU, responded just over a month later with a lawsuit alleging that this state-funded religious school violates the state constitution.
This challenge to the religious charter school, known as St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, should be a slam-dunk — at least assuming that the allegations in the lawsuit are correct.
Charter schools are public entities funded by state tax revenue. Among other things, the complaint points to a provision of the Oklahoma Constitution which provides that public education funds may not be “used for any other purpose than the support and maintenance of common schools for the equal benefit of all the people of the State.” And several school policies described in the complaint indicate that St. Isidore does not intend to operate for the equal benefit of all students.
According to the lawsuit, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, one of the two dioceses that plans to operate this school, has a policy of expelling students who “intentionally or knowingly” express “disagreement with Catholic faith and morals.” This includes a rule that “‘advocating for, or expressing same-sex attractions … is not permitted’ for students,” and also a rule providing that a student who “reject[s] his or her own body” by beginning a gender transition “will be ‘choosing not to remain enrolled.’”
Yet the most striking thing about this legal complaint is what it does not say. The lawsuit states explicitly that “the plaintiffs’ claims for relief are brought solely under the state constitution, state statutes, and state regulations.” It does not even mention the federal Constitution’s First Amendment, with its prohibition on laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” Before a series of recent Supreme Court decisions carved up this establishment clause, a lawyer challenging government funding of religion almost certainly would have raised some claim under this clause.
(In response to my inquiry about the decision not to include an establishment clause claim in the Oklahoma lawsuit, Heather Weaver, a lawyer with the ACLU, said that “Oklahoma law provides robust protections for the separation of church and state and the fundamental principle that public schools must be open to all students, regardless of a student’s LGBTQ status, faith, disability, or other characteristics. Oklahoma law also gives taxpayers broad rights to challenge violations of these protections, so it made sense for us to file in state court with a focus on state law.”)
This establishment clause was long understood to require strict separation of church and state — and specifically to forbid using public funds to pay for religious instruction. As the Supreme Court said in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”
But those days are long past. Indeed, under the current Court’s decision in Carson v. Makin (2022), it’s not even clear that Oklahoma may refuse to fund charter schools that are operated by a church, that seek to train students in that church’s values, and that actively discriminate against individuals the church deems sinful.
Carson held that Maine, which provided private school tuition vouchers to students in rural areas, must allow students to use these vouchers at religious schools. Private schools are, of course, private — meaning that they are not part of the state government even if they receive some funding from the state. So Carson does not, on its face, apply to charter schools — which are public schools even if they are often managed by a private institution. (Some advocates have claimed that charter schools should legally be classified as private schools — an argument that has fairly obvious implications for religious charter schools under Carson.)
But the Court’s Republican-appointed majority has relentlessly moved to shrink the establishment clause, and to expand the rights of religious conservatives more broadly. Oklahoma’s decision to authorize an explicitly religious charter school reads like the next incremental step in a broader legal campaign to eliminate the establishment clause’s restrictions on public schools altogether. And it is far from clear where this Supreme Court will draw the line and say that there are limits to the government’s ability to promote religion.
What is the establishment clause for?
The establishment clause provides simply that there can be no law “respecting an establishment of religion.” It does not explain what an “establishment of religion” is. Nor does it lay out in any detail when the government can and cannot provide benefits to a religious institution.
Armed only with this vague text, the Supreme Court has offered several competing explanations for why the establishment clause exists and what it was intended to prevent. At times, the Court has said that it exists to prevent the government from coercing nonbelievers into acts of devotion they find objectionable. At other times, the Court has described the establishment clause as a nod to pluralism — something that allows many religious traditions to thrive in the United States by forbidding the government from taking sides in religious debates.
Everson was rooted in the first of these two rationales, the belief that the government may not coerce others into religious exercise. As Justice Hugo Black wrote in that case, the clause is intended to universalize a Virginia statute, authored by Thomas Jefferson, which provided that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief.”
Everson read this prohibition on coerced religious activity expansively to include not just direct use of force against nonbelievers, but also the use of taxes collected from the general public to fund religion. As Black wrote, “individual religious liberty could be achieved best under a government which was stripped of all power to tax, to support, or otherwise to assist any or all religions, or to interfere with the beliefs of any religious individual or group.”
