Ho ho ho no mo
And so, as predicted, Santa has darkened the McGowan fireplace for the last time.
Delaney (8) followed the same classic curve as the other two. She started last year with the ancillary technical questions of a child who’s begun to smell something funky but doesn’t reeeally want to dig to the back of the fridge just yet.
“Regular reindeer don’t fly. How do Santa’s reindeer fly?”
“Well…some people say they eat magic corn.”
Magic corn. The rapidity with which this sharp, science-minded, reality-loving inquirer would happily swallow lame answers of that kind and skip tra-la away demonstrated as clearly as anything could that she was more interested at that point in perpetuating this particular belief than in figuring things out—a fact further underlined by her disinclination to ask the obvious, direct question that we would willingly have answered at any point, namely “Is Santa real?”
(Sorry about that sentence, I’m reading Infinite Jest again.)
Same with many kinds of belief. It’s not that true believers of various kinds don’t ask questions — it’s that they so eagerly accept poor answers to those questions in order to preserve belief. It’s something we all do at various times and places in our lives. Yes you do, and have, and will. Me too.
At some point (with Santa, anyway) the weight of inconsistency eventually becomes too great, and the direct question is asked. And when it’s asked, you ANSWER, and congratulate the child for figuring it out.
Just before Christmas, Laney’s questions intensified, but remained oblique. At one point she looked Becca in the eye and asked the most convoluted almost-direct indirect question I’ve ever heard:
“When I’m just about to have kids of my own, are you all of a sudden going to tell me something that I need to know about something?”
“Uh…not that I know of,” Becca replied. Which was true.
“Good, because I love Santa.”
“Who said anything about Santa?”
“Never mind.”
Two weeks after Christmas, Erin (12) came downstairs at bedtime with a look of panic. “She’s figuring it out, and I don’t know what to do!!”
“Figuring what out?” I asked.
“Santa! Laney’s asking all these questions and I don’t know what to do!! I did your thing about ‘Some people believe…’ but then she keeps going and going!”
“That’s awesome! That means she’s finally ready to figure it out. Just answer every question honestly. Do you want me to come up?”
“Yes. No. Well, in a little while.”
I waited ten minutes, then went upstairs. The girls were sitting on their beds facing each other and looked up with little smiles as I entered.
“What’s up in here?”
Laney nodded sagely. “Well…I figured something out.”
“What did you figure out.”
“I figured out…the thing about Santa.”
“What thing is that?” Say it, girl!
“That…well, he isn’t real.”
“Oh, that.” I smiled and sat next to her. “How does that make you feel?”
“A little upset. I really loved Santa!”
Now with Laney being the youngest, I knew there was a risk of her feeling embarrassed at being the last to know. But we’d always played with a very light touch, allowing her to believe until knowing became more interesting — which it now apparently had. Time to let her walk proudly through that door.
The key is to underline the proud. I asked how she had figured it out, and she proceeded to describe a fascinating trail of clues that I hadn’t even known she was following.
She sleeps in my T-shirts, and one night found a half empty box of candy canes nestled in the drawer. “Who buys candy canes in a box?” she said, further noting that this year there were no canes on the tree, only in…the stockings.
“And all of the Santa presents were in Santa paper except the ones for you and Mom. And there was still a price tag on one of my presents.” And on and on she went. She had noticed these things because she wanted to, because she had reached a tipping point between the desire to believe and the desire to know.
So I turned on the praise. “Look what you did!” I said. “You used your brain to figure out all of those clues…and you did it yourself!”
She beamed.
“Was it fun to figure out?”
“Yes,” she admittedly, it actually was.
“And the best thing is that all of the good stuff about Christmas,” I said, “all the fun, all the family stuff, the presents, the yummy food, the lights and music and doing nice things for other people — we still get to have ALL of that. But now you know where it all really comes from.”
She has shared her findings with every significant adult in her life, proof that pride quickly eclipsed disappointment. “Guess what I figured out all by myself,” she says. Only one adult went into a “Yes, Virginia” genie re-bottling attempt.
