ON Nov. 3, Tuesday coming up, remember to vote and remember to take the kids with you to your polling place.

If you've voted by mail, I sure hope you included the youngsters, well, teenagers too, in the process.

My neighbor, seeing a local candidate's lawn sign at my house, wanted to know, "Yo, what's up with this?"

Quiet as it may be kept, in communities across the nation, it is time once again to act as involved and responsible citizens.

VOTE!

But why involve the children who aren't eligible to mark a ballot before they are 18 years old and registered to vote?

But they can vote and the little ones are thrilled with the opportunity. Polling places have a practice machine and while the "pretend ballot" doesn't make it into the all-important ballot box, youngsters enjoy the exercise in democracy.

Do the kids actually know what they're doing? Well, that depends on their age and the household environment we parents provide.

Will teens actually be willing to accompany a parent to the polls? How many of us vote before heading to the job site or vote heading back home at the end of the workday?

The big thought is how many of us drop a teen at the school campus in the morning and may well pick them up at the end of the day?

As parents, we know that willingness is all too often a concept quite foreign in the life of those between the ages of - readers, please put in your own numbers on this one.

Exercises in the democratic process are something we owe our children long before the concept gets presented to them in school.

While "My house, my rules" ought to be the order of things; democracy should have a place in every household allowing children to help make decisions with their vote.

Conversation at the family dinner table can most certainly include some vocabulary building activity that would include candidate, ballot box, election, registrar of voters, register to vote, politician and the list goes on.

The women's suffrage movement gets a big round of discussion, and why not have the teenagers, who spend so much time on the Internet, anyway, do a little research and lead some dinnertime conversation with their findings?

When did African Americans gain the right to vote and what did they do to gain this right?

With this type of conversation, the kids will undoubtedly mutter their universal and often heard comment: "Boring."

But it's not our job as parents to be the entertainer of the year. It's our job to prepare our children for the responsibility of adulthood.

It's our job to run our household in a manner that recognizes we, as parents, are the first teacher - we should be the teacher of the year.

Find out everything you need to know - so you can tell it to the kids - by visiting The League of Women Voters-sponsored website at www.smartvote.org.

Oh, and there's room at your polling place for strollers - your children are never too young to go with you on election day.

This blog can be found in our column section where you can print a copy or e-mail to someone
            http://talkaboutparenting.org/pages/articles.php