Big Brothers (2 of 2)
Older siblings can have a strange and scary power over their youngers. So experienced, so judgmental, and so good at pushing buttons.
I was the middle of three, and so both receiver and wielder of that power. I could get my younger brother to completely lose his mind with a well-timed twitch of my eyebrow and rarely missed the chance (sorry, Randy). My older brother could do the same to me.
Ron’s five years older, so I was in kindergarten when he was in fifth grade and therefore automatically an Ewok to his Obi-Wan. By the time I entered junior high, he was halfway through high school. I started college right after he finished. There was just no catching up.
I know Connor (14) has the same effect on his sisters. They try to dismiss his teasing or criticisms, but it’s not easy. He aims, he fires, they fall.
The same is true with his observations about life in general, which are always delivered with the devastating finality of Judge Judy. He tells them how it is; they mutter “nuh uhh,” then collapse into brow-knitted self-doubt.
That dynamic was only one of my concerns when Connor delivered one of these pronouncements a few days ago. From the next room, I heard Delaney (7) sharing a conversation she had with a friend at school. “I told her I didn’t really believe in God, but I was still thinking about it. She said she didn’t know anybody else who…”
“Lane…” Connor said, then sighed with exaggerated patience.
She stopped. “What?”
“Lane, you really shouldn’t talk about religion at school.”
“Why not? It’s interesting.”
“You shouldn’t talk about it because you gain nothing and it gets all your friends to hate you.”
Unquote.
Pause.
“Nuh uhh.”
“Yes. It does, Lane.”
It took every bit of my strength to stay in my chair.
I had at least three reasons to be concerned about this. First, I wanted to know if he was speaking from painful experience. If not, I wanted to be sure Delaney completely disregarded his advice, since these astonishing conversations are a big part of her unique engagement with the world. And if it WAS something he experienced, I might need to revisit the advice I give to parents around the country — to encourage their kids (and themselves) to discuss belief and disbelief openly in hopes of moving us toward that world in which differences in belief are no big deal. The whole idea of engaged coexistence turns on questions like this.
I waited until after dinner, then told Connor I’d heard their conversation. I said this was something I needed to know the truth about because parents come to me for advice on these issues, and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. Had this ever happened to him? Had he ever had friends begin to hate him because of religious differences or conversations?
“Well…no,” he said. “Not anymore. But younger kids do that.”
“Someone stopped being your friend when you were younger?”
“Well…no. But one time this kid freaked out because I told him I didn’t think God was real.”
“And he hated you from then on?”
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“No, I guess not. He just freaked out for a minute, you know, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you don’t believe in God, how can you not believe in God?’ blah blah. Then everything was fine. We were still friends and everything.”
I was relieved. This is exactly what I’ve heard from countless parents–the vast majority of the time, kids engage, they freak out, they move on. I asked Connor not to discourage Laney from talking about these things with friends, and he agreed.
At bedtime I asked Laney what she thought about Connor’s advice. She shrugged. “It’s not true. My friends don’t hate me. They think it’s interesting.”
I told her that I’d chatted with him and found out that it had never happened to him. I encouraged her to keep it up as long as she found it interesting.
“I know. It doesn’t bother me when he says things like that,” she assured me. “I just think…” She shook her head dismissively and sighed. “…brothers.”
So…are you in?
Foundation Beyond Belief is halfway through its first fund drive—but only 37 percent of the way to the goal.
Over 1600 people expressed their support for this project by signing up for our mailing list and Facebook group—a fantastic show of enthusiasm. But just four percent of those have so far been moved to donate to this crucial fund drive. We are enormously grateful to those few—but we need the rest of you.
Here’s why.
By the end of next year, we hope to empower a new force in philanthropic giving, fuel the great work of over thirty charitable organizations around the world, and begin to transform the popular perception of secular humanism. On the educational side, we will create both a community and a resource center for nonreligious parents.
To accomplish all of this, we need a world-class web center—not just a “brochure” site with a donation button, but a touchpoint and resource center for a vibrant and engaged community of humanists.
The site will include detailed information about featured organizations, a forum and social network for members to debate, investigate, and help select future beneficiaries, an invitational blog on humanism and philanthropy, and profiles to allow members to distribute their monthly donations among the causes as they see fit.
