‘I Need Opinions for My Debate’—What I Told My Daughter Instead of Giving Her Mine
The kitchen table was covered in flour from the half-finished cookies my son had abandoned, and my daughter Elsie, age thirteen, slid a printed rubric across the sticky surface. She had that tight, scrunched-up look she gets when she’s about to be annoyed by me.
“We have to do a debate on school uniforms,” she said. “And I have to write down three reasons for and three reasons against, but I don’t have any opinions on it.”
“You don’t have opinions on school uniforms?” I asked, pulling the stray chocolate chips out of the bag. “You have opinions on everything.”
“No, like, good opinions. You always say I just say things without backing them up. Mr. Alvarez said we need to use evidence. So I need you to tell me what to think.”
That last part landed weirdly. She wasn’t asking for help. She was asking me to do the thinking so she could copy it down and get a grade. And honestly, part of me wanted to just do it. It was 7:30 p.m., I was tired, and the whole thing would take fifteen minutes if I just gave her solid, debate-ready opinions: Uniforms reduce peer pressure. Uniforms stifle self-expression. Here’s your evidence. Done.
But I knew that if I did that, two things would happen. She’d get an A on something she didn’t understand, and she’d learn that the way to handle an intellectual challenge is to find an adult who will hand her the finished version.
So instead, I asked her a question I didn’t know the answer to.
“What do you actually dislike about your school day? Not the uniforms. The day.”
She rolled her eyes, but she answered. She hated that she had to take her shoes off at the metal detector every morning because of the sensors. She hated that the lunch line ran out of the good pizza by the time her class got there. And she hated that Mr. Alvarez made them keep their desks in rows even though she thinks better when she can see other people’s faces.
“Okay,” I said. “So the thing about uniforms—if they exist to make everyone equal, why does the metal detector still scan your shoes? Uniforms don’t fix the actual inequalities. They just make the visual differences go away.”
She looked at me. “So my opinion is that uniforms are fake equality?”
“I don’t know. Is that your opinion?”
“I guess? But I still need to be for uniforms too.”
This was the part where it got tricky. She didn’t need to agree with both sides. She just needed to understand both sides well enough to argue them. And a lot of adults get this wrong—they think a strong debater is someone who believes their side passionately. But the best debaters I’ve ever listened to were the ones who could step into the other side’s shoes so completely that the judge couldn’t tell which was their real belief.
“Okay,” I said. “For the ‘pro’ side—try this: imagine you’re the teacher. You have thirty kids. Six of them come to school in $200 sneakers and three come in the same pair of hand-me-downs every week. You can’t control that. But you can control the shirt on their back. If you make everyone wear the same shirt, you’ve made the classroom feel safer for the kids who don’t have the new stuff. The uniform isn’t about the clothes. It’s about reducing the daily performance of wealth.”
Elsie wrote that down. Then she chewed the end of her pen. “But that’s still fake, because the kid with the $200 sneakers is still wearing them under the uniform.”
“Right. So which argument feels stronger to you?”
She thought about it. “The fake one. The teacher isn’t actually fixing the problem, they’re just hiding it so they don’t have to look at it.”
That was good. That was a synthesis of the two ideas I’d thrown at her, but she had turned it into her own thing. The key, I realized, was that I hadn’t given her an opinion. I had given her raw materials—a couple of images, a practical irritation, a teacher’s perspective—and she had assembled them into something that was actually hers.
We spent the next forty minutes doing the same thing for her other points. She picked the metal detector thing as her opening—the “fake equality” angle. For the against side, she didn’t write about “self-expression” or “individuality” because those words were too vague. Instead, she wrote about a specific kid in her grade who wears a different band t-shirt every day, and how the shirt becomes a conversation starter. Take that away, and the kid has to actually talk to people, which is harder. She had a point, and it was one I never would have gotten on my own.
The debate happened the next Tuesday. She didn’t win. The boy who went against her was very loud and used a lot of statistics, and the classroom noise level made it hard for her softer arguments to land. But she came home and said, “I didn’t lose because I didn’t have an opinion. I lost because I spoke too softly. That’s a different problem.”
That, right there, is the thing I keep coming back to. When a kid says “I need opinions for my debate,” what they’re often really saying is “I need to feel like my thoughts are valid enough to put on paper.” They don’t need you to hand them the answer. They need you to hand them a mirror, then step out of the way so they can see their own reflection clearly.
I’ve done this twice more since then: once for a persuasive essay on recycling, once for a mock congressional hearing on raising the voting age. Each time, I use the same three low-effort moves:
First, I ask them what annoys them about the topic—not what they think, but what they feel in their gut. Kids have strong guts and weak vocabularies. The feeling is there. They just need the words.
Second, I make them argue the side they hate, but from a specific character’s perspective. Instead of “argue that uniforms are good,” I say “argue that uniforms are good from the perspective of the kid who gets picked on for wearing the same shirt every day.” That makes it concrete. It’s not abstract politics anymore—it’s a person they can imagine.
Third, I give them permission to change their mind during the research. The point of a debate isn’t to prove you were right. The point is to figure out which position survives contact with reality. I tell them, “If you learn something that makes your side feel wrong, you can switch. That’s not flip-flopping. That’s learning.”
Elsie’s current debate topic is about whether middle schoolers should have cell phones in class. She hasn’t asked me for my opinion yet. But last night, I heard her on the phone with her friend, saying, “Honestly, the school’s policy doesn’t even make sense, because they let us use laptops but not phones, and it’s literally the same internet access.”
I don’t know if she’ll win the debate. I do know she’ll have a real opinion, one she built herself from the messy pile of things she actually noticed. And weirdly, that feels like enough—for now, at least.
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