For many teenagers, civic participation can seem like something that begins at the age of eighteen. That’s when Americans can gain the right to vote, an action that has long served as the most explicit measure of democratic participation.
But teenagers are already affected by the decisions made by elected officials and community leaders. School policies, public spaces, local funding, transportation laws, and more all shape teenagers’ daily lives, even when those same young people aren’t eligible to vote on the people making decisions.
This creates a complicated position for young people, who are members of their own communities and often expected to understand and follow decisions made by people and institutions in power, but are also limited in their formal power to influence those decisions.
This tension has pushed young people into other avenues of creating change and participating in the public conversation: youth advisory boards, student journalism, community organization, volunteering, and advocacy all give young people opportunities to contribute to their communities before they’re old enough to legally cast a ballot.
According to CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, young people participate in civic life in many ways beyond voting, including volunteering, discussing politics, contacting public officials and participating in community organizations. In its research on youth civic engagement, CIRCLE emphasizes that civic participation is a skill and habit that develops over time, rather than starting suddenly when someone turns 18.
National politics tend to dominate traditional news outlets, but local community issues are often ones that teenagers encounter more directly and have greater opportunity to voice in. A teenager might depend on a particular public transportation route to get to school, spend after school time at a publicly funded space like a library, or have opinions about how their school district handles their budget. Local governments and institutions are behind all of those decisions.
Youth councils and advisory boards are one way communities have attempted to bridge the gap between policy and youth. These groups give teenagers a formal platform for leadership, collaboration, and communicate with adult officials who traditionally control the conversation.
The quality of that participation matters, however. The simple existence of a youth board where young people are given a title and left to discuss ideas in a vacuum doesn’t fulfill the purpose of giving young people a voice; it simply places them in an isolated space where their ideas exist without being translated into real decisions.
That’s why the structure of youth participation is so important. Are young people simply being asked for their opinions, or are adults explaining how those opinions will be used? Are teenagers involved early enough to influence a decision, or are they being consulted after the important choices have already been made?
Involving young people in the conversation has practical repercussions when adults can’t fully replicate or understand the experience of being a teenager.
Consider something as ordinary as local public transportation. A city planner may understand technicalities like traffic patterns, infrastructure, and budgets, but a teenager who relies on that same transportation understands it in a very different way. They know which routes make it difficult to get home from school, which stops feel unsafe, and the impact a delayed bus might have on their entire school community.
Contrary to the common idea that teenagers are disengaged from civic life, many young people show their willingness and enthusiasm to contribute in ways like this. But while voting may be easy to measure, other forms of civic engagement are harder to quantify.
A teenager who spends several hours producing a student newspaper investigation, volunteering with a local nonprofit, or starting a social media campaign about an issue that’s important to them, may not appear on a statistic about voter issues. But those activities are still key indicators of civic engagement because they are actions that connect young people to their communities and give them opportunities to influence how other people understand local issues.
Broadening our public definition of what civic engagement entails is important because teenagers have such fewer formal avenues for political participation than adults. They cannot vote or hold elected office, but they can organize, report, volunteer, educate, advocate, and learn.
Social media has also expanded the ways young people can get involved in public dialogue. The accessibility and reach of an online platform enables a teenager to explain a local issue to thousands of people through a video, organize volunteers for a social project, or use journalism to bring attention to the issue in their community.
That raises a challenge for adults, especially those who work with young people. The challenge isn’t just finding ways to get teenagers into civic spaces, but making sure that work has a clear purpose and gets recognized in the community it impacts.
That can mean giving youth councils specific responsibilities, rather than treating them as discussion groups. It can mean giving student journalists access to information they need to effectively report on their schools and communities. It can mean designing meetings and public processes that young people can realistically attend, and experience their ideas getting not just heard aloud, but actually considered.
For teenagers, those structures make civic engagement feel far less abstract. When 18 is hailed as the magic age for the start of civic life, it can make community participation feel off limits for young people under that age. Instead of learning about government through a textbook, a student could attend a city meeting and see how a decision is debated. Instead of hearing about advocacy issues online, a young person could directly work with an organization that advocates for that issue with real impacts.
Those kinds of experiences help teenagers understand that civic life isn’t confined to elections, but exists in their everyday community contributions and the way their voices get factored into the public conversation.
Voting will eventually become one of the ways teenagers can participate in civic life, but it doesn’t have to be the first. Civic engagement can be smaller or more personal. It can mean volunteering at a community event, reporting a story that matters to other peers, or simply learning how a local decision may affect the people around you.