So—IF you support this idea, and IF you can spare the shekels, please take a moment to help create this Foundation by making a donation of any size in the sidebar.
We’ll do our best to make you proud.
Dale McGowan
Executive Director
Foundation Beyond Belief
A simple plan
Seems a bit of a donnybrook has ausgebroken in the comments on one of my YouTube videos. Don’t get excited, now – it’s mild enough. But it started with a pretty common misunderstanding of my position. And my real position on this is among my most deeply-held convictions as a parent, so I can’t stay quiet.
Here’s the argument: Because I advocate letting kids sort things out for themselves in the long run, I am saying that all points of view are equally valid. Ipso facto, I’m a relativist.
As regular Memlings will know, I do have opinions. I think some points of view are excellent, some are neutral, some are utter nonsense, and some are outrageously stupid and dangerous. I’ve come to these conclusions not because my parents fed them to me, but by using the tools and values they gave me and then sorting it out on my own. I try hard to stay open to a change of mind on each and every opinion. Sometimes I even succeed.
By thinking hard, paying attention, and caring about getting the right answer, I’ve come to the conclusion that evolution by natural selection is true and “intelligent design” is both false and much less interesting. I’ve come to think that Catholic doctrine is one of the most grotesque collections of dehumanizing stuff we’ve ever come up with as a species, and that many of the Catholics I know are nonetheless among the best people I know. In the midst of a high church Episcopal service, I whiplash between being seduced by the pageantry and sickened by it.
I think Mormon doctrine is incredibly strange, liberal Quakerism is a beautiful expression of the religious impulse, and Pat Robertson is a pig. Ecclesiastes is lovely and sad. Leviticus is vile. Unitarians are fascinating in their self-contradictions, and their social justice work is second to none.
I think the differences between Sunni and Shi’ite Islam are microscopic (a POV shared, it seems, by most Islamic intellectuals), and yet appears to be enough to justify an ongoing mutual slaughter a la 17th century Christian Europe. Jain principles are cool, and I wonder if most Jains follow them, or if they’re pretty much like the rest of us (i.e. great on paper).
If you’d like to know how I’ve come to any one of these opinions, I can walk you through the entire process because I was there. My parents declined to force-feed me their opinions, though I knew what they were and was surely influenced by them. Instead, my parents taught me to think hard, pay attention, and care about getting the right answer.
My kids get a hearty helping of my opinions, along with an express invitation to ignore them and find their own way. And because Becca and I spend so much time and effort teaching them to think hard, pay attention, and care about getting the right answer, I’m convinced their destination will be one of the good ones (plural), even if it isn’t the same as mine.
And you know what? It seems to be working really well.
In an earlier post on relativism, I put it this way: “A moment’s reflection makes it clear that there’s something between stone tablets and coin-flipping — between Thou shalt not and Whatever makes your weenie wiggle. It’s called moral judgment.”
Teach and model good judgment, then let them judge. It’s a simple plan, and for the sake of my kids, and everyone they will cross paths with, I’m sticking to it.
Big Brothers (1 of 2)
“Dad Dad, come here, you’ve got to see this.”
I followed Connor (14) into the kitchen, where our dog Gowser, a 65 lb. Rhodesian ridgeback mix, was eating contentedly.
Connor got down on all fours and began nuzzling his face toward the food bowl, making slurping noises. Suddenly from deep in Gowser’s throat came a sound I had never heard her make – a deep, angry growl.
“Connor, stop now!” I yelled. “Back up!”
“Why?” he chuckled. He wrongly assumed I was kidding and continued slurping. Gowser’s growl deepened. I grabbed Connor by the belt and slid him abruptly away from the bowl.
“What’s the matter with you?” he snapped.
“Con, she thinks you are another animal taking her food, and she will bite you. The growl was a warning.”
“Oh come on,” he said. “There is no way she’s going to bite me. I’m the one who feeds her!”
I thought about telling him there’s a whole proverb devoted to exactly that, then realized there’s probably an actual fallacy called Argument by Proverb. “Her instinct takes over,” I said. “She’s a wolf inside. She’s not going to stop and think before she eats your face. So don’t do it again.”