“Grandma,” Laney said patiently. “You don’t have to do that. I looked at all the clues and figured it out. It’s fine.”
So I remain convinced that our family’s Santa period was jolly well-spent. As I wrote in Parenting Beyond Belief,
By allowing our children to participate in the Santa myth and find their own way out of it through skeptical inquiry, we give them a priceless opportunity to see a mass cultural illusion first from the inside, then from the outside. A very casual line of post-Santa questioning can lead kids to recognize how completely we all can snow ourselves if the enticements are attractive enough. Such a lesson, viewed from the top of the hill after exiting a belief system under their own power, can gird kids against the best efforts of the evangelists -– and far better than secondhand knowledge could ever hope to do.
And I wouldn’t have mythed it for the world.
First large-scale secular parent survey
Foundation Beyond Belief has two sides — a humanist charitable giving program, and an education and support program for secular parents.
The intrepid and talented Ute Mitchell (of CFI Portland’s outstanding secular parent program) has signed on as our Foundation’s Parent Community Coordinator. Her first task is taking the pulse of the secular parenting world — finding out just who we are and what parents need who are raising their kids without religion in a predominantly religious world.
I’ve spent the last four years immersed in this topic — talking to hundreds of nontheistic parents across the US and elsewhere, reading, analyzing, hanging out on the PBB Forum — but now it’s time for something more systematic. We’ve created a 10-minute survey to get a better sense of who you are and what you need. The first of several, this one focuses on general questions including parents’ background and current attitudes, family practices, and specific needs. A survey next week will go to existing secular parenting groups to see who and where they are, what’s working for them and what’s not, and what they need in terms of support. Other individual surveys will focus on specific topics including science, dealing with death, and kids’ peer experiences.
Over 400 600 700 1100 1400 1800 people have already taken the survey since it was posted two weeks ago. We’ll close it down shortly and let you know what we find.
Click here to take survey, or under the red arrow in the sidebar.
And if you haven’t yet joined the Foundation itself, now is the time! Our webmaster has installed a brand new, fully-secure donation system (now including a PayPal option) and made several other lovely upgrades to the site. Help us meet our April 1 goal of 1000 contributing members supporting ten charities working to improve this life and this world.
The old switcheroo
This is at least the fifth time I’ve written about my love of artful distillation. Analogies, concordances, wordclouds, graphics, video mashups — I’m a big fan of anything that helps me grasp the otherwise ungraspable.
Last May I came across another of these beautiful things, then promptly forgot about it until now. It’s a graphic that captures the complex findings of the Pew Study on Religion and Musical Chairs — something like that, the exact name escapes me — which explored changes in religious self-identification in the U.S. Not changes in percentage of the marketplace, mind you, but changes by individuals — how many people raised as Catholics change to something else and where did they go, for example, and the same with other categories.
Looking through the full survey itself is plenty fascinating. But an interesting fella calling himself the Internet Monk boosted my grasp of the whole thing with this simply wonderful graphic (click to enlarge):
(Reading this on Facebook? Click here for graphic.)
Suddenly, in graphic form, you can see why the Catholic college I worked for was so particularly skittish about a freethought group on campus: Catholics leaving the fold are more likely to head to mi casa than anywhere else. More fun: most of those who were raised nonreligious and go elsewhere go allll the way over to the evangelicals. I’ve called this the “teen epiphany” and suggested it might well be caused by too severe a parental allergy to religious exposure. Note also how few nonreligious end up Catholic, that a higher percentage of evangelicals go mainline Prot than vice-versa, and how extremely few of those raised in non-Christian religions end up Christians of any kind.
After I gave a seminar in Indianapolis last May, an atheist dad pulled me aside. Exposing our kids to many worldviews and letting them choose for themselves sounds good, he said. But can we really afford to be that open? Look at the Pew study. Our retention rate is the worst of any worldview! That’s why we need to raise our kids to be atheists, he said.
