When I want to approach a complicated topic with my children, I've found it's best to start with a question.

When I picked up my daughter from high school last Friday, I asked what she had heard about the Jason Stockley verdict. That was the day Stockley, a former St. Louis police officer, was acquitted in the 2011 shooting death of black motorist Anthony Lamar Smith.

She said that earlier in the day, an upperclassman had yelled out, "Black lives don't matter!" He was quickly challenged by peers, and the incident didn't escalate. She didn't find out more about the verdict until after school.

That wasn't a reaction I expected in this large, suburban high school where a quarter of the students are minorities.

"That was a terrible thing to say," I said. Some teenagers say stupid things, she reminded me. I handed her my phone and asked her to read an article about the verdict that discussed the multiple shades of "reasonableness" the judge had to consider -- what constitutes "reasonable" fear that justifies using lethal force by the police and the legal standard of guilty beyond a "reasonable" doubt.   

One of the first things my daughter said was that the verdict wasn't fair. Children are highly attuned to the idea of fairness.

Parents cannot shield kids from videos that circulate on social media about police shootings. In this case there was audio of Stockley saying he was "going to kill this (expletive)," along with police video that showed him rifling through a bag in his police vehicle after the shooting and returning to search Smith’s car before saying he found the gun.

I reminded her that we didn't hear all the testimony nor did we see the evidence that was presented during the trial. There is, however, an undeniable pattern and evidence that the system favors the police when they use fatal force, and that black men are disproportionately treated worse in police encounters than whites, I said. The widespread use of videos to capture it and social media to share it has brought the issue to the fore.

We talked about what it meant that the judge wrote in his verdict, "Finally, the Court observes, based on its nearly thirty years on the bench, that an urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly.”

Would he make the same assumption about "suburban" heroin dealers, which we surely know exist, given the widespread heroin epidemic?

By their early and mid-teens, you want your child to begin to see the world in its contradictions and wrestle with the causes: We rely on an imperfect criminal justice system. People have a right to safely protest and should do so without hurting others or their property. Some people will be more outraged about vandalism than police aggression or injustice. And, yes, the police are there to protect us, but that's not how everyone is treated.

A friend described how she responded when her five- and seven-year-olds asked what happened in the news. They were sitting on the sofa, and she was scrolling through the news coverage on her phone when they looked over her shoulder and asked. Her children are white.

She told them that a police officer had killed a man, but he was not going to jail for it and that people were hurt and upset about that. The inevitable follow-up was: How can that happen?

She said to them that sometimes people are treated differently based on the color of their skin. She compared it to bullying, a concept younger children have already heard about.

"Protests are a way of (talking to) a system that is bullying people (and telling it) to stop," she said. The difficult thing for her is also making sure that her children don't fear the police because of what they are hearing and seeing. "I want them to know if they are ever in trouble, they need to go to the police officers."

If it's a difficult conversation for white parents, it's even harder for parents of black and brown children. Or those who live in communities where the threats to them are less theoretical and more immediate concerns. The Disaster and Community Crisis Center at the University of Missouri published a video last year encouraging dialogue, establishing a sense of safety for kids and promoting positive coping skills when dealing with media coverage of community racial trauma and civil unrest.

The point of such conversations is to help children understand the world better, learn healthy coping skills and resilience, figure out how to deal with competing information and to develop more compassion.

When I asked my younger child, who is in middle school, what he had heard about the case, he said not a single teacher or student had mentioned it. All he knew was from bits and pieces he had seen in the news.

There's a place to start.

As children get older, parents worry about the lengths their child might go to in order to fit in.

Adolescents are especially susceptible to peer pressure. They are battling social anxieties and navigating fraught peer interactions. The developing teenage brain, which is preoccupied with what others are thinking of them, responds differently to emotional stimuli than the adult brain.

But we don’t age out of the human need to be accepted by members of a group.

Belongingness is a fundamental emotional need. People desire to be a part of something greater than themselves, to feel understood and seen. This meaningful bonding is crucial to our well-being. We may find it among peers, co-workers, family, friends, co-religionists or through some other association or mutual interest.

A friend recently posted a Facebook status in which she described an ice-breaker from a training session.

“We all introduced ourselves with our names and three groups of ‘our people’ -- the people we feel most at home with,” she wrote. The person running the session offered concrete affiliations -- fans of her college basketball team, for one. My friend’s answer was, “I’m Judy, and my people are journalists, nerds and people who grew up poor.”

The exercise is a clever way to get people to reveal more about themselves in a less threatening way. The question really asks: With whom are you most likely to feel at home? With whom are you most likely to feel immediate commonality?

