Telling our children the truth: response to Paul Graham
I never remember my parents swearing at anyone or about anything. They were honest when they were angry or upset, but did not feel it was helpful to get demeaning or curse things or people. I have also tried to help my children work out their problems and anger without resorting to shouting or swearing, because I agree that the escalation is more hurtful than helpful. We don't always succeed, but that is the goal.
When our textbooks glossed over the truth or TV programs misrepresented reality, my parents pointed it out. I have done the same with my children. When we asked about sex, drugs, alcohol, my parents explained it straightforwardly and also explained why they had chosen to remain virgins until married, and not risk addiction to mind-alerting substances (or even health-altering tobacco).
Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were always fun imaginary characters. Jesus was a historical person, whom, my parents honestly explained, some people considered just another human being, but that a third of the world's population considered something much more, themselves included.
I have similarly tried to tell the simple truth to my children. What is lost by that?
As to religion, my parents said that they believed that God really does exist and that the Bible is a historical record of man's interactions with a real God. But they did not hide from us, even when we were very little, the fact that there are many people who think God does not exist, and that it is really only the personal experience of God for oneself that can "prove" his existence (and the existence of a spiritual realm) to an individual. They pointed out that if a person has never experienced God, he has no reason to believe God exists (unless he wants to accept the testimonial of others who have as proof enough). As a result I was able to be honest when I myself had not yet encountered God, and never look down on others who had no reason to believe in him having not encountered him.
I always felt free to challenge my parent's values and perspectives because they did not demean opposing opinions, but explained clearly and directly why they had chosen the path that they were on. They practiced what they preached. I have tried to do the same with my children (now all in their twenties).
My children have the advantage of seeing the honesty of my parent's lives as well as my own and my husband's. When my mother got cancer, we sat our kids down and told them everything that was happening... they knew about the chemo and the pain and her 5 year fight to live was played out before their eyes. On her death bed my mother asked my second son about the paper she had been helping him research for college. He knew her body was soon to stop functioning... and that while some thought her spirit was also about to end, none of us believed that was true. We burned her body, scattered her ashes and rejoiced in her release from pain into eternal life.
I believe if parents do not think that heaven exists they should tell that to their children the first time they ask. But they should also tell them that many others believe heaven does exist. Or vice versa. That would be telling them the truth.
Perhaps my parents were so straightforward because they were highly educated (my father graduated from Caltech (BS), Columbia (MA), Cornell (PhD) and Princeton Seminary, my mother summa cum laude from USC), so intellectual honesty was important to them. Or perhaps they were honest because they believed in the moral obligation of truth because of their faith in a moral God.
Whatever the reason, I would like to affirm to all parents that truth works. Be honest about why you have chosen to believe what you believe and live how you live. Be honest about the mistakes you have made and are making. Kids can handle truth delivered compassionately. What they need is a strong relationship with you and each other, and that cannot be built on deception.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 49.9 ms ] threadIf you determined that there were differences between races, and it was in the best interest of your children to discriminate against certain people, what would you tell them? Would you ever tell them to discriminate against other races if that was truly in their best interest?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
If my hypothetical child asked about that, I would explain what we actually know about what causes differences in ability, such as socioeconomic factors.
Also, there are no racial groups for which your average IQs hold. My point is not just that there is any overlap, it's that there is considerable overlap, which renders discrimination based on race quite useless.
Also, discrimination means being able to tell different things apart. A 'discriminating' taste in wine means knowing the difference between good wine and bad, not thinking that all the wine from region A is better than any wine from region B.
Ashkenazim and sub-Saharan Africans?
Again, with the 'some overlap renders it useless' argument. I still don't understand why you will not also educate your child against the dangers of thinking that age correlates with height, when everyone knows that there are ten-year-olds who all taller than particular nine-year-olds -- and that you can have arbitrarily narrow age groups that make the average difference far smaller than the difference within each group. Overlapping bell curves with different medians still have different medians, however much they overlap.