In addition to the fact that this would (1) do violence to my kids’ autonomy, (b) show that I don’t trust them to think as carefully and well as I have, (III) show no confidence in my own worldview to stand on its own, and (∆) constitute indoctrination every bit as bad as any religion, there’s another reason to relax about our “retention rate” as a worldview — and once again, it’s the Internet Monk who led me to it.
Compare the red block at the top to the red block at the bottom.
The nontheistic worldview as a percentage of the population is growing by leaps and bounds, not because children are being raised into it, but because an ever-greater number of people raised in religion are finding their way out of it. This is a good thing because it moves us out of the margin, gives the nonreligious more of a voice in the culture, and makes it more likely that any given religious person knows someone who is nonreligious. I don’t need or want to control the culture, and I don’t need my kids to follow in lock-step with my beliefs. But I would like a seat at the table, and that’s clearly moving in the right direction.
Sure, a lot of kids raised without religion end up trying on a different worldview. But as the study itself notes, many who change will change again, and again. That’s a good thing. It’s one sign that someone is at least trying to get it right.
Also worth a click: Why people left the worldview in which they were raised — and why they went where they did. Click all of the top tabs for maximum fun.
“Time is amazing”
- January 27, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In death, My kids, Parenting
- 8
In the final section of my nonreligious parenting seminar, I offer suggestions for helping kids engage mortality gently but honestly. Treat death as a natural part of life. Take casual opportunities to talk about it before a loved one dies. Talk about the life cycle of insects/animals/plants, then gradually connect to us. Read Charlotte’s Web and Tuck Everlasting. Take a walk in a cemetery.
Get a pet.
I’m not suggesting you get your kids a pet so that they can experience death, but it’s a nice side benefit.
That one always gets a gallows chuckle in the seminar, but I actually mean it. Now given my choice, I’d rather completely spare my kids any exposure to death ever, secondhand or firsthand. It would also be nice if they’d fart money, but they continue to disappoint.
Likewise with banishing death. Wish all you want, our kids will experience profound, painful, permanent losses in their lives. My job is not to pretend I can change that, but to help make that difficult reality as manageable as possible for them — and shielding them from the pain of heartbreaking loss is not the way. That may be easier on parents and kids alike in the short run, but it sets them up for much greater pain down the road when it’s Grandpa or Mom or (FSM forfend) me crossing over to the other side. Of the grass.
My convictions were put to the test just over a year ago when Erin’s guinea pig died. I blogged at the time:
Erin held him all evening, cooing and stroking and sobbing. In the morning, he was gone.
When Erin’s heart breaks, it takes every other heart in the room with it — and her heart is as broken now as I’ve ever seen it. Still, I know the loss of Max, as painful as it is, is an important experience for her. Pets can contribute, however unwillingly, to our lifelong education in mortality. Though we don’t buy pets in order for kids to experience death, most every pet short of a giant land tortoise will predecease its owner.
When we looked into the cage Thursday morning and saw that Max was still, Erin screamed, then did the precise opposite of what I would have done: she flung open the cage, grabbed him, hugged him to her and wailed…She stroked his fur and touched his teeth and gently rolled his tiny paws between her fingers, all the time whispering Maxie, Maxie. Please wake up.
Then came a monologue both stunning and familiar — that ancient litany of regret, guilt, and helplessness:
I wish I had given him a funner life. He didn’t have enough fun.
Do you think he knew I loved him?
I should have played with him more.
I wanted to watch him grow up!
Do you think I did something wrong? I must have done something wrong!
I want to hear his little noises again.
It isn’t fair at all. It isn’t fair. Things should be fair.We buried Max in the backyard this morning under a metaphor of falling yellow leaves. Erin placed him in the shoebox on a layer of soft bedding. She put his water bottle to his lips once, twice, three times, convulsing with tears. She added food pellets near his head, like an ancient Egyptian preparing Pharoah for the journey to the next life. Flower petals, then Max’s favorite toy, and at last — this nearly did me in — she carefully dried her tears and placed the tissue in with him.
We talked over the grave about what a lucky guy he’d been to be born at all, that a trillion other guinea pigs never got the chance to exist, to be loved and cuddled like he was. She liked that.
