JUSTIN TRUDEAU NEVER planned to go into politics.

“When I was 15, my father [former prime minister Pierre Trudeau] had just retired … politics was pretty much the furthest thing from my mind as a possible career path,” he says.

Nonetheless, despite an early career in teaching, Trudeau is now the Liberal member of Parliament for the Papineau region and is particularly invested in engaging young people in politics.

It can’t be easy, can it? North American teenagers are widely criticized for their seemingly inherent apathetic natures, but Trudeau says he considers them much maligned.

“Yes, there are moments of cynicism,” he says, adding that we all have those. “But fundamentally, don’t ever make the mistake of thinking young people can be apathetic and cynical because they don’t care about the world…. It’s because they care so much about the world that they are often frustrated and sometimes angry that they don’t have a voice, they don’t get listened to.”

So Trudeau does just that: he listens.

“I’ll go out to a high school or a university and have a conversation with young people,” he says, setting himself apart from those who pontificate for an hour before disappearing into the ether.

Trudeau talks for only about 10 minutes before opening the floor.

“We end up having a very honest, straight conversation,” he says.

“I don’t talk down to them.… You speak to them as equals, about things that are of concern to them and to all of us.”

The result? Not apathy.

“Young people are worried about the big picture,” says Trudeau. “They are worried about the environment, about world poverty and world hunger.

They’re worried about conflict and war and human rights and injustice. They’re not going to get all worked up about a bill that will shift taxes one way or another by half a percentage point or such.…

So, to have a conversation with them on that level is the only way to absolutely engage them.” Trudeau’s advice to parents of seemingly disconnected teens is to not worry about direct involvement with politics, per se, but to focus on involvement and connection in general.

If you look closely at organizations like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Free the Children and even local environmental initiatives, he says you’ll find that teens are actually extremely involved already.

“They just often couldn’t care less about politics. That’s not their fault. That’s the fault of politics itself.”

Trudeau feels that his own parents ultimately did the best possible thing to inspire him (and that thing wasn’t about holding office).

“My father always said no matter what we chose to do, as long as we lived up to our potential and made the world a slightly better place, that was fine,” he says. “For me, being a teacher was a very concrete and powerful way of shaping the world and making a difference in the lives of people around me.”

Trudeau has two young children of his own and hopes to similarly inspire them as well as the kids he mentors through work. He wants to give them “confidence in themselves, a sense that they matter in the world, that they are, in fact, deeply relevant.”

And if your kids are interested in politics directly? Trudeau says a partisan route isn’t primarily important. He also says you don’t need to worry about stuff like debate skills (“it’s not a fundamental building block”). Just get them involved, and your kids will learn important skills that will aid them later in life.

Make a difference in your community, he says.

The rest will follow.