The knowledge that the average ten-year old is taller than the average nine-year old is just as useless as knowing that the average Ashkenazi Jew has a higher IQ than the average sub-Saharan African.
You would really be indifferent between finding yourself in Boro Park or Bedford-Stuyvessant? I understand the rent is very cheap in the latter (I lived there a while). Bed-Stuy doesn't have sub-Saharan Africans (or if it does, they're very smart immigrants who are likely to move to a better neighborhood in a few years), but the people there are from roughly that group, plus some admixture.
I think socioeconomic status is a better predictor of criminality than race. With that said, if I'm walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, race is one of the few variables I have to work with. Unfortunately, in America, race is a moderately effective indicator of socioeconomic status, so I would use it as one factor in judging my safety. Even then, I usually use clothes and appearance rather than race to judge one's propensity for crime.
This is actually a more interesting problem in terms of what to tell children than racial differences in intelligence. I think by the time they're old enough to be somewhere without adult supervision, they are able to determine what looks like a poor area or poor person and act accordingly. I can see the logic that would lead someone to tell their kids to use race as such a proxy instead, but the consequences of doing so make it not worth the negligible increase in safety in my opinion.
I think it's a red herring to ask why we're collecting the data in order to decide whether or not the data are accurate.
I don't care why we're collecting the data, and I was assuming the data was accurate. I'm just saying that as far as genetic differences are a factor in the data, there's nothing we can do about it or with it, so it's useless.
I'm not saying (or rather, I don't want to say) that race exists and discrimination is good. But it's the closest argument we have to the evolution argument of days past.
I don't think this subject comes up very often with small children. "Discrimination" is just a probabilistic decision made wherever imperfect knowledge exists. That is, you look at the demographics of a neighborhood before moving there, knowing full well that it's not an ideal measure. Again, what can children do about such a thing?
The OP seemed to be setting up a scenario in which his parents said, "...and others disagree" and so made themselves seem "truthful". That's halfway to getting to the real truth which is, "We ourselves are completely without a clue, but prefer Yahweh over Ganesh because an elephant head is bullcrap a mite too obvious for our tastes. Others disagree."
The real secret is that truth doesn't matter too much unless it involves something that can damage you. God, it just so happens, is not among the things that can damage you. And so, feel free to believe whatever you want.
I would tell them to beware of plausible-sounding theories. And I'd have them read this:
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2007/11/science-103-virtue-of-sim...
The best thing to do is to not pre-infect your child with your own personal notions on controversial topics till he is equipped to think independently about them.
I sure wish he'd stick to technical stuff. The combination of arrogance and ignorance displayed in that essay is a bit too much. I'd be a lot happier if he'd release another version of Arc than to peddle this drivel :(
Forgive me if I don't take your comment seriously.
You ignore (at least in this post) the millions who were not raised like you, and yet have strong relationships with their parents. You ignore parents who've actually had to answer some really difficult questions ("What's a prostitute?"). You ignore the fact that you can't correct all the lies and half-truths because you won't hear or see everything your child hears or sees.
Even the truth as one "believes" it comes with bias, which one might consider a lie. "I believe in God, but some people don't believe he exists because they haven't had a personal experience of Him" ... the truth, perhaps, but it conveys an unmistakable opinion; how does one's 8 year old truly infer "God may or may not exist" from that? Is that really "truth" if you nudge someone so perceptibly in the direction you want them to go?
It's quite convenient for you that they were right on all the things they taught you. Or were they?
When it comes to lying vs. "telling the truth" concerning ones beliefs, the [in]accuracy of the belief itself is moot.
Regardless of the justification, the sole purpose of a lie is deception. In PG's essay he points out reasons that we choose to deceive children, and the merits of those reasons are debatable. The author, and her parents, have taken the opposite tactic in child raising, which is admirable (imho).
Whether or not God exists, (which I believe undoubtedly that He does. Downmod if you'd like), when a parent answers a child's question concerning God in a fashion as described above...they are telling the truth. It does not matter one whit if they are right or not. As long as they believe what their answer is, they are not lying. In this particular case, the parents even go out of their way to point out that others believe otherwise, which is profitable for the child as well.