In Judy’s groups, there is a common thread: She identifies with outsiders. Journalists observe the events they cover without participating, and nerds and poor folk also understand what it’s like to be on the outside. Each are immigrants in their own country in a way, she explained to me.

I considered her question carefully. My tribe is comprised of storytellers; doers and givers; and people who are both funny and empathetic. Again, there are commonalities among these groups. Storytellers are also keen observers and listeners. Telling a good story is a way of reaffirming human connections and making the listener, viewer or reader feel something.

Doers and givers have an inherent optimism and selflessness that guides their behavior. I am drawn to the resilience of people who have overcome difficult circumstances. Their courage is just as contagious as fear.

Funny, empathetic people are often self-deprecating, comfortable in their own skin and easy to be around. We all want to be around people who are authentic, genuine and sincere.

I asked my husband to tell me about “his people.” He named doers, underdogs and music lovers.

The overlap in our answers explains why we were drawn together in the first place.

Whether the point of connection is a shared passion for a particular sport or type of art, or a shared life experience such as growing up poor or running a marathon, we feel at ease with people in whom we recognize something about ourselves.

To some extent, our tribes describe how we see ourselves. But they also describe what we want to be.

Just like we caution our children as they grow up, it’s helpful to remind ourselves when we are older and the demands on our time are ever greater: Merely fitting in with a group is not the same as belonging. A sense of belonging comes from being accepted and supported.

Humans are multidimensional and often contradictory, so subsets of “our people” will likely complement different aspects of our personalities. I appreciated the chance to think about the sort of people I consider my tribe because it gave me insight into who I should prioritize spending my precious free time with.

It’s a revealing question: Who are your people?

Jennifer was preparing to take an accounting exam when she saw a report on the business center’s television that would change her life.

Jennifer, who is being identified by her first name because of concerns for her family’s safety, is a senior and accounting major at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Her mother brought her to the United States from Honduras when she was 7 years old. Her mother had left to find work in America when Jennifer was 3 years old.

“I just knew that I was finally going to be with my mom,” she said.

A bright and studious kid, she adjusted and did well in school in Ballwin, Missouri. In her sophomore year of high school, she asked her mother for her social security number so she could apply for an internship. Her mother told her she didn’t have legal papers; she was undocumented.

“That’s when I found out I was very limited in what I could do. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t work legally,” Jennifer said.

All of a sudden, the country she had grown up in wasn’t hers anymore. The place she knew as her home, where she had dreams to go to college, became a place she had to hide who she was. She couldn’t even tell her closest friends.

The next year, President Barack Obama signed DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) into law after waiting for Congress to act on behalf of young children who had been brought to and raised in America without legal documents. What is a small child supposed to do when their parent moves them to another country? How do you tear a young person away from their family and home to deport them to a country where they have no connections, no family and may not even speak the language? Especially if they weren’t even responsible for coming here illegally in the first place?

Jennifer immediately filed for the legal protection DACA offered. She gave all her information, paid the fee and passed a background check. Even though there was no path to becoming a citizen, it allowed her to stay, study and work here legally. It had to be renewed every two years. It gave her a measure of her dignity back.

“I was no longer hiding a part of myself,” she said.

Jennifer graduated from high school and got accepted into the Honors College at UMSL. She works two jobs to help pay for her education. She will be graduating in May and planned to attend networking events with accounting firms to find a job.

Then she saw the news that President Donald Trump had rescinded DACA, effective in six months. Trump has asked Congress to handle the issue. If they are unable to pass legislation, students like Jennifer face deportation by the federal agencies they gave their personal information and fingerprints to in good faith.

Even though she had prepared herself, she was still in shock when she watched Attorney General Jeff Sessions make the announcement. For a second, she felt a flash of anger and resentment toward her mother. Why put her in this situation?

Immediately, she let it go.

“I’m not a mother. I can only imagine the struggle she went through,” she said. “It wasn’t the best decision, but it was the only option she had at that point. I can’t blame her for being a mother and wanting to protect me and for wanting to give me a better future. I can’t blame her for that.”

She had to pull herself together and take her accounting exam.

“I’m just scared,” she said. There are months ahead of just waiting while her entire future, all her hard work, hangs in the balance.

Even worse than the fear of losing her future is the pain of feeling like she isn’t wanted in the country she loves and considers her home.

“I’ve never in my life felt like I was less than a person,” she said. “Now, it’s like I’m not worth staying here.”

After she finished her exam, she drove back home to Ballwin.

Then she cried.