The protests about police shootings haven’t stopped in the heartland. Two weeks after a St. Louis judge issued a not-guilty verdict in the Jason Stockley trial, there have been protests in malls, before concerts and baseball games, and in schools.

Many of the high schoolers who walked out of their suburban St. Louis classrooms to protest the Stockley verdict were in middle school when teenager Michael Brown was fatally shot.

The anguished reaction in the streets three years ago captured the world’s attention, but it made an indelible impression on the newest generation of emerging social activists.

Theirs is an adolescence punctuated by protests. It’s a coming-of-age experience vastly different from their Generation X parents, like myself, who were too young or not yet born during the Vietnam War protests. We were even further removed from the civil rights movement, which belonged to our parents’ generation.

Today’s parents, in our mid-30s to early 50s, lacked the visceral experience as teenagers of watching police, in militarized vehicles, firing tear gas on crowds and making mass arrests in the malls we hung out in, in the streets familiar to us.

Our children’s perspective on how to impact social change is being shaped by the experiences they are living through. And what a tumultuous few years it’s been.

Today’s young teens growing up in the middle of the country have watched a national movement against racial inequality and police brutality spring from civil unrest in their own area. They watched students at their state’s flagship institution -- the University of Missouri -- challenge the administration’s response to racism on campus and saw the football team unite to bring down a university president.

The few degrees of separation in cities like St. Louis mean that social media feeds, filled with images of protests, likely involve someone they know or someone to whom they can find a mutual connection. They may have marched in the largest single-day mass protest in American history, joining between 4 to 5 million people participating in women’s marches across the country a day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. That was soon followed by hundreds of thousands of people at airports nationwide demonstrating against the administration’s travel ban.  

And, most recently, amid two weeks of daily protests since a judge found former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley not guilty of murdering Anthony Lamar Smith, #TakeAKnee also started trending. NFL athletes silently kneeling during the playing of the national anthem have inspired similar protests against racial inequality and injustice on high school and college fields across the country.

From pop culture to social media to sports, everything is intensely political.

These students have also seen the backlash to this activism and the growing polarization in civil society. They may have something to learn from previous generations who fought similar battles. Those who were 16 in 1963 when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech are 70 now. They may remember that the historic march, now taught with reverence as a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, took place against a backdrop of fear and suspicion.  

In the 10 weeks before the 1963 March on Washington, there were 758 demonstrations in 186 cities resulting in 14,733 arrests, according to the Justice Department. A Gallup poll taken before the march found that the majority of Americans were against it -- viewing it unfavorably, thinking it wouldn’t accomplish anything, or believing that it would end in violence.

In addition to the power of their civil disobedience, that generation also learned that the most potent protests happened at the ballot box.

It remains to be seen if today’s 16-year-olds will harness that same political muscle when they are old enough to cast ballots. This generation after the millennials, Generation Z, makes up a quarter of the U.S. population. They are a larger cohort than the baby boomers or millennials.

Given their collective formative experiences so far, this generation will not accept a return to a status quo their parents accepted. They are armed with technology, including social media, to organize and amplify their voices, and a courage to stand up for their beliefs that has been tested and proven to be strong.

This generation is getting loud.

And they won’t be ignored.

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?