As a side note, I don't believe "What's a prostitute?" is a great example of a difficult question, and hardly worth lying to a child about.
> As to religion, my parents said that they believed that God really does exist and that the Bible is a historical record of man's interactions with a real God...
Just by saying the fact that they themselves believe in god, they are giving the child a reason to bias towards that answer, aren't they? In the mind of the child, the foremost authority on all things occurring in the world around them is their parents, are they not?
The best way to answer this question is simply, "Noone knows", and leave it at that. Any further explanation will only lead the child one or another. Actually, not its not, because even by saying "Noone knows" you suggest a direction of thought, pushing them towards agnosticism rather than Catholicism, or Judaism, or Muslimism, or Whatever-ism. There is no right answer to this question. No matter what, by answering this question you are effecting the way they think about it. So just don't answer the question.
Are you seriously suggesting this? It seems clear to me (and presumably to anyone else who has ever interacted with curious children) that this is a completely impractical and unrealistic solution. Have you ever tried _not answering_ a question from a kid? ;)
This dramatic influence-avoidance thing seems pretty ridiculous.
I'm not saying whether or not it is possible to not answer the question when a child asks you one. I'm not saying you SHOULDN'T answer the question. But if you do not want to influence a child's thought patters in any given situation you have to not say anything (though likely silence will also influence them in some way as well). Hence why I said, "There is no right answer to this question".
"This dramatic influence-avoidance thing seems pretty ridiculous."
yes, it is ridiculous, which is why we lie to kids, because we have to give them some answer they will be satisfied with. There is no way to NOT lie to kids and not be pretty ridiculous.
If instead you mean, you must always disagree with whatever your child's opinion is, I don't disagree. You have to argue both sides of any philosophical question though, less you accidentally push your own beliefs on them, and this is extremely difficult to do correctly. Orson Scott Card's character Han Fei-Tzu is an excellent example of the type of teaching discipline I hold sacred. When someone makes an opinion about anything, you have to argue the other-side as well as you possibly can, and if your charge changes their mind, you have to switch sides and argue for that side. This requires an incredible amount of knowledge and intelligence which most parents are not going to be able to replicate.
Teaching in this matter will force the child to learn how to look at any problem from different viewpoints.
> Influence: the power or capacity of causing an effect in indirect or intangible ways.
The effect in the case of parents is that the children will end up believing the same things as their parents did. This is completely distinct from education, because education is the teaching of what is known to be true, or at least a non-biased account of the available information. This is something most people cannot do as its very difficult to do right. Either you stick to known facts (1 + 1 = 2) or you give a non-biased account of history (say, a war) by arguing for and against both for both sides equally. If you look at any moment in history and think someone was evil or good, you probably misunderstand something and need to go back to that topic and learn more.
Influence breeds from a onesidedness that is not evident in education. Education breeds from understanding. If one tells their children they believe in god and this makes them believe in god, is it really significantly different then saying there is a god? Either way they still have a choice, to believe you are right or not. As they are the child's parents, isn't it almost guaranteed that they'd trust your judgment at such a young age? (I'm assuming an age of around 4 years old.)
> It's unavoidable, and there's nothing wrong with it if you do it with honesty and respect.
This is also true, almost. As described above it will take more energy to fully explain the correct answer to any question then the child is willing to listen to. I'm not arguing that there is something wrong with it. I'm just acknowledging that it is lying, albeit unintentional and without malice, but it is still lying.
If your intentions are self serving, or anyway if you are covertly selective in what you tell to others, if you use fallacies, or if you outright lie, you are probably doing wrong. There's a word for that, and it's manipulation. Influence doesn't have neutral connotations in English. Much on the contrary: when you say someone has influenced you, or is/was influential in general, you're praising, not condemning them.
Full neutrality is impossible. You should keep neutrality as a general aim, while recognizing you're more biased than you realise.