A few weeks ago — a year later almost to the day — Delaney (8) got a guinea pig of her own. Erin asked to go with us to the pet store to help Laney pick out the toys, the food, the bedding. She led Laney up and down the aisles. “Max really liked timothy hay,” she said. “You’ll want to get some of that. Ooh, and look, there’s that little wooden thing he liked to chew on!”
As we stood in line at the register, Erin looked up at me. “I’m kinda surprised I’m so okay with all this,” she said. “I mean, I still miss him a lot, but it’s not so…you know…” She pressed a palm to her chest and closed her eyes, then looked up again. “You know?”
I knew. I reminded her of something she said a few days after he died. “You thought it would never stop hurting, remember?”
She nodded. “But it did. Time is amazing.”
And there it is. In addition to learning how much she could love and how much she could grieve, she learned that no matter how much a loss hurts, it will eventually hurt less. So next time — and there will be a next time — she’ll have a comfort she didn’t have before.
The reluctant animal / Can you hear me now? 11
(The 11th in a series on effective communication. Full series here.)
Last September, I briefly mentioned a new CD by They Might Be Giants titled Here Comes Science. From the online samples alone I could tell that it was delicious and different. Now, after four months of family listening, it’s time to chat again.
One song in particular is so good in so many ways, I just had to give it its own blog moment. It’s terrific musically, catchy and inventive as hell, which makes it one of the few pieces on Earth I can hear more than a half dozen times without throwing a virgin into a volcano and jumping in after him. But it’s the lyrics that put My Brother the Ape in my Hall of Fame — and in the Can You Hear Me Now? blog series.
You can guess from the title that My Brother the Ape is about evolution, but it takes a different tack. In Parenting Beyond Belief I waxed on about how cool it is that we are literally related by common descent to all living things on Earth, cousins “not just of apes, but of the sequoia and the amoeba, of mosses and butterflies and blue whales” (p. 221). And it is world-changingly, paradigm-shiftingly cool — IF you can get yourself to let go of the concept of human specialness.
My Brother the Ape is sung from the perspective of someone who has trouble letting go and accepting his kinship with other animals. It starts with an invitation:
Well, I got the invitation that you sent to everyone
And I told you family picnics weren’t exactly my idea of fun
You replied that everyone but me said they were going to come
Which is how you talked me into going to the reunionWhen you said everyone, you really meant it
My brother the ape
My brother the ape
Most songwriters, myself included, would have sent the narrative voice to the reunion and had him dance and sing and frolic in the oneness of all life. The Giants go deeper. Even after the reunion, Narrative Voice is still not all that comfortable with things:
I received the photos you sent, and I don’t regret that I went
Or the sight of everybody stiffly posing under one tent
But I don’t feel I belong and I keep wanting to escape
And I fail to see the likeness between me and my brother the apeThey all kept saying how much we look alike
I don’t think that we look alike at all
He starts working it out, bit by bit — two steps forward, one step back:
But I’ll admit that I look more like a chimp
Than I look like my cousin the shrimp
Or my distant kin the lichens
Or the snowy egret or the moss
And I find it hard to recognize some relatives of ours
Like the rotifer, the sycamore, iguanas and sea starsMy brother the ape
My brother the ape
In the end, he begins to come around, though you can see it’s still going to take some getting used to:
They say you don’t get to choose your family
But there’s no other one to chooseSo that’s why I’m writing this now
And you can tell my sister the cow
That I meant to thank her for the gorgonzola, and I’ll allow
That I’ve been acting like a stranger, but you guys are all so strange
Though I think of what I’m like and I can see we’re all the sameSo this time next year, we’ll meet at my place
My brother the ape
My brother the ape
My girls (8 and 12) have latched onto this song in a big, big way. They sing it around the house, they request it as a bedtime song, over and over and over. And in the process, the message that we are related to every living thing sinks in, bringing wonder with it.
