It is easy for Alex Behr to gush about her son, Eli, whom she describes as a generous and thoughtful college junior who had a serious skateboarding phase.
It is much harder for her to talk about his politics. Ms. Behr, 59, is a Democrat in Portland, Ore., who voted enthusiastically for Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election. She and her ex-husband were appalled that Eli, 20, decided to cast his first vote in a presidential election this fall for Donald J. Trump.
When Eli brought a “Make America Great Again” hat home from college this summer, Ms. Behr threw it into the corner of his bedroom. They argued about guns, immigration and abortion, struggling to do so without permanently damaging their relationship.
“facts don’t matter to you,” Ms. Behr wrote in a moment of frustration during one text exchange about Mr. Trump’s legal battles. “love you. have a good day.”
A few months removed from Mr. Trump’s victory, the two have arrived at an impasse. Ms. Behr worries her son is being swayed by conservative opinions fed to him on YouTube and Instagram. Eli feels like he is simply learning to think for himself — a quality he admires in Mr. Trump.
“He’s not afraid to say what he thinks,” Eli said in an interview. “It seems like what he says is coming from him instead of coming from a big cabinet behind you, telling you what to say.”
Mr. Trump has for nearly a decade been a source of political divides within families, cleaving new fault lines along the way. In 2016, as younger voters leaned toward Hillary Clinton over Mr. Trump, it was easy to find left-leaning children loudly bemoaning the politics of their Trump-supporting parents, online and in the news.
This time around, there is a fresh wrinkle. Although young voters as a whole preferred Ms. Harris, Mr. Trump secured a second term in office with the help of an improved performance among young men. That has in some families exposed a different dynamic: liberal parents contending with their conservative sons.
In one of several articles of its kind published in 2016, The Cut interviewed Mrs. Clinton’s supporters about their Trump-voting fathers. By 2024, one of the publication’s columnists was instead asking “Can Parents Prevent Their Sons From Sliding to the Right?” on behalf of progressives like herself.
Some liberal parents aren’t so sure they should try to intervene. Plenty see their sons’ embrace of Mr. Trump as an expected act of rebellion, or a choice made by an independent young adult that they should respect. For others, it has felt like a painful rejection of the values they have tried to instill in their children.