To be sure, this holding had limits. While Everson forbade taxation used specifically “to support” religion, it also recognized the government must provide some services to religious institutions. The government may still provide “police and fire protection, connections for sewage disposal, public highways and sidewalks” and the like to churches, for example, so long as these services are provided to religious institutions on the same terms that they are provided to everyone else.
The idea was that the state had to be “neutral in its relations with groups of religious believers and non-believers.” It could provide a religious institution with the same services it would provide to anyone else. But, if the government taxed, say, a Buddhist to pay for Jewish education, then that would violate the establishment clause because it effectively coerced that Buddhist into paying for another person’s religion.
Fifteen years later, in Engel v. Vitale (1962), Black laid out a different theory of why the establishment clause exists.
In Engel, the Court struck down a school district’s policy of requiring teachers to begin each school day by reciting a prayer authored by the school board. “One of the greatest dangers to the freedom of the individual to worship in his own way,” Black warned, “lay in the Government’s placing its official stamp of approval upon one particular kind of prayer or one particular form of religious services.”
The central idea animating Engel was that, if the government is allowed to write prayers or otherwise put its seal of approval on particular religious practices, then US politics will inevitably be consumed by religious believers from competing faiths, all lobbying elected officials to make sure that their religion receives the government’s blessing.
The Court reached this conclusion after considering 16th-century English history, when Parliament approved a Book of Common Prayer that “set out in minute detail the accepted form and content of prayer and other religious ceremonies to be used in the established, tax-supported Church of England.” This led to perpetual lobbying, and frequent strife, over just what prayers the government should endorse and which ones it should reject. Powerful religious groups “struggled among themselves to impress their particular views upon the Government,” while less powerful religious believers literally fled the country — many of them becoming early American colonists.
According to Engel, the First Amendment was drafted in large part to prevent this kind of strife among religious factions from occurring in the United States. The founding generation, Black wrote, was not willing “to let the content of their prayers and their privilege of praying whenever they pleased be influenced by the ballot box.”
Thus, while Everson read the establishment clause as a shield against the government coercing nonbelievers into participating in religion, Engel saw it more as a safeguard for pluralism. The idea behind the later decision was that, for multiple faith traditions to coexist peacefully in the United States, the government had to be hyper-cautious about picking favorites among them.
Of course, these two theories of the establishment clause are not mutually exclusive — how else could both Everson and Engel have been written by the same justice?
But the last seven decades or so of establishment clause jurisprudence has largely been a fight over whether the Court should accept one or both of these theories — and just what it means to coerce religious belief or to pick favorites among faiths.
The current Court has abandoned any concerns about pluralism and defined “coercion” very narrowly
Over time, Engel’s concerns about ensuring that the government does not favor one religion over another evolved into a ban on government “endorsement” of a particular religious viewpoint. The Court held in Allegheny County v. ACLU (1989) that the prohibition against governmental endorsement of religion “preclude[s] government from conveying or attempting to convey a message that religion or a particular religious belief is favored or preferred.”
As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in an influential 1984 concurring opinion, government endorsements of religion undercut the pluralistic idea that all citizens enjoy equal political standing. They tell “nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community” while simultaneously telling “adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.”
Similarly, in Lee v. Weisman (1992), the Court held that the establishment clause’s prohibition on coercion extends not just straightforward attempts to force a nonbeliever to participate in religion — such as if the government were to arrest or fine anyone who does not attend a church service. It also applies to more subtle forms of coercion, including the use of social pressure to encourage acts of faith.
In Lee, a public school invited a rabbi to deliver a prayer at a graduation ceremony. This, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Court, is not allowed.
“The undeniable fact,” Kennedy explained, “is that the school district’s supervision and control of a high school graduation ceremony places public pressure, as well as peer pressure, on attending students to stand as a group or, at least, maintain respectful silence during the Invocation and Benediction.” Such pressure, “though subtle and indirect, can be as real as any overt compulsion,” as it leaves a young nonadherent with “a reasonable perception that she is being forced by the State to pray in a manner her conscience will not allow.”
Thus, before the Roberts Court started dismantling the establishment clause’s safeguards, the Court recognized two values implicit in this clause: 1) the right to be free from coerced religious activity, and 2) the right to live in a pluralistic society where the government does not favor one person’s religion over the other. The right against coercion extended not just to direct pressure by the state, but also to more subtle forms of pressure such as a public school ceremony that effectively forces a student to choose between participating in a prayer or risking ostracizing themselves from their classmates. Meanwhile, the pluralistic right prevented the government from endorsing a particular religious viewpoint above others.
