WARNING: Your Kid is Smarter Than You!

Everyone is born with some capacity for critical thinking, but most people lose the skill over time. Children, specifically those aged 3-5, happen to be the best at it. This can be proven by a single word: ‘why’.

When someone asks a ‘why’-question, they are asking a question of reason, which is to say they are thinking critically to some degree. Children do this much more openly than adults, which is why most adults think children are simply being pests when they do. That is incorrect. The root of their questioning is philosophical. Children challenge assumptions, premises, and claims more openly than anyone. They are learning as much as they can about the world, and they demand reason to back up that knowledge. They are not lazy in the way that they tend to develop beliefs. Unfortunately, most parents do not share such genuine, open curiosity, nor are they readily able to cater to it. This is most obvious in grandparents, as the saying goes, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. Elderly people tend to be the most firmly set in their ways and resistant to new ideas. Who can blame them? Thinking is calorie-intensive. Quite frankly, old people just don’t have the energy for it. Parents and teachers, however, have an important job to do. They have no excuse.

Though a child’s tendency to ask these types of questions will persist for some time, his continuance to do so will depend greatly on how open and able his parents and teachers are to dealing with it. In a perfect world, adults would take this as an opportunity to think critically about those questions themselves. Instead, they get frustrated or annoyed, make up a poor answer (e.g. “because I said so”), and send their kid straight to the TV or to bed; whatever it takes to keep them occupied and out from under the their skin. This is an uninspired and very resistant approach to parenting. The child’s curiosity is repressed, and they gradually stop asking questions and start submitting more and more to an ideology. The more naive children give in more quickly to the rules set before them. Others might become rebellious. Those rule-followers are certainly no smarter than the rebels, despite what social convention will tell you. Either way, their guardians’ repression has a lasting, negative effect on how they think.

I would like to now disclose that I do not have any children of my own, and I do not plan to have children in the foreseeable future. On that basis, someone who is guilty of the above might already feel offended and accuse me of having an incredible opinion on the matter. I would like to think that the contrary is true for two main reasons. First, I am a good planner. I am fully aware of the challenges of raising a child, and that is precisely why I am responsible enough to take the necessary precautions to prevent having one. Secondly, experience isn’t everything. I can observe the effects of bad parenting with a high level of objectivity because my thoughts about the matter are not distorted by the feelings caused by having a child of my own – feelings which unavoidably inhibit one’s ability to reason well.

Having said that, as you are a rational, autonomous agent, let me tell you a story.

I have a friend who has a four-year-old daughter. Immediately, there is a problem: He did not intend to. No, the fact that so many other people accidentally have children does not excuse him. That would be to commit the bandwagon fallacy. Nor does the fact that he is married and is financially able to support his daughter excuse him. In fact, he and his wife planned on holding out for five to seven years after their marriage to have a child, as they were aware of their not being ready. Instead, they ended up getting pregnant within only one year of their marriage. She was not planned, and my friend was not ready for the challenge of raising her. This is obvious upon close observation.

What does it mean for one to “be ready” to raise a child? That seems like a personal, descriptive question that everyone has their own unique answer to. That is true in a sense, but there is also a very normative aspect to this question. What “readiness” should mean here is that one is willing to accept the intellectual challenge of teaching a little person how to think – not what to think. That involves, not shrugging every time the child asks ‘why’, but, also, more crucially, asking ‘why’ for oneself. There is a modern saying that goes, “grade school teaches one what to think whereas college teaches one how to think”. My argument is that by the time someone gets to college age, they have already become a person to a degree, with their own thoughts, feelings, and system of beliefs. Therefore, it is almost certainly too late to teach one how to think. Small children ask the most critical questions. Parents should help them improve that ability at that point, before they have subscribed to an ideology that will most likely be founded in poor reasoning. The obstacle here is that the parents have previously adopted certain beliefs and have therefore surrendered their own ability to think well, much less will they be able to teach that ability to a child. Leading by example is vital, as kids learn by copying.

My friend is no exception. He holds some rather radical beliefs – mainly those of scientism and atheism, which normally go hand-in-hand. Therefore, he is not the type, no matter the subject, to be truly open to the question ‘why’. His beliefs dictate specific answers to those questions. i.e. All knowledge in the universe, including that of supernatural entities (such as God), has been or will be confirmed or falsified on the basis of physical, quantifiable matter.

The other day, my friend’s daughter was at preschool when some of her classmates were talking about a discussion they had in Sunday School the weekend before. When she got home that afternoon, she began to ask her father questions about God. She wasn’t doing so in a way that presupposed God’s existence, nor was she making any such claims. She was simply asking out of genuine curiosity, as children do with everything. To this point in her life, she had never even heard of God because my friend, being a serious atheist, had kept all sources of religion from her access at home. So, as you might imagine, he was quite disturbed that she was asking these questions. He felt he had done all he could do at home to keep religion out of her life, and now she was confronting him, backing him into a corner. His quick-fix decision was to, first, reject her questioning, and second, become more militant in forcing scientism upon her. He went out and bought children’s books about Darwinian evolution to fill the gap of there being no religion (e.g. bible story books). His hope was that she would believe in science (actually, scientism) instead of religion.

My friend, on an elusive, yet vital note, is trapped in a very conflicted way of thinking. He wants his daughter to “think according to reason”, as he says, but he also wants her to believe in some very specific ideologies. The two, at least in principle, cannot coexist. As I have clearly explained in earlier posts, reason and ideology are nearly polar opposite mindsets. If one is to reason well, he should find that no general ideology, is worth submitting to. There are only specific, situational exceptions to that fact. For example, when one takes a math test, he tunes into the deductive, mathematical way of thinking. When he takes a history test, he tunes into the material he studied for that test. Each way of thinking is useful in its own contexts. If he tries to apply math to the history test, or vise versa, he will fail the test.

On a more obvious note, my friend’s attempt to relentlessly control what is exposed to his daughter is a hopeless endeavor. She is going to get out of the house and away from her parents, as she already has to a degree. She is going to experience the world. She is going to have conversations with people who have views that conflict with her own. Most of all, she is going to be challenged. If she is taught what to think (whether evangelical Christianity, scientism, atheism, democratic or republican ideologies, etc.) she will be defenseless in such encounters. She will only be able to think and express herself according to those strict systems of thought, and that will be very limiting.

This approach to parenting, in some form or another, is widespread in the western world, and it is wrong. It is like trying to understand how the brain of a rat works by killing the rat, taking the brain out, and observing the brain in a non-working state, independent of the body. When one attempts to control all variables from happening, such conditions fail to represent those in the real world, for the real world is that which contains all the variables uncontrolled! Anything learned via such a method cannot be meaningfully applied in the real world. In fact, such methods will produce literally no meaningful results whatsoever.

How these analogies and examples can help us improve things, I will soon explain. There are constructive methods and solutions. The details of those methods will be for the individual parents and teachers to determine. All I will do is offer insights. You know your children the best, so adapt the concepts in your own way toward the one common goal: development of flexible thinking and viewpoints. There is a route for everyone. It is up to you to carve it for your children and for yourself.

There is not one generalized system of government, education, and economy that will satisfy all individuals. The ways individuals see things can change instantaneously. Creating a better world starts with better-thinking individuals. We can only hope that future systems will adapt accordingly.

To be continued…