More specifically, arguing equally for and against both sides of any war is not neutral; it's a futile attempt guided by political correctness. My first impression on reading that is that you're overreacting to typical western (esp. American) good vs evil rhetoric.
You can teach about a war without making explicit moral judgements about either side. There are many reasons to study a war that don't require you to discuss ethics (for example, you may be studying socioeconomic motivations and impact.) Or, if you want to discuss morals in a non judgmental way, you can describe the system of values that was current in each side at the time of the war.
That said, using the narration of a war as an illustration of some point in ethics is no worse, per se, than making such point in first place. In general, one side of the war will conform better than the other to some system of values. As a parent who is transmitting your child a system of values anyway, making a taboo of stating explicit judgments on either side of a war is pointless.
Hiding your beliefs from your children just not to influence them is a form of lying, and it's futile IMO. Do you have to make up cover stories about where you're going when attending church? Do you have to tell your relatives to keep the secret? Ridiculous.
And anyway, where would a 4 year old get his first ideas about religion from? Will they discover the Truth by themselves from cogito ergo sum? Nope, they'll be marked by the next influential person they meet: a teacher, a friend, etc. How is that any better?
Just stating your beliefs, while acknowledging the possibility that you're wrong, is a very honest thing to do. The child will grow to make their own opinion before it matters for any practical purposes anyway. That's what my parents did with me, and I stopped believing in God at around the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus. I never felt pressured either way, and I carry no trauma that I know of.
> Full neutrality is impossible.
Completely agreed.
> You can teach about a war without making explicit moral judgements about either side.
True, and the more I think about it, the less I believe it'll come up in a conversation with a 4 year old. Especially on specifics such as the morality of a specific war.
> Hiding your beliefs from your children just not to influence them is a form of lying, and it's futile IMO.
Very true. Hiding information is definitely a form of lying. See Mark Twain's On the Decadence of the Art of Lying, he makes a very good argument for saying lying is not a bad thing, in certain circumstances, but also that not telling the whole truth is also lying.
> Do you have to tell your relatives to keep the secret? Ridiculous.
My general belief was that relatives would have less of a dramatic impact on the child's behavior patterns than the parents of the child. So while the child might know they believe in god, it wont necessarily translate to the child believing in god himself. Oddly, I never connected Christmas with Christianity when I was a child.
> Just stating your beliefs, while acknowledging the possibility that you're wrong, is a very honest thing to do. The child will grow to make their own opinion before it matters for any practical purposes anyway. That's what my parents did with me, and I stopped believing in God at around the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus. I never felt pressured either way, and I carry no trauma that I know of.
I believe your point was well made. I took things a bit to far with the not lying. I still believe influence is a form of lying when working from the perceptive of a parent to a child, but I now believe that the effect is far less than I had originally believed. Thinking back on it, my own parents did the same thing yours did, though I was pressured slightly into believing in Catholicism, the pressure wasn't so harsh that I felt compelled to actually do so. I guess I was a bit harsh on the naivety of children, thinking ideas would be implanted in their young minds far easier than they actually are. I think also, that I was tying the words 'influence' and 'manipulation' a bit closer than they actually are. It does irk me though, that some children take their parents beliefs to heart without even thinking about it, sometimes without even realizing it.
Sorry, I meant to say it doesn't have negative connotations.
IMHO That's the truth, and the facts.
We probably also know that the argument degrades rather quickly once started.
Additionally, I believe there was a very good essay somewhere that argued there was a heaven and a hell. Saying that if we know there are an infinite number of other dimensions with an infinite number of possibilities, whose to say there isn't one where ONLY good things happen and one where ONLY bad things happen. These places would be heaven and hell, respectively. Of course, if someone is actually sent to one of these places, they will immediately change it if they do something contrary to what is expected in that specific realm, no longer making it heaven or hell, and a new heaven or hell takes its place where that even didn't happen.
So, if heaven and hell exist, who is to say god does not?
Do fairies live in the bottom of my garden? I'd say scientific evidence to date suggests not.