“Why not? She’s not going to…”
“I gave you the answer and the reason. We’re done.”
[N.B. This brilliant coinage by my wife Becca is also the answer to a question I often get from parents: “It’s fine to say you’ll let your kids question you, but where does it end?” It ends when you’ve given them both an answer and a reason. Sometimes they have a further line of argument, and sometimes I have the energy to hear it. But if they simply say “Why?” after you’ve already given a reason, use the line and send Becca a nickel.]
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He skulked away, irritated that my fantasies of man-eating wolves kept him from hearing his goofy, lovable dog make that awesome sound up close again. So be it – we’re not covered for face transplants.
Connor is in that phase of development when you mask your gnawing inner doubts about a thousand things with complete outer certitude about a thousand other things, large and small. Remember those years? I sure do. You feel like you can’t afford to be agnostic about ANYTHING, lest that whole inner house of cards come tumbling down.
Connor is handling that inner/outer conflict MUCH better than I did at 14.
One of the main challenges of multiple kids for me is giving the younger ones all of the advantages the oldest had when he was their age. This is where Connor’s confident certainties can sometimes get in the way.
When he was growing up, he was allowed to explore ideas and float hypotheses with complete freedom. I described one such moment of his at age six, and my response, on page 14 of Raising Freethinkers. I cleverly changed the dog’s name to keep Gowser from getting too much fan mail:
KID: I think Bowser can read my mind.
DAD: Oh? Why do you think that?
KID: I was gonna give her a crust of bread, and she started wagging her tail as soon as I thought of it!
(Here’s the moment we typically wind up the correction machine, making sure the child knows that there’s a non-paranormal explanation. Resist!)
DAD: Hmm. Well, we better watch what we’re thinking, then!
Good Dad! I’m so proud of you. You didn’t say it was true or false, and she didn’t ask you to (yet). You simply made her feel good for thinking and guessing and inquiring about the world. There’s plenty of time for insisting on the right answers. First we need to build the desire and the tools to find them on her own.
Connor has long since developed that desire, and his thinking tools (with the occasional exception, see above) are really sharp. Problem is, he reached that point while his sisters were still in the free-hypothesis stage. A typical conversation a couple of years back:
ERIN (9): I think I know why the Earth turns.
MOM: And why is that?
ERIN: I think the wind is pushing against the mountains.
CONNOR (12): No.
The “no” was always delivered with crushing, dismissive confidence. Erin’s face would fall, and she would cede the floor to his greater knowledge. It always broke my heart.
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After hearing this a few times, I pulled him aside and explained that no one had shut down his hypotheses when he was that age. As a result, he has developed a great mind, a love of questioning, and powerful curiosity. I told him he was not to shut the girls down either so they too could develop that love of questioning.
“But the things they say are just…”
“…just like the things you said,” I answered. “Exactly like them.” I knew he wanted to join these conversations at the level he was at, and that it would kill him to stay out entirely. “Tell you what,” I offered. “Instead of saying, ‘No,’ why don’t you say, ‘Actually, I think it’s like this.”
The next time Erin floated a hypothesis, Connor rolled his eyes, mustered all the patient condescension he could, and said:
“Aaaaactually…”
Oh well. You do what you can.
I looove me a good correlation
A member of the PBB Forum recently recommended The Kids’ Book of World Religions. Try though I do to keep up with these things, I hadn’t heard of this one, so I clicked over to Amazon for a look.
I scrolled down the page to the “Frequently Bought Together” feature (wherein Amazon tries to convince you to buy another particular book or two because other visitors to the page are doing so) and did a classic doubletake when I saw the two books they were bundling together with this survey of world religions: Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers.
“Huh,” I said, in those exact words.
These things are generated automatically, so it was a pretty reliable indication that people interested in one were often interested in the others. I scrolled down further and discovered that fully 28 percent of the people who view the page for The Kids’ Book of World Religions end up buying one of my books.
Another book linked to that page was Mary Pope Osborne’s One World, Many Religions. I clicked over to that page and found that it too was “Frequently Bought Together” with Parenting Beyond Belief. (This wasn’t completely surprising, since this title — unlike every other title in this post — is recommended in Raising Freethinkers.)