It’s not that my kids have ever been reluctant animals. We’ve underlined our place in the scheme of things since they were born. We point out that the trees in our backyard are related to them in exactly the same way their cousins are, except with a common ancestor millions of years further back than Grandma. We refer to our dog as our wolf and ourselves as her monkeys. So for my kids, the song is mainly a fun and catchy reminder of just how cool that is and how far the kinship goes — to lichens and starfish and beyond.
But for someone who has been raised with the notion that humans are specially created in the image of God to “rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground” (Gen 1:26) — or even coming from a pretty natural position of human chauvinism — evolution represents a serious demotion and a choking slice of humble pie.
A song that empathizes a bit with that reluctance can offer a place for the listener to stand, and sing, while they consider whether or not to come to the reunion.
Parenting Beyond Belief now in Apache
My mother’s book has been translated into Apache. Apache, Helen! Not even Shakespeare or Dickens has been translated into Apache!
T.S. Garp, in The World According to Garp
Okay, PBB has not been translated into Apache. But that line from The World According to Garp was the first thing that popped into my head when I learned yesterday that Parenting Beyond Belief has appeared in its first translated edition — and at first blush, it’s hardly less surprising than Apache.
PBB is now available in Polish.
We’ve been hoping for two years to secure a contract for a French edition, especially given fascinating cultural changes underway in Québec, about which I posted in late 2007:
So why the sudden interest among the Québécois about parents non-croyants? It’s a fascinating story.
Québec has historically been the most religious of the Canadian provinces. Over 83 percent of the population is Catholic — hardly surprising, since the French permitted only Catholics to settle what was New France back in the day. But now Québec is considered the least religious province by a considerable margin — and without losing a single Catholic.
Non-religious Catholics, you say? Oui! French Canadians are eager to maintain their unique identity in the midst of the English Protestant neighborhood — and “French” goes with “Catholic” in Canada even more than it does with “fries” in the U.S. Yet educated Catholics — I’ve discussed this elsewhere — are the most likely of all religious identities to leave religious faith entirely. There is, by all accounts, a very short step from educated Catholic to religious nonbeliever.
Poland shares that tight equation between Catholicism and national identity. Fully 89 percent of Poles self-identify as Catholics. The church is considered by many, even some nontheistic Poles, to be a bulwark against the countless threats to Polish identity that pepper the nation’s history (though it was of little use to the three million Polish Jews murdered in WWII). The papacy of John Paul II and the end of Soviet influence in Poland combined to produce a renewed affection for the Catholic church.
So what does all this have to do with a book on raising children without religion? It’s simple. As in Québec, Catholic identity in Poland is high, but observance is fairly low, with Mass attendance at 40.4 percent in 2008. Poland is also a highly educated and literate country, and (as noted above) educated Catholics are the most likely of all religious identities to leave religious faith entirely. So there is a large and probably growing community of Polish parents trying to raise their children without the undue influence of that looming institution.
I’m happy to help.
Thinking selectively
When I (ever) get around to shooting the sixth YouTube video in the Parenting Beyond Belief series, it’ll be about teaching elementary age kids about evolution.
My advice in a nutshell? Don’t. (That’s why I don’t usually put my advice in nutshells.) [Added: Please note that this is a joke, apparently too subtle. The next sentence reverses it. See? All is well.]
What I mean, of course, is DO teach them about it — but do it in the same way you might teach an eight-year-old about a Shakespeare sonnet or a Bartok string quartet. I wouldn’t sit my second grader down in front of Bartok’s Fifth Quartet and expect her to plead, please oh please Daddy, for the Sixth. The trick is to lay a groundwork by exposing her to music of a hundred kinds, so that later, when she encounters Bartok, she’ll have the experience and the conceptual grounding to make her own informed judgment about it.
Appreciating Shakespeare starts with exposure not to Sonnet 138, but Green Eggs and Ham. (Or maybe a marriage of the two.) Get them savoring meter and wit itself, then they’ll step up into more and more subtle examples of it very naturally as their palate matures. To understand why Bartok and Shakespeare are so friggin’ incredible, it helps to have come across a thousand other examples of their arts to get a sense of what’s possible and what’s been tried. Then you can really savor what they achieved.