All of that went by the wayside, however, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022).
Bremerton is a mystifying decision, in part because the six Republican-appointed justices in the majority took great liberties with the case’s facts. It involved a high school football coach who would pray at the 50-yard line following games — in full view of students, players, and spectators, and sometimes surrounded by many of them as he was praying. There are photographs of crowds surrounding this coach as he prayed, some of which were included in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent.
Yet Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the Court’s opinion, falsely claimed that this coach only wanted to offer a “short, private, personal prayer.”
Because Gorsuch lied about the facts of this case, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what Bremerton held. No one questions that a public school employee may say private prayers while they are on the job. The question the Court was supposed to answer in Bremerton is whether a representative of the government may, during a public event, ostentatiously convey a religious message to hundreds or thousands of spectators — including potentially players who are under that government employee’s direct authority.
One thing that is clear, however, is that the ban on government endorsements of religion will no longer be enforced by this Court’s GOP-appointed majority. Instead of applying “the endorsement test,” Gorsuch wrote, “the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings.’”
And what, exactly, are those “historical practices and understandings?” Gorsuch does concede that “government may not, consistent with a historically sensitive understanding of the Establishment Clause, ‘make a religious observance compulsory.’” But his opinion suggests that the clause may do nothing else.
Among other things, Gorsuch cites favorably to Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Lee, which described Justice Kennedy’s concerns about subtle pressure on public school students as “precious,” and which declares outright that “the coercion that was a hallmark of historical establishments of religion was coercion of religious orthodoxy and of financial support by force of law and threat of penalty.” Gorsuch also quotes James Madison, claiming that Madison understood the First Amendment “to prevent one or multiple sects from ‘establish[ing] a religion to which they would compel others to conform.’”
So, while the Bremerton opinion is not a model of clarity, two lessons can be extracted from it. One is that the ban on government endorsements of religion — the mechanism the Court used to ensure that a plurality of faiths would thrive in the United States — is now dead. The other is that, while the Court still recognizes that some forms of government coercion into religious behavior are not allowed, its Republican majority appears eager to narrow the definition of “coercion.” There may even be five votes for Scalia’s position — that the government may actively promote religion so long as it does not use force or the threat of penalty to do so.
The Court’s GOP-appointed majority has even ruled that the Constitution requires the government to fund religion
One form of coercion that the current Court permits is the government may now take taxes from a nonbeliever — taxes that the nonbeliever must pay to avoid criminal sanctions — and use them to fund religious education.
Indeed, the government has been allowed to fund religious education with tax money for quite some time. In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), a 5–4 Court abandoned Everson’s strict rule against government funding of religion. That said, Zelman merely held that states could offer tuition vouchers that fund private religious education if they chose to do so. Nothing in Zelman prohibited states from maintaining a neutral posture on religion — one where the state government allows private schools to teach whatever religious lessons they choose, but where the state also refuses to fund those lessons at the taxpayer’s expense.
The Roberts Court’s biggest innovation on public funding of religion came in Carson, the case about Maine’s private school vouchers program. As the Court described this program, it allowed families in sparsely populated areas, areas where the state determined that it was not practical to operate a traditional public school, to receive vouchers that would pay up to a certain amount of tuition “at the public school or the approved private school of the parent’s choice at which the student is accepted.”
Before Carson, however, these vouchers could only be used at “nonsectarian schools.” Maine decided, exercising the choice the Court left to it in Zelman, not to fund schools that promote a “faith or belief system” or that “presents the material taught through the lens of this faith.”
In ordering Maine to fund religious education, Carson reached two somewhat conflicting conclusions. The first is that the sort of neutral posture toward religion permitted by Zelman is now unconstitutional. Maine’s program, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for his Court, “pays tuition for certain students at private schools — so long as the schools are not religious.” That, he claimed, “is discrimination against religion.”
At the same time, Carson still permits a state to “provide a strictly secular education in its public schools.” And it also “need not subsidize private education.” But, once a state decides to fund private schools, “it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”
Roberts’s explanation for this distinction is grounded somewhat in the rule against coercion. He emphasized that, under Carson, “public funds flow to religious organizations through the independent choices of private benefit recipients,” and that any parent whose child winds up in a religious school will do so only because of that parent’s “choice.”
