Raising a Child of Freethought

Dateline: August 30, 2000

"RAISING A CHILD OF FREETHOUGHT" > Page 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

The Value of Reading

From the earliest of days, I enjoyed reading to my son. Every evening, the routine was to find a book to read. I took this practice to an extreme, I'm afraid. I understand that most children get out of this routine by the start of grade school. We kept it up until just about 4th grade.

An important part of this practice was a habit I had of stopping at various points and explaining words or ideas that I thought he might not understand, or checking back to earlier points of the story to verify questions about what was happening at the end. This was of good use in the later years, as we explored such books as "Ender's Game" and "Lord of the Rings." As I said, we were extreme in our reading!

Still, the thinking skills that I was demonstrating were vital for freethought. We were on the alert to make sure we understood what we were reading. We were learning to catch errors in the plots. On occasion, I would even ask my son to speculate on what a character might do, given events in the stories. We sometimes found it amusing to see how our predictions varied from the vision of the authors.

Critical Thinking

One of the most intriguing parts of teaching my son the skills of critical thought was how we dealt with the issue of Santa Claus. I was fairly sure that most kids figured out the truth concerning Santa by their early grades. Children with no older siblings to inform them might take a little longer, I thought. I was starting to get worried when 4th grade came up and we were still getting requests to visit Santa at the mall. I decided one early winter day of that year to take action.

I sat down with my son and asked him if he really believed in Santa, and he assured me that he did. I asked him about his beliefs concerning the more common parts of the myth - the workshop at the North Pole, delivering toys to all children in one night and so on.

In discussing the North Pole, I asked him what he knew geographically about the area. He said he knew it was in the center of the Arctic ocean, and covered with ice. I mentioned to him that expeditions had been there, and that there had even been a submarine that broke through the ice there once.

What I was doing was creating a cognitive dissonance, forcing him to face the conflict between two opposed beliefs about the same thing. When he realized that there was a logical problem that he couldn't explain, he stopped dead in his tracks and said, "I need to think about this."

I said, "I think that's a good idea. If you want to talk about this any more, let me know." I did not want to force a decision at once. Instead, I left him to do his own thinking. I was pleased to find that there were no more requests for interviews with Santa after that.

I never asked for or heard a specific statement from him that he had abandoned the belief in Santa. I thought it would be rude to intrude on his private thought processes, and I certainly had no intention of celebrating the loss of a fondly-held belief.

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