  2020 through 2023 were unusually tumultuous years for children in the United
States, and children's welfare was prominent in political debate. Theories in
moral psychology suggest that political parties would treat concerns for
children using different moral frames, and that moral conflict might drive
substantial polarization in discussions about children. However, such partisan
frames may still differ very little if there is limited underlying disagreement
about moral issues and everyday concerns in childhood when not explicitly
referencing politics. We evaluate claims of universality and division in moral
language using tweets from 2019-2023 linked to U.S. voter records, focusing on
expressed morality. Our results show that mentions of children by Republicans
and Democrats are usually similar, differing no more than mentions by women and
men, and tend to contain no large differences in accompanying moral words. To
the extent that mentions of children did differ across parties, these
differences were constrained to topics polarized well before the pandemic --
and slightly heightened when co-mentioned with `kids' or `children'. These
topics reflected a small fraction of conversations about children. Overall,
polarization of online discussion around childhood appears to reflect escalated
polarization on lines of existing partisan conflicts rather than concerns
originating from new concerns about the welfare of children during and after
the pandemic.