By contrast, if a state only offered a public education to its students, and then taught religion in those schools, that would mean that parents would have no choice but to send their children to a school where they will be religiously indoctrinated. Such a regime would probably violate even the Roberts Court’s understanding of the establishment clause because it would effectively coerce schoolchildren into attending religious classes.
Carson, however, shows no regard for an entirely different kind of coercion. By ordering Maine to fund religious education, even only within the context of its rural vouchers program, the Court coerces Maine’s taxpayers into funding religious education. And the Court apparently found this kind of coercion completely unobjectionable.
So what are the Roberts Court’s limits on government programs that advance religion?
Read together, the Roberts Court’s establishment clause cases suggest that the Court probably will not neutralize this clause altogether. But they have already neutralized many of its modern applications, and they appear likely to endorse government behavior that would not have been tolerated even in the recent past.
One category of establishment clause cases that I have not yet discussed is cases involving symbolic endorsements of religion. Think about cases where the government installs a giant Ten Commandments monument in the middle of a courthouse or builds a cross on public land.
The Court’s previous decisions governing such monuments are nuanced — a short summary is that government displays of religious symbols are sometimes allowed and sometimes not allowed. But it is far from clear whether, under the current Court, any religious display whatsoever will be struck down. After all, the best argument against allowing the government to build a giant cross on the front lawn of the White House is that doing so would endorse Christianity. But Bremerton held that the ban on government endorsements of religion is dead.
That leaves the rule against coercion, which does still seem to have a little life left in it. Even Gorsuch appears to concede, for example, that the government may not send the police to arrest someone who refuses to attend a Catholic mass or fine a Lutheran who refuses to convert to evangelical Christianity.
But it is not at all clear whether the ban on coercion extends very far beyond cases involving the “force of law and threat of penalty” that Scalia denounced in his Lee dissent. Because Bremerton decided a fake case and did not actually engage with the question of whether a public school coach may ostentatiously perform their religious identity in front of the school community, we don’t yet know for sure whether the Court will allow government employees who wield authority over children to use that authority to pressure those children to embrace Christianity.
But the fact that the six justices who joined the Bremerton majority couldn’t even be honest about the facts of that case should not give hope to anyone who fears that teachers or coaches may use their government jobs to proselytize to their students. If nothing else, Bremerton shows that this Court will not be judicious in policing the line between private religious acts by government employees, which are emphatically permitted under the Constitution, and attempts by government officials to convert others to Christianity while the official is on the job.
And then there’s the school funding cases and other cases where a religious group sues to receive government funds. Carson held that private school voucher programs must fund religious education. And it also held that traditional public schools may elect to only teach secular material. But what about charter schools like Oklahoma’s St. Isidore?
It remains to be seen how the courts will handle that case, but St. Isidore has a strong argument that it is entitled not only to receive government funds, but that it is also entitled to set up a religious school that is part of the Oklahoma government. Or, to put it another way, if Carson extends to charter schools and not just to private school voucher programs, then the 45 states with charter school programs all must include religious schools that otherwise qualify to participate in those programs.
Because Carson placed so much emphasis on whether a government-funded religious school allows parents to choose whether to send their children to that school, there’s a fairly high likelihood that the Supreme Court will, indeed, extend Carson to apply to charter schools. That’s because charter schools, like private schools, typically do not compel any parent to send a child there.
In the long run, advocates of private school vouchers and charter schools may come to regret the Carson decision. By forcing states to choose between either having a single, unitary public school system, or having government-funded private and charter schools that teach religious views many citizens may find objectionable, Carson places secularly minded states in a difficult position. If those states don’t want to fund schools like St. Isidore, or other religious schools that may teach that LGBTQ people are immoral, Carson suggests that they must eliminate any programs funding private schools or publicly funded charter schools altogether.
Nevertheless, the Court’s Republican-appointed majority appears as unconcerned with this problem as it is with the problem of taxing secular citizens to pay for religious education.
The future of religion in the United States, in other words, is unlikely to involve police officers breaking into people’s homes to arrest them for skipping church. But it is likely to include far more government funding of religious activity, far more proselytizing by teachers, coaches, and other government officials who wield authority over children, and many more monuments to Christianity — all paid for by your taxes.
