Raising a Child of Freethought
Dateline: August 30, 2000
This week, an article from J. Eric Harrington...
Eighteen years ago, as I approached the time of my son's birth, I recall hoping primarily that I could bring him up to be a freethinker. I had never heard the term in those days. In fact, I was a devout member of a Southern Baptist church, as was my wife. However, I was determined to teach my son to live up to an ideal that I had in my mind - one that is embodied by this quote:
What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.
Bertrand Russell
Regardless of the many changes in my beliefs during my life, the one thing that has always been my first concern was the ability to think for myself. As Professor Russell said, I came up with some odd conclusions at times. But they were always my conclusions. I wanted more than anything for my son to live his life in the same way.
In those days, I was not concerned over whether there was a danger that he might turn out to be anything but a Christian. I thought that the Christian faith could be defended reasonably, so I started from the beginning with a base of fearless reason.
Much of the work in the first decade of my son's life was a matter of laying the groundwork for freedom of thought. Yet I had very little material at my disposal with which I could work - much of what I did was based on my intuition of how I would want to be treated as a child.
Respect
The first idea I started with was showing respect for my son's rights. I never walked into his room, even when he was a toddler, without knocking on his door and waiting for his invitation. When it came to his thoughts, I showed a similar respect for his decisions, even when I disagreed with them. I think this was vital in developing a freethinking attitude in him.
When he was in the first grade in 1988, we had our first disagreement over politics. As many schools do, his class held a mock Presidential election. I hadn't talked much with him about my views of the Presidential race, and I was a little surprised to hear that he had voted for George Bush, a choice I wouldn't have made.
Instead of telling him that he'd made the wrong choice, I took this as a chance to do some teaching. We sat down together, and I showed him some newspaper articles, explaining why I would have voted differently. At no point did I criticize him for choosing "wrongly," and I made sure that the discussion didn't rise to the level of a conflict.
Discipline
I was far from a perfect father, though. This was also a key in helping my son grow into a freethinker. Frankly, I made some rather bad mistakes, but found ways to use them to good advantage.
At one point, I erred quite badly in handing out a punishment, grounding my son for disobeying my instructions while we were shopping one afternoon. After the sentence had been passed, he told me his side of the story, and it turned out that he had indeed followed my instructions to the best of his abilities.
I have known men who would have been determined to "save face" in similar situations. I admit that I felt the desire to find some way to rationalize sticking to the punishment. However, I did not. I told him that I had been wrong to punish him. More importantly, I apologized for being angry and not asking for his side of the story in the first place.
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