Evolution is another thing that’s best approached in sensible steps. It’s an immense, complex and subtle thing that takes place in achingly slow increments as random variation is acted upon by decidedly non-random selective pressures. It’s directional in the short term and directionless in the long term. It is heartless and wasteful and elegant all at once.
In my early teens, I had a very basic grasp of evolution — condensable I’m sure to 50 words or less, half of which were “very.” I majored in physical anthropology in college because I knew juuuust enough to know how much I didn’t know — and how very much I wanted to know it.
I was nineteen before I had a solid grasp of evolution, its evidence, its mechanism, and its astonishing implications.
Since my kids are on track to beat me in everything else — looks, personality, sports, general maturity and fashion sense — I figure I’ll do what I can to help them grasp the greatest realization in human history a lot earlier than I did. The key is to focus not on evolution first, but on natural selection, the much more graspable process that drives evolution.
I addressed this in Raising Freethinkers (pp 17-18):
Q: My six-year-old is fascinated by the natural world. I’ve tried to introduce her to the idea of evolution, but when I say, “A long time ago, apes turned into humans,” she squinches her face—and I know she’s picturing something pretty funny. How can I help her understand the long, slow, fascinating process of evolution?
A: By teaching it the same way evolution happens—in small steps over many years:
1. Draw her attention to adaptations. If I’m out on a walk in the woods with my own daughter and we see a deer with protective coloration, I’ll often say, “Look—you can barely see it! What if I was an animal trying to find a deer to eat? That one wouldn’t be very easy to find. And its babies would have the same coloring, so I’ll bet they’d be hard to find, too.”
2. Imagine a poor adaptation. “Hey, what if it was bright pink? I think I’d have a pink one for supper every night, they’d be so easy to catch.” I step on a twig and the deer bolts away. “Ooh, fast too! I’ll bet I’d have to eat slow pink ones every night. Soon there wouldn’t be any slow pink ones left because I’d have eaten them all!”
3. Move to natural selection, using a non-human example and a shortened timescale. Evolution itself requires thousands of generations and a massive timescale, so above the microbial level we can’t see it in action. But we can study natural selection, the mechanism by which evolution occurs. Once natural selection is understood, evolution is an inevitable consequence of the passage of time. And one creature in particular is just waiting in the wings, so to speak, to explain natural selection to our kids: the peppered moth. [See the Activities section in RF Chapter 1.]
4. Use analogy to teach the otherwise unimaginable timescale. Analogies can be difficult for very young kids, but once your child is able to handle that level of abstraction, there’s no better way to render the inconceivable conceivable. Saying a million Earths would fit inside the Sun is fine, but saying “If the Sun were a soccer ball, Earth would be a peppercorn”—now I get it. Same goes for time. Use either Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar or Dawkin’s armspan analogy.
That’s been our approach, and once in a while, I get a hint that it’s working. Two weeks ago during the Christmas break, Connor (14) was sitting bored, looking out our back window. Suddenly he said, “Dad! Plants don’t feel pain.”
We had a conversation long ago about the many remaining open questions — like whether dolphins are actually smarter than we are, to what extent other animals communicate with each other — and whether plants feel pain.
“How do you know they don’t?” I asked.
“There’d be no reason for them to evolve that,” he said. “Pain is a warning so you can get away from something like a predator, or take your hand out of the fire. But plants can’t move anyway, so pain wouldn’t be an advantage. It wouldn’t help one plant survive to reproduce more than another one. It would just…hurt.”
I reel a bit in moments like these. Never mind whether he’s right — I have no idea myself. The wonderful thing is that he’s thinking creatively and in the right terms. In this case, that means thinking “selectively.” With that grounding, once he encounters evolution in greater depth, it’ll slip on like a glove.
Full launch at last
Foundation Beyond Belief — a non-profit charitable and educational organization created to focus, encourage and demonstrate the generosity and compassion of atheists and humanists and to provide a comprehensive education and support program for nontheistic parents — is alive.