It’s not dissimilar from talking to other adults, but even the most well-meaning grown-ups can forget that.
Somehow, despite our best efforts, it still happens to even the most self-assured adult. You’re at a birthday party or a family dinner or a picnic in the park, and suddenly, you find yourself face to face with a kid. You introduce yourselves, there’s a slight pause, and then, even though you know better, you hear the boring question coming out of your mouth: “So how’s school?”
Why are adults so bad at talking to kids, considering each and every one of us used to be one? “We forget what it’s like to be a child,” says Tina Payne Bryson, a psychotherapist and co-author of The Whole-Brain Child. “It’s hard sometimes to relate to kids because the rhythm of our days is so different.” Our brains and habits have changed, and as adults, it can be tough to remember what it’s like to be a 10-year-old.
But that’s the key: Talking to and connecting with 10-year-olds now doesn’t require remembering what you were like at 10. Instead, it’s all about approaching them as people: individuals who have their own interests, insights, and personalities. If you’re curious, warm, and earnest, you can make a new friend — and leave your awkward adult persona behind.
Find a point of connection
Much like in an initial conversation with an adult stranger, it can be hard to know where to begin. But once you offer up an open-ended topic, a kid will often run with it. Icebreakers with a kid can be situational. If you’re at a barbecue, ask them what their favorite condiment is. Or they can be general: Did you see a funny animal video recently? “You just want to get the kid talking,” says Ben R., an 11-year-old who lives in Highland Ranch, Colorado. “You want to get to know them.” Ben recommends starting with a question about something that you enjoy. If you like video games, ask what games they like to play; if you’re a big reader, ask about their favorite recent book.
The framing is important. “Adults reach for whatever they can, and ask a yes or no question,” says Robyn Silverman, host of the podcast How to Talk to Kids About Anything. If a kid is wearing a baseball cap, asking whether they like baseball is not a good question — just like if you were wearing a baseball cap, that question wouldn’t encourage you to keep talking. Don’t despair: You can just tweak the format of a question to improve it. “Instead of ‘How’s school?’, you could ask, ‘If you were principal for the day, what’s one thing you’d absolutely change?’” suggests Silverman. “A more interesting question will elicit a response more than ‘fine.’”
That first conversational volley is all about finding a point of connection. It could be a shared interest, such as the card game Codenames, or a low-stakes disagreement, like whether dipping french fries in a milkshake is delicious or gross. “The great thing about asking questions is to find out what you have in common,” says Ben. “You’ll feel more relaxed then and can focus on connecting through that.”
Ask good follow-up questions
The next step in a good conversation with a kid? Pay attention. This is where many adults slip up. Instead of actually listening to what a kid has to say and asking a relevant follow-up question, they jump in with a long story about themselves — or, worse, offer up a weird non sequitur. Recently, Ben was waiting in line for a waterslide when the adult behind him asked what grade he was in. After he answered, the stranger, who had not previously met the fifth-grader, replied by saying that he grew up so fast. “I thought to myself, is this how adults are? They just ask simple questions, half-pay attention to the conversation, and get distracted by something else?” Ben says. “I felt like he could have just realized that I could talk the same way everybody else could, but he made it really awkward for the rest of the conversation.”
Asking a good follow-up question is all about active listening, which requires humility. A kid is a person with their own interests and expertise, and you can learn from them, just like you learn from a conversation with another adult. “Kids are egocentric in nature, and they love to talk about what they love,” says Morgan Eldridge, a clinical psychologist who recommends framing a child as the expert on what they care about. “If you don’t know anything about Pokémon cards, ask them to tell you about it.”
More key aspects of active listening are body language and tone. If you’re talking to a younger kid, physically get down on their level so that you’re not looming over them. For kids and adults alike, face them, put away your phone, make eye contact, and smile. No need to speak in a different voice, though. “There are multiple occasions where adults have talked to me with a childish tone,” says Ben. “We’re more sophisticated than they think.”
When you’re fostering a comfortable conversational environment for a kid, you should also think about safety. There’s an inherent power imbalance between an adult and a kid, especially when you don’t know each other well, and as the adult, you’re responsible for making sure that your relationship and conversation stay appropriate. “Kids need to feel safe, seen, soothed, and secure,” says Bryson. “When you smile and have relaxed posture, it sends signals of safety and connection.”