I popped ’round to Many Ways: How Families Practice Their Beliefs and Religions and learned that “Customers Also Bought” PBB. Twelve percent of visitors to The Story of Religion by Betsy Maestro end up buying PBB instead, as do nine percent of visitors to My Friends’ Beliefs: A Young Reader’s Guide to World Religions.
As of yesterday – these things do ebb and flow, of course – every book paired with the above titles by Amazon’s automatic recommendation system was either another comparative religion book for kids or a book for nonreligious parents. And here’s the thing: not a single book devoted to another individual worldview made the lists.
What does this mean?
Correct me since I’m wrong, but it would seem to suggest something I’ve long suspected — that nonreligious parents are more likely than parents of other worldviews to give their kids a broad exposure to a number of beliefs.
I certainly hope that’s what it suggests, because that’s freethought parenting. That’s what I’m always on about — teaching kids to think well, then trusting them to do so. Daddy’s so proud of all y’all. Go get yourself a cookie.
Which way do your kids roll?
What is needed is not the will to believe but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. — Bertrand Russell
Unwillingly back from 17 days off, with a wallet full of Post-Its full of ideas for the blog.
The first popped up when Michael Jackson’s ghost was spotted at Neverland. Here’s my favorite video clip of the event (cue soundtrack):
The debunk is easy, of course. More interesting is the question it raises for parents who want to raise critical thinkers. Some, I’m sure, sat their kids in front of the video and fed them the critique of credulity: “Look, at 0:18, see? There’s a courtyard to the left there. You can even see the windows into that room. And look look, one second later you can see a set light standing in that room! There’s obviously a crew setting up in there, and somebody just walked by that window! See? Not a ghost. Right?”
Johnny and Janey nod solemnly and power down, pending future input.
By debunking it for them, Parental Unit handed them a piece of information: this ghost was a shadow. But s/he didn’t allow the kids to stretch their own critical thinking hamstrings. S/he gave them a fish instead of teaching them to fish.
News of the ghost reached us on vacation as we drove with Grandma to the coolest kid museum in the U.S. (more on this later). One of my kids had heard it on a morning show: during an interview, a news crew had captured Michael Jackson’s ghost walking by in a nearby room. That’s how it’s generally presented, of course — never “a news crew captured something that some people thought looked like a ghost, and further assumed to be the ghost of Michael Jackson.” Too many ickily precise words. “An eerie presence at Neverland was captured on film” is the usual approach to keeping us tuned in.
“Huh,” sez I, or some such noncommital thing.
We had a fine time at the museum. Later that afternoon, I pulled out my computer and found the YouTube video I knew would be there.
“Hey, who wants to see Michael Jackson’s ghost?” I said. Yup — I left out the precision, too. I did so because I know which way my kids roll, and that they don’t need a push from me.
Present some folks with Elvis in a restaraunt, or Mary in a tortilla, or an exotic miracle juice, and they’ll roll fast and hard toward belief. As Russell would put it (after his third gin XanGo), they have the will to believe and they’re not afraid to use it. No matter how much you try to drag them back uphill, such folks will lie at the bottom of the hill cooing contentedly in the lap of Elvis or Mary, munching on mangosteen while P.T. Barnum grazes on their wallets.
My kids roll the other way. As a result of the low-key and fun questioning atmosphere they’ve grown up in, they have a serious crush on the real world. Oh they like fantasy just fine. But to paraphrase Russell again, their will to find out is reliably stronger than their desire to believe any given proposition. And they’ve blown their minds often enough by the wonders of that real world that they’ll wait patiently, tossing aside counterfeit wonder, until the real thing comes along.
The will to believe is a form of incuriosity. The will to find out is about simple, persistent curiosity. Raise curious kids by being curious yourself, out loud. Show a hunger for the actual and a delight in finding it, over and over again, and your kids will tend to roll that way as well.
Though they all roll toward reality, the steepness of grade isn’t the same for all three of my kids. Erin (11) rolls gently but steadily toward reality, and Delaney (7) makes long detours. But both eventually end up wanting to know what’s actually what.