Foundation membership is now open, and our first slate of beneficiaries is in place.
And what a slate it is. There’s an organization of scientists committed to biodiversity, another providing health care to marginalized communities on five continents, and a secular alternative for addiction recovery. There’s a non-profit bringing safe drinking water to five countries in desperate need, an advocacy group for refugees fleeing war, and an advocacy group for asylum seekers fleeing torture. There’s a scholarship fund for GLBT students who have been disowned by their families, an organization protecting children in war zones, and another protecting the environment by working toward “greener” buildings and cities.
Selecting these has been a challenging and powerful experience. In the end, we chose a wide range of organizations in size, budget, mission, and scope. Members will now in turn choose which of these organizations they will support with a percentage of their monthly donations—which in turn will inform our future selections.
It’s a chance to watch the evolution of humanist philanthropy.
No more words. Time for pictures:
Now go. Join up.
UPDATE: As is to be expected with a site and project as complex as FBB, we’ve had some technical hiccups. If you’re having any trouble signing up, give it a couple of days and our brilliant webster Airan will have it all ironed out.
Santa Claus – The Ultimate Dry Run
Time once again for the annual reposting of my take on Santa, which first appeared in Parenting Beyond Belief. A lovely symmetry this year: My youngest is now eight, the age my oldest was when his Kringledoubt finally overflowed (see below). And sure enough, Delaney is currently on that same fascinating cusp between wanting to preserve belief and wanting to know.
IT’S HARD TO even consider the possibility that Santa isn’t real. Everyone seems to believe he is. As a kid, I heard his name in songs and stories and saw him in movies with very high production values. My mom and dad seemed to believe, batted down my doubts, told me he wanted me to be good and that he always knew if I wasn’t. And what wonderful gifts I received! Except when they were crappy, which I always figured was my fault somehow. All in all, despite the multiple incredible improbabilities involved in believing he was real, I believed – until the day I decided I cared enough about the truth to ask serious questions, at which point the whole façade fell to pieces. Fortunately the good things I had credited him with kept coming, but now I knew they came from the people around me, whom I could now properly thank.
Now go back and read that paragraph again, changing the ninth word from Santa to God.
Santa Claus, my secular friends, is the greatest gift a rational worldview ever had. Our culture has constructed a silly and temporary myth parallel to its silly and permanent one. They share a striking number of characteristics, yet the one is cast aside halfway through childhood. And a good thing, too: A middle-aged father looking mournfully up the chimbly along with his sobbing children on yet another giftless Christmas morning would be a sure candidate for a very soft room. This culturally pervasive myth is meant to be figured out, designed with an expiration date, after which consumption is universally frowned upon.
I’ll admit to having stumbled backward into the issue as a parent. My wife and I defaulted into raising our kids with the same myth we’d been raised in (I know, I know), considering it ever-so-harmless and fun. Neither of us had experienced the least trauma as kids when the jig was up. To the contrary: we both recall the heady feeling of at last being in on the secret to which so many others, including our younger siblings, were still oblivious. Ahh, the sweet, smug smell of superiority.
But as our son Connor began to exhibit the incipient inklings of Kringledoubt, it occurred to me that something powerful was going on. I began to see the Santa paradigm as an unmissable opportunity – the ultimate dry run for a developing inquiring mind.
My boy was eight years old when he started in with the classic interrogation: How does Santa get to all those houses in one night? How does he get in when we don’t have a chimney and all the windows are locked and the alarm system is on? Why does he use the same wrapping paper as Mom? All those cookies in one night – his LDL cholesterol must be through the roof!
This is the moment, at the threshold of the question, that the natural inquiry of a child can be primed or choked off. With questions of belief, you have three choices: feed the child a confirmation, feed the child a disconfirmation – or teach the child to fish.
The “Yes, Virginia” crowd will heap implausible nonsense on the poor child, dismissing her doubts with invocations of magic or mystery or the willful suspension of physical law. Only slightly less problematic is the second choice, the debunker who simply informs the child that, yes, Santa is a big fat fraud.
