“Those types of diagnosis are hard for anyone,” he said. “But I think, especially when you have a mother of really young kids, to be in a situation where you could be having an incident where she may not get through that, and then these kids would grow up without a mother … It was really tough for us when we got the news.”
But prayer helped sustain their family in the midst of this suffering.
“But I’ll tell you this. The people that prayed for us over those weeks and months had a huge impact, and it really lifted my wife’s spirits,” he recalled. “She had to go through a lot of really tough stuff, but she was able to do it. I, obviously, as the husband and the father, was there to be supportive, and she ended up coming out of that, I would say probably stronger now as a result.”
Family is a core value for DeSantis that shows up everywhere from his campaign to his legislative priorities.
“I think one of the things we bring is we show the importance of family, because that’s just who we are as people,” he said. “We try to bring our kids and involve them in this just because we want to spend more time with them.”
DeSantis said the kids have been able to see much more of America than he did when he was growing up.
“Prior to this campaign, they had never seen snow before,” he said. “They are Floridians, and so they didn’t know. So, they got to make snowmen in New Hampshire, throw snowballs in Iowa.”
Beyond snowball fights, parenthood in 2024 involves facing many political and social difficulties, such as transgender ideology in school.
In fact, DeSantis signed into law a Parental Rights in Education bill in 2022 that put guardrails on Florida public school teachers giving instruction on “gender identity” or “sexual orientation” in kindergarten through third grade classrooms.
Restoring family as ‘centerpiece’ of American life
DeSantis said he hopes that he and his family can represent a “restoration” of the family in America.
(Story continues below)
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“But I do think what we represent is kind of a restoration of the idea that family really is the centerpiece of American life,” he said. “If we have strong families, we are going to have a strong country. If families continue to disintegrate, a lot of the problems that we deal with, those are going to end up being magnified.”
DeSantis noted that “government isn’t the solution to all of this,” but it does play a role.
“We take our responsibilities as parents seriously,” DeSantis said, noting his stand against gender ideology in elementary school and the “battle against Disney.”
“I’d like to think I would have taken those strong stands anyways. But the fact that I’m a father of young kids, it’s really personal to me because I’m thinking to myself, I have a first grader. It’s totally inappropriate to tell her that she can change her gender or that her gender is a choice,” he said. “And so I think that it’s helped us really be strong on education, parents’ rights, and these core issues that matter so much to parents.”
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