For Connor (14), it’s a cliff. That can present problems of its own. He’s often unwilling to even consider any unconventional possibilities. That protects him from being duped by salesmen, politicians, and faith healers, but it can also keep him from seeing how deeply bizarre reality can be. He has, for example, dismissed my descriptions of quantum strangeness with a simple, “Oh yeah, I’m so sure.” In his defense, that’s pretty much the same thing Einstein said about quantum physics (“Ach ja, ich bin so sicher.”)
So we watched the video three times. Erin and Delaney toyed with the idea that Jackson’s ghost had really appeared before asking each other a few simple questions and watching it fall apart. (Connor went straight to pfft.)
To my surprise, CNN actually debunked the rumor, showing that it was a simple shadow:
…which enraged some roll-to-beliefers. My favorite comment:
Fine, so it’s a shadow. So what? Have you so-called “skeptics” ever considered the possibility that ghosts ALSO cast shadows???
Flow
One of the threads in Raising Freethinkers that I found most fascinating was the section on “flow” (in Chapter 5, “Ingredients of a Life Worth Living,” written by Molleen Matsumura).
We’ve all experienced the flow state—when we’re completely in the moment, so intensely focused on the activity at hand that we lose track of time. It’s one of the most deeply satisfying and meaningful states we can enter.
Creativity researcher and psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced “chick-sent-me-hi-ee,” just as it looks) spent years defining, describing, and studying different aspects of flow, which he called “our experience of optimal fulfillment and engagement…being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one. Your whole being is involved.”
After I first read Molleen’s contribution on flow, I dug into the literature a bit. It began to occur to me that the descriptions of flow experiences (including the feeling of being at one with everything or experiencing total peace) paralleled the descriptions of transcendent spiritual experiences, including meditation.
Finding activities that put you into the flow experience, then, can provide a secular equivalent to “spirituality”—something that lifts you out of everyday experience. You might say I’m flowy, but not religious.
Some thoughts from Molleen in Raising Freethinkers about how parents can facilitate the flow experience in their kids—and how we often get in the way:
Since flow experiences are some of the most meaningful we can have, parents can help their children have a deeper experience of life by helping them find and engage in flow. And one of the most common enemies of flow is something over which parents have a good deal of control—schedules.
Just when an activity is getting really interesting and the flow experience begins to take hold, it’s time to set the table, leave for preschool, go to gymnastics. Your own time pressures can make it difficult to see that your child isn’t necessarily just being stubborn when they don’t want to be interrupted. It can also be challenging to set aside appropriate and adequate times for extended concentration to be possible…
Helping your child have flow experiences that are both inherently satisfying and enhance other aspects of life will depend on identifying his or her particular abilities. Practice is a good thing, but practicing hard at a particular activity, such as playing the piano or playing basketball, will be more worthwhile to some kids than others. It takes careful observation to know whether a child really needs to try a little harder, or needs to try something different.
Writing fiction is a flow experience for me. Nonfiction, no. And writing music, for me, is never a flow experience. More like forcing a marble through a Cheerio. Playing the piano, yes — playing clarinet, nein. Hiking, yes — sports, nyet.
I want to help my kids find their flow. While I’m at it, I need to find and engage more of my own.
What are your flow experiences?
Parenting Beyond Belief Channel on YouTube
It has taken me a year and a half to bring the Parenting Beyond Belief Seminar to 19 cities. I currently have requests from 106 more.
Time for a more efficient way of doing things.
In 2010, I hope to be training seminar leaders across the country through Foundation Beyond Belief. In the meantime, I’ve just learned of a new medium called the “Inter-nets” through which I can post “viddy-ohs” about nonreligious parenting. Thought I’d give it a go.
The first in a planned series of 8,403 short, informal videos on nonreligious parenting is now on YouTube (and embedded below). We’ll start with a brief history of PBB, then dive into content with an average of one 7-10 minute video per week. The tentative summer schedule:
June 15: The, uh… “Genesis” of Parenting Beyond Belief
June 20: Four reasons kids need to be religiously literate
June 25: How to teach kids about religion…and how not to
June 30: What indoctrination is…and what it isn’t
August 5: “What if my child becomes religious?”