Let their enthusiasm lead
Once the conversation is moving, step back. “When talking to kids, adults make the mistake that they need to talk a lot,” says Silverman. “But people [not just children!] actually love it when you listen.” Instead, ask questions and let the kid direct the flow; they’ll naturally lead the conversation toward what interests them most.
In many cases, this means going in a speculative, silly direction, which can be tricky for grown-ups. “Adults are more logical and solution-driven,” says Bryson. “We’ve forgotten what it’s like to play.” To rediscover your playful side, you can always ask an open-ended question, or even a goofy one: If you were going to open a restaurant that only serves three dishes, what would they be? What celebrity has the coolest style of all time? Would you rather have to fight 50 mosquito-sized alligators or one alligator-sized mosquito?
No matter what, don’t dismiss their enthusiasm. If a kid loves basketball but you don’t care about sports, ask them to tell you about their favorite player of all time. If they just learned a ton about bugs in a science unit, don’t try to show off how much you know — encourage them to share instead. “There’s a power imbalance, and it seems to give adults permission to belittle,” says Silverman.
If you do make a faux pas, like talking over them or getting distracted, own up to it, apologize, and redirect. You can always say, “I just spaced out, I’m sorry. What were you saying about summer camp?” Just pick the conversation back up afterward.
Be yourself (even if that means being shy)
Kids have different temperaments and personalities, just like adults do. They don’t expect everyone to be outgoing and loud. In fact, not every kid will want you to be. “Just like different friends appeal to different people, different kinds of adults will appear to different kids,” says Bryson. “The boisterous adult doesn’t appear to some kids, and the quiet adult doesn’t to others.” Just come as you are, since kids can tell whether you’re being authentic or not. “It’s really about showing up as yourself in the moment,” Bryson says.
If you are on the quieter side, don’t worry. Kids know what it’s like to feel anxious in a conversation, too. “Sometimes you just get nervous, and that’s okay,” says Fiona A., an 8-year-old who lives in Salinas, California. “Or sometimes you need a little bit of alone time. Just be you.”
Ben suggests a trick that he uses when he feels awkward or unsure about what to talk about: When you get stuck and start to feel self-conscious, ask a question. “Even if you don’t pay attention, it diverts the conversation away from yourself,” he says. “You learn more about them, and also you don’t have to talk as much.”
Sometimes, you’ll notice that a kid seems anxious to be talking to an adult. In that case, make sure you’re projecting a warm, friendly, safe environment. Being vulnerable can help them feel more comfortable, too. “A lot of adults are authority figures, and sharing something embarrassing can make us more accessible,” says Bryson. When she’s talking to a quiet kid, she often shares a story about when the class rat bit her in first grade at the school Christmas party; her listeners are always on the edge of their seats, ready to share their own best animal story afterward. You can be vulnerable about feeling awkward, too: If you share that you often feel shy at parties, then it normalizes the kid feeling shy.
And if they’d rather be quiet, it’s also fine to share a companionable silence. “If we ask a question or two and they don’t expand, it just means they don’t want to be asked a question right now,” says Bryson. If they’re not uncomfortable with quiet, then you shouldn’t be, either.
Refer back to your shared interests
Once you’ve had a friendly conversation with a kid and found some common ground, you can start to develop an ongoing relationship with them. Just like with a new adult friend, it’s important to remember details about them and refer back to them in future conversations. Did they tell you about joining the soccer team? Ask how the season is going. Did you bond over your love of superhero movies? Ask them what they thought of the sequel to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. If you know in advance that you’re going to see a kid who you’ve already spent time with, you could send them something that you can then talk about in person. Bryson recently hosted a friend and their 13-year-old son; in anticipation of his visit, she sent him some funny dog videos on Instagram. That offers an easy way to break the ice and connect in person again.
No matter the age gap, making conversation and becoming friends always happens much the same way: capitalizing on shared interests, asking good questions, and paying attention. And once you’re friends, conversation is easy. “After I get to know an adult, it’s easy to talk to her,” says Fiona. “It’s more complex to build friendship with an adult, but once you do, it’s like they’re a kid just like you.”
Charley Locke is a freelance journalist. She often covers young people and elders for publications including the New York Times for Kids, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic.