What is the difference between raising a child and indoctrinating one? I ask myself that question all the time, thank you Richard Dawkins.
Last month my 11 year old son and I were boarding a flight home. As we stepped into the cabin, the stewardess gasped and blurted out, "Oh my he is yours!"
I smiled and said, "Thank you." My son giggled. We are used to this because my little boy is my mini me. He looks like me, moves like me and thinks like me. By think like me I do not mean that he believes all the same things I do. I mean his is neurologically weird in the same weird way that I am. He is so much like me I would not have to flex a muscle to indoctrinate him. So why don't I do just that?
When I first held him and looked into those black baby eyes, I saw that his personality was there as fully formed as the perfect little nails and the end of his long baby fingers. I realized that every thing I thought about parenting was wrong. He was not a blank slate. It was not my job to mold this little creature into some idea of the perfect person. It was my job to get that little body and that little personality to adulthood with as little damage as possible. Parenting suddenly got a lot harder.
The world is full of dangers, sharp knives can be locked up but sharp tongues are much harder to sequester. There are many personality brushing experiences that all children must face, disappointment, loss, shame and so many other things that make up the gantlet run that is growing up. Just like it is possible to overprotect a child's body it is also possible to overprotect their personality. However, there is a line. In the same way that I would never give my growing son a cigarette because it will harm his body, I will not indoctrinate him because it will harm his personality.
"Wait, wait! are you saying that indoctrination is as bad as letting children smoke?" you may be thinking. Yes it is. Children are not growing up in the same world we did. No child ever grows up in their parent's world. Time and culture move on and it should move on. When they are grown our children will have to face problems we can't even imagine. Indoctrinating them ties them to the chains of our believes and limits their ability to grow. How can they fully develop their own unique personality if we hobble them with things they MUST think. Indoctrination is violent in that it does not leave room for inquiry and dissention.
Kids are natural mimics. It is hard wired into the neurology. It is one of the ways we apes learn. This can make it hard to know where learning ends and indoctrination begins. For example, my son's new found contempt for Christianity, is it something he has come to on his own or has he learned it by mimicking me? Sorry Christians but when you start in with "god hates gays", insisteing the world is only 6,000 years old, or start whining that there is a war on Christmas's I can't help rolling my eyes. So how to sort it out?
Inquiry and permission to decent are my tools of choice. First I acknowledge that I agree with him but assert that he is free to not agree with me. We have been doing this for years so this step elicits the eye roll and the exasperated "I know mom" that only a pre teen can deliver. Then on to inquiry a proses he actually likes. I start out asking him what he knows. This is not the inquiry I am talking about. This just gives me a base line and an opportunity to clear up any facts he may have misapprehended. He hates this but luckily he very really misapprehends things these days. You know we are in this phase if you hear me saying, "well actually..." I only correct hard facts, dates, points of history, miss quotes and adding missing context. This is not about changing his mind. It is about broadening his base so that the real inquiry can begin. We love a full on "why is the sky blue" session. This is where we follow his questions and his inquiry.
In the case of Christianity he had observed the Christian fixation on the bible. He first noticed them in the dollar store. Then he noticed the book is everywhere. We are a reading house. We all have kindles and we share a house account so our kindles are FULL of books. There is a kitchen cabinet devoted to cookbooks and they are all ratty and dirty for heavy use. We love books. Lots of books. All kinds of books. The Christian obsession with just one book seemed so stupid to him that he began to pay attention. From there he heard about the debate with Bill Nye and the Christian denial of evolution. He decided they must be trying to be stupid. If there is one thing my son finds contemptible it is willful stupid. So we talked about the bible. He learned about how it was written and the basics about what is in it. We went through and I summarized what was in the books. He was NOT impressed.
We tried to watch some the creationist videos on YouTube because I knew I could not present even a vaguely unbiased opinion so I let Ken Ham do the talking. My 11 year old was sputtering over the bad logic. Sorry Christianity but truly you bring it on yourself.
I like history and religious history is a big part of it. We have learned about the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, the Norse, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam and his favorite so far the Zoroastrians. He has found much in all of these religions and has incorporated many of their myths and traditions into his own pantheistic belief system. Yes my son has his own belief system that includes many Gods and spiritual beings because I am raising a child not an atheist.
Last month my 11 year old son and I were boarding a flight home. As we stepped into the cabin, the stewardess gasped and blurted out, "Oh my he is yours!"
I smiled and said, "Thank you." My son giggled. We are used to this because my little boy is my mini me. He looks like me, moves like me and thinks like me. By think like me I do not mean that he believes all the same things I do. I mean his is neurologically weird in the same weird way that I am. He is so much like me I would not have to flex a muscle to indoctrinate him. So why don't I do just that?
When I first held him and looked into those black baby eyes, I saw that his personality was there as fully formed as the perfect little nails and the end of his long baby fingers. I realized that every thing I thought about parenting was wrong. He was not a blank slate. It was not my job to mold this little creature into some idea of the perfect person. It was my job to get that little body and that little personality to adulthood with as little damage as possible. Parenting suddenly got a lot harder.
The world is full of dangers, sharp knives can be locked up but sharp tongues are much harder to sequester. There are many personality brushing experiences that all children must face, disappointment, loss, shame and so many other things that make up the gantlet run that is growing up. Just like it is possible to overprotect a child's body it is also possible to overprotect their personality. However, there is a line. In the same way that I would never give my growing son a cigarette because it will harm his body, I will not indoctrinate him because it will harm his personality.
"Wait, wait! are you saying that indoctrination is as bad as letting children smoke?" you may be thinking. Yes it is. Children are not growing up in the same world we did. No child ever grows up in their parent's world. Time and culture move on and it should move on. When they are grown our children will have to face problems we can't even imagine. Indoctrinating them ties them to the chains of our believes and limits their ability to grow. How can they fully develop their own unique personality if we hobble them with things they MUST think. Indoctrination is violent in that it does not leave room for inquiry and dissention.
Kids are natural mimics. It is hard wired into the neurology. It is one of the ways we apes learn. This can make it hard to know where learning ends and indoctrination begins. For example, my son's new found contempt for Christianity, is it something he has come to on his own or has he learned it by mimicking me? Sorry Christians but when you start in with "god hates gays", insisteing the world is only 6,000 years old, or start whining that there is a war on Christmas's I can't help rolling my eyes. So how to sort it out?
Inquiry and permission to decent are my tools of choice. First I acknowledge that I agree with him but assert that he is free to not agree with me. We have been doing this for years so this step elicits the eye roll and the exasperated "I know mom" that only a pre teen can deliver. Then on to inquiry a proses he actually likes. I start out asking him what he knows. This is not the inquiry I am talking about. This just gives me a base line and an opportunity to clear up any facts he may have misapprehended. He hates this but luckily he very really misapprehends things these days. You know we are in this phase if you hear me saying, "well actually..." I only correct hard facts, dates, points of history, miss quotes and adding missing context. This is not about changing his mind. It is about broadening his base so that the real inquiry can begin. We love a full on "why is the sky blue" session. This is where we follow his questions and his inquiry.
In the case of Christianity he had observed the Christian fixation on the bible. He first noticed them in the dollar store. Then he noticed the book is everywhere. We are a reading house. We all have kindles and we share a house account so our kindles are FULL of books. There is a kitchen cabinet devoted to cookbooks and they are all ratty and dirty for heavy use. We love books. Lots of books. All kinds of books. The Christian obsession with just one book seemed so stupid to him that he began to pay attention. From there he heard about the debate with Bill Nye and the Christian denial of evolution. He decided they must be trying to be stupid. If there is one thing my son finds contemptible it is willful stupid. So we talked about the bible. He learned about how it was written and the basics about what is in it. We went through and I summarized what was in the books. He was NOT impressed.
We tried to watch some the creationist videos on YouTube because I knew I could not present even a vaguely unbiased opinion so I let Ken Ham do the talking. My 11 year old was sputtering over the bad logic. Sorry Christianity but truly you bring it on yourself.
I like history and religious history is a big part of it. We have learned about the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, the Norse, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam and his favorite so far the Zoroastrians. He has found much in all of these religions and has incorporated many of their myths and traditions into his own pantheistic belief system. Yes my son has his own belief system that includes many Gods and spiritual beings because I am raising a child not an atheist.
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