August 26: Introducing kids to evolution
We’ll continue with understanding moral development, talking about death, reaching across worldview lines, relaxing family tension, teaching kids to interact well with religious peers, talking about the body and sexuality, the pledge of allegiance, the “mixed marriage,” Santa Claus, and more. I hope they’re occasionally useful.
Keeping forbidden fruit from taking root
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It’s funny/sad/scary how many things we humans get not just wrong but precisely backwards.
We try to make ourselves safe from terrorism by military force—in the process, creating deeper anger and much more fertile ground for terrorism.
We try to raise moral kids by inculcating unquestionable rules and commandments—which turns out to be “worse than doing nothing” because “it interferes with moral development.”1
We try to prevent teen pregnancy by abstinence-only sex ed, which results in equal or greater rates of teen pregnancy. 2
Some of us try to protect our kids from religious fundamentalism by shielding them from all exposure to religion—an ignorance that results in many secular kids being emotionally seduced into religious fundamentalism.
And in our fervor to protect our kids from risks, we often deny them the chance to develop their own risk management smarts—which then puts them at far greater risk.
The whiplash reply to this line of thought is often, “Oh, so you’re saying we should raise kids without rules, encourage them to enjoy unprotected multispecies sex at age twelve, and let them cartwheel down the middle of the freeway while smoking?”
That’s right. Those are the two choices–ya diametrical, dualistic, black-and-white, not-more-than-two-options-seeing putz.
(Sorry, that was harsh.)
One of the decisions parents have to make is how best to approach the issue of alcohol. Since most of us can be assumed to share the goal of raising kids who will use alcohol responsibly and safely once they are of legal drinking age, the question is about how best to get there.
Once again, it’s research to the rescue. And once again, it turns out that the advice of our jerking knee is precisely wrong. Children are more likely to develop dysfunctional and unhealthy habits regarding alcohol if it’s made into forbidden fruit and a magical rite of passage into adulthood.
“The best evidence shows that teaching kids to drink responsibly is better than shutting them off entirely from it,” says Dr. Paul Steinberg, former director of counseling at Georgetown University. “You want to introduce your kids to it, and get across the point that this is to be enjoyed but not abused.” 3
In his landmark 1983 study The Natural History of Alcoholism, Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant found that people who grew up in families where alcohol was forbidden at the table but consumed elsewhere were seven times more likely to be alcoholics that those who came from families where wine was served with meals but drunkenness was not tolerated.
Vaillant also looked at cross-cultural data, finding a much higher frequency of alcohol abuse in cultures that prohibit drinking among children but condone adult drunkenness (such as Ireland) and a relatively low occurrence of alcohol abuse in countries that allow children to occasionally sample wine or beer but frown on adult drunkenness (such as Italy).
Moderate exposure coupled with mature adult modeling is the key.
Vaillant concluded that teens should be allowed to enjoy wine on occasion with family meals. “The way you teach responsibility,” he noted in 2008, “is to let parents teach appropriate use.” 4
Religious and cultural traditions that forbid forbid forbid often end up with more dysfunction per acre than those that teach and encourage moderation. Southern Baptists joke even amongst themselves about their hypocrisy regarding alcohol. My mother-in-law once went to a hotel that was completely filled with conventioneers — yet when she went to the hotel bar, it was completely empty.
“Where is everybody?” she asked the bartender.
“It’s a Baptist convention,” he said, “so they’re drinking in their rooms.”
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Fascinating article about the Baptist resolution condemning alcohol consumption — complete with a demonstration of the weak art of argument by scriptural cherrypicking (on all sides)
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1Quoted in Pearson, Beth, “The art of creating ethics man,” The Herald (Scotland), January 23, 2006.
2Abstinence Education Faces An Uncertain Future,” New York Times, July 18, 2007; Bearman, Peter and Hannah Brückner: “Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and First Intercourse.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 106, No. 4 (Jan 2001), pp. 859-912.
3Quoted in Asimov, Eric, “Can Sips at Home Prevent Binges?” New York Times, March 26, 2008.
4Ibid.
