“Did you watch the Trump/Biden debate?” a dear friend’s middle school-aged grandson — a big history fan — recently asked her. She hadn’t, so he asked her if she would watch it with him on YouTube. My friend really didn’t want to, but for the sake of her grandson, she did.

After they watched the debate, she thought about how she could show him a contrasting example, then asked him to watch a Bush/Gore debate with her. When they finished watching the Bush/Gore debate, my friend asked her grandson if he’d seen a difference between the two.

“Yeah,” he said. “In the Trump/Biden debate, they attacked each other, but in the Bush/Gore debate, they attacked policies.”

“That,” she told him, “is what a debate should be.”

Not only was the Bush/Gore debate a better example of what a civil debate should be, my friend’s willingness to watch a debate she didn’t care to see with her 13-year-old grandson, then to find a contrasting debate to discuss with him, is a great example of how parents and grandparents can help young people learn how to be civil and respectful in today’s bitter political climate.

Sadly, political discourse has devolved into nothing more than personal attacks and name-calling. Instead of debating policies and ideas with civility and respect, politicians prefer to label their opponents as evil in the crudest possible terms. This sort of labeling serves both to discredit and to dehumanize opponents and to make them appear not worth listening to.

This is the atmosphere young people are growing up in — the air they breathe on social media and in their schools and universities. Instead of learning how to make good arguments for the positions they hold, they’re learning to demonize their opponents. Instead of learning to respect the opinions of those they disagree with, they’re learning to shout them down in public forums and to demand that they not be allowed to speak.

And, yet, our young people are our future. We live in a huge, diverse country held together mostly by a set of principles and to some degree a shared heritage. But as the country grows more and more diverse and a shared heritage is less and less a reality, our only hope for continuing as a nation is to teach young people how to engage others with civility by respecting other points of view while arguing clearly and well for their own.

Young people also need to learn how to choose and support politicians who not only share their values but who can also civilly and clearly make the case for their own policies and ideas without demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents.

Helping young people learn to argue well, to treat opponents respectfully, and to make wise political choices won’t be easy, yet our country’s future depends on it. If more parents and grandparents would take advantage of opportunities to show kids a better way — as my friend did with her grandson — twenty years from now, our country could be in a much better place.