“Gee,” the child can say to either of them. “Thanks. I’ll let you know if I need any more authoritative pronouncements.”
I for one chose door number three.
“Some people believe the sleigh is magic,” I said. “Does that sound right to you?” Initially, boy howdy, did it ever. He wanted to believe, and so was willing to swallow any explanation, no matter how implausible or how tentatively offered. “Some people say it isn’t literally a single night,” I once said, naughtily priming the pump for later inquiries. But little by little, the questions got tougher, and he started to answer that second part – Does that sound right to you? – a bit more agnostically.
I avoided both lying and setting myself up as a godlike authority, determined as I was to let him sort this one out himself. And when at last, at the age of nine, in the snowy parking lot of the Target store, to the sound of a Salvation Army bellringer, he asked me point blank if Santa was real – I demurred, just a bit, one last time.
“What do you think?” I said.
“Well…I think all the moms and dads are Santa.” He smiled at me. “Am I right?”
I smiled back. It was the first time he’d asked me directly, and I told him he was right.
“So,” I asked, “how do you feel about that?”
He shrugged. “That’s fine. Actually, it’s good. The world kind of… I don’t know…makes sense again.”
That’s my boy. He wasn’t betrayed, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t bereft of hope. He was relieved. It reminded me of the feeling I had when at last I realized God was fictional. The world actually made sense again.
And when Connor started asking skeptical questions about God, I didn’t debunk it for him by fiat. I told him what various people believe and asked if that sounded right to him. It all rang a bell, of course. He’d been through the ultimate dry run.
By allowing our children to participate in the Santa myth and find their own way out of it through skeptical inquiry, we give them a priceless opportunity to see a mass cultural illusion first from the inside, then from the outside. A very casual line of post-Santa questioning can lead kids to recognize how completely we all can snow ourselves if the enticements are attractive enough. Such a lesson, viewed from the top of the hill after exiting a belief system under their own power, can gird kids against the best efforts of the evangelists – and far better than secondhand knowledge could ever hope to do.
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A related post from Krismas 2007
For Tom Flynn’s counterpoint to this position, see pp. 85-87 of Parenting Beyond Belief.
A Hall of Fame reply…maybe
Had a lovely visit last month with the Freethinkers of East Cobb, a secular parenting group here in the Atlanta burbs. One of the group members named Kirstin left me a great gift — the cleverest reply I’ve ever heard to one of the most common questions nonreligious parents get.
She and her husband cross paths with the occasional evangelical Christian homeschooling parent in the neighborhood. At some point, by Georgia law, the Christian parent will ask where they go to church. Kristin told me
“Whenever we get that question, we just say, ‘Oh, we homechurch.’”
The more I think about it, the better this answer gets. You would NOT want to use this to hide your beliefs, but the inevitable follow-up question will give you the opportunity to go there. It ends up being a gentle and interesting sidestep into, rather than around, the larger question.
According to the Googlemind, the coinage “homechurch” is rare but not unheard of.* It’s apparently used most often by Christians who are “between churches” for one reason or another. But it also works for a secular parent who is making an effort to raise religiously literate kids (and selves) without the shortcomings and single note of the traditional church.
I’ve written at length about what I think is the ideal approach to religious literacy, which boils down to several thousand little conversations, connections, observations and experiences woven into the daily fabric of family life for 18 years. Described that way, it’s more similar to “unschooling.” But saying “We unchurch” would be immediately misunderstood — an experience unschoolers are surely familiar with.
So my vote is unchanged. “We homechurch” goes straight to the Secular Parenting Hall of Fame. Use it responsibly, and send Kirstin a nickel every time you do.
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*UPDATE: Or not. If you search with a space (“home church”), you uncover a whole movement of believers who “home church” because actual churches have gone too liberal on them. I avoid church (in part) because the perspective is too narrow and exclusive for me. They avoid it because the perspective is too broad and inclusive for them. Oy! (Thanks to several commenters for pointing out that dark reflection.)