Interests of a 6-Year-Old Child

A six-year-old's actual interests, per child-development research, are safety (especially at school), well-funded public schools with small classes, healthcare when sick, stable non-deported parents, clean air and water, freedom from being a prop in culture wars, and a livable future. Paxton's record runs against most of these: his ATF litigation made it easier for guns to flow to people who can't pass background checks (firearms are the leading cause of death for U.S. children), his voucher push defunds the neighborhood school, his Ten Commandments mandate forces religious content on first-graders of every faith, and his deportation-first immigration posture risks the six-year-old's classmates and their parents. He earns two points: school choice gives some specific six-year-olds a different option, and his opposition to abortion can be read as protective of future six-year-olds. Talarico was a public school teacher with 45 kids in one classroom, and his platform reads like a parent's wishlist — universal Pre-K, capped class sizes, $25 insulin caps, paid family leave, universal childcare, Narcan on every Texas school campus (already 5 lives saved), Medicare buy-in to keep the family solvent if a parent gets cancer, and gun-safety measures aimed at the leading cause of child death. He drops two points because his abortion/IVF positions are to the left of where most people land when thinking about future six-year-olds, and because a child whose family takes Christian Nationalism seriously would feel his sharper rhetoric as an attack on their parents.