She also ignored an infinite number of other things.
Congratulations. You just uncovered another level in pg's hierarchy of disagreement: acusing the other of ignoring anything she didn't say. Cool.
It seems to me that the point of the essay was that it is possible to tell children the truth, even though the truth is complex. The author's childhood and parenthood, as described in the essay, provide at least one example that it can work.
My dad recently told a story about how he got scammed out of practically all his heavy machinery when I was 8 years old. He was completely broke, his machines were in another town, the scammer had run off and he had no means of earning money without transporting his machines back. But he had no money to do this. So for 6 months, he ran around trying to borrow money so he could transport the machines back and start earning money.
I remember when the machines were gone. But I did not associate it with anything, I thought they were out on a job. If my Dad had told me that he had been scammed, and the machines were stuck and he had no income, and that debts were piling up every single day, I would have understood the problem, and to god, that would have been the most terrible thing that I could have imagined.
I would have wondered how someone could scam my dad. I would have come up with ways of trying to get the machines home. I would have worried that we would become poor.
Knowing that information would have been a terrible thing for me to know as an 8 year old, exactly because I would have understood what it meant. If any one of you claims that telling an 8 year old that type of stuff is good for the child, then you are damn idiots who have no place raising a child.
For me as a child, lightning was already very scary, even though I understood how unlikely it was to happen. Compare an event like my father losing his money to something abstract and unlikely to lightning, and you understand by how much more it would have worried me.
Anyone who advocates telling children that type of information is completely unfit to raise children.
I don't lie to children, either. I tell them that black is white, up is down and short is long ... but I do it compassionately.
It's frustrating that these weird beliefs are so widespread in modern society, but it looks like the world is slowly moving away from it. It gives me higher self-esteem to be secular now when I am ridiculed for it than in the future when most people believe like me.
The cause of the lies is that a generation as a whole stops believing things their parents taught. But when this generation has children, the only model for parenting is their own parents. Thus they teach their kids like their parents did, and that includes "lies" that the adults no longer believe. In other words, the "lies" adults teach kid represents an echo of once widely held beliefs among adults.
"Dad, why did you and mum get a divorce?"
"The thing is Paul, it was all your fault"
There's a whole series of these sketches with similar themes. Telling the truth in all instances to kids is idiotic :)
One of my other favorites that I can't find on youtube/script:
"Dad, why don't I have many friends?"
"The thing is Paul, you're just not that interesting. I sometimes struggle to stay awake when talking to you myself." etc etc
"Which of us kids is your favorite?" "Do you like my latest bit of art? toilet roll glued to a box"
What about adopted kids? What about kids who came from really difficult childhoods. What about a kid that was the product of his mum being raped?
Do those kids really need to know that? Are they emotionally developed enough to deal with such harsh realities?
The OP doesn't seem to have had to deal with particularly hard questions at all.
Say there was an escaped convict loose in your town, who had previously murdered several children. Your kid sees some vague reference to it on the news before bed time, and asks "What is that about dad?" Would you answer:
a). Oh it's quite scary Son. There's a madman who sneaks into kids bedrooms and cuts them up. He's loose outside.
b). Nothing to worry about, get back into bed :)
For the sake of argument:
> "Do you like my latest bit of art? toilet roll glued to a box"
You're a regular Duchamp!
As for the multiple choice question (which is worse than a CNN poll), how about none of the above, or
c). (Father has already explained the situation in an honest way to his son, explaining, too, the precautions he -- and the town -- are taking to keep his son safe.)
In the end, though, one of the "lies" that parents have been telling children for ages now is the bedtime story where the children are killed to teach a harsh reality: back then, children died quite often.
I don't think kids are developed enough to calculate risk well enough. Adults also generally suck at that. So even if you tell him the good news (What precautions you+town have taken to keep him safe), he will focus on the bad news (Murderer on the loose) so I don't actually think in the kids eyes that is any better than (a).
Let's hope future parents can be more enlightened...