Children, religion, and critical thinking.

[rivka]

Elsewhere, someone presented a dilemma: her mother-in-law enjoyed taking her son to church and he enjoyed going, "the problem I'm having though, is my husband and I are really against some of the things they teach (I won't go into specifics, but for example, I eavesdropped and heard one sermon where they were blasting homosexuals). Now that my son is nearly 2.5 I'm worried he's actually listening and picking up on this stuff." She went on in a later post to explain that she is an atheist, but has always intended to expose her child to different beliefs. She wound up concluding that the best thing to do would be to ask her husband to find a liberal church "so he can take our son too and show him another side."

I replied to her:

I don't know how well such a young child would be able to understand and process differences between, say, a conservative and a liberal Christian church. Does he really have the cognitive capacity to compare them and realize, "this is the other side to the story, there are two ways of looking at things and I can choose which one to believe"? I think of that as being more of an adolescent ability.

I have a very bright two-year-old, and I've realized that she takes everything she hears at face value. Even in children's book passages where we are clearly meant to infer that someone is saying something untrue, she accepts the statements as fact. I know that in a year or two she'll be much better at picking up context clues that she isn't meant to take something literally - but I expect that it will take much longer for her to understand that something which is presented as absolutely, dogmatically, no-room-for-doubt true (by an authority figure and by someone she loves) may not be true at all.

I would have less immediate concern about your mother-in-law's church's teachings about homosexuals (which are repellent to me, but it's not like your son is really old enough to understand any of it), and more concern about the messages he is probably getting about salvation and hell. Is he being exposed to vivid, fear-based descriptions of the punishments and suffering of hell? 2.5 is probably old enough to pick up the message that people who don't go to church - like you - are bound for hell, which could be very frightening for him.

She thought I was way off base:

Well, if he's hearing at one church that you'll go to hell if you're gay and he's learning about loving everyone, even if they are different at another church, yeah, I think he'd notice the difference. Like I said, I have very vivid memories from that age and I was aware of a lot more than people thought I was, which is why I never underestimate what kinds of feelings or thoughts kids are capable of. You'd be surprised what people talk about when they think a young child isn't listening or won't understand! And people tend to talk down to children because they think their understanding is minimal, when it really isn't. I wasn't an exceptionally bright child, but believe me, I felt like people treated me like an ape when I was 2 and 3 years old. I believe a 2 year old can understand that 2 men or 2 women can love each other romantically and can understand if someone is talking bad about people like that.

I certainly don't think I'm guilty of underestimating the intelligence and comprehension of toddlers. I was a very bright kid. I have a very bright kid. But as smart as I think Alex is, there is no way that I would regularly expose her, at her age, to points of view that I wouldn't want her to believe. I don't think she has the critical thinking skills to handle it.

We've been reading a "Charlie and Lola" book in which Lola gets fixated on a particular library book and doesn't want anyone else to check it out. Alex loves the book, asks for it repeatedly, seems to follow the plot, and quotes big chunks of the text. But when I ask her, "Is it okay for the other little girl to take that book home?" she answers, "No, that's Lola's book." Lola asserts that strongly in the text, and so Alex assumes it to be true. She understands that someone might say something counterfactual in order to be silly, but she's too young to understand that someone might have an unreasonable, incorrect point of view. (Piaget, from his grave: "I could've told you that.")

So no, I don't think that she'd be capable of comparing Universalist messages she was exposed to on Sunday morning to fundamentalist messages she heard on Sunday night, identifying the discrepancies between them, evaluating the credibility of each set of sources, and freely discarding elements that didn't fit with her values. I don't think she's capable of understanding that a crowd of otherwise good, kind people who are very certain about their beliefs might all be completely wrong. And it kind of boggles me that any parent of a two-year-old does think that.

Ultimately, I think it's great to expose children to a vast range of opinions and beliefs, including completely wrongheaded ones. I'm sure we'll eventually find ourselves having a conversation with Alex about why So-and-so's parents think we're going to hell, and why our family and our church doesn't believe that. But that's going to have to wait until she's developed some basic critical thinking skills, and honed them on less frightening topics.

Comments

[odanu.livejournal.com]

I actually have a similar dilemma to your unnamed friend. My youngest, Runs with Scissors, (who is now 10) often attends church with his paternal grandparents, who belong to a very conservative evangelical church. In addition, those grandparents are openly racist and homophobic. Rather than forbid him to spend time with his grandparents, who dote on him and whom he loves dearly, we have worked very hard to instill critical thinking in him. When he comes home from church we have long conversations about the content of the sermon, and I work hard to get him to answer for himself (through judicious use of the socratic method) why an assertion made in church is not true (to begin with, we learned to distinguish between an assertion and an argument... and then to distingish between a fact and an opinion).

So far, so good. I suspect Runs with Scissors will end up some variety of Christian in the end, but of a far more liberal flavor than his grandparents.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I think that's a completely workable solution for a ten-year-old, and I admire your willingness to foster their relationship under such difficult conditions.

[abbylee]

Yes, I think she doesn't understand that even if her 2 year old can grasp that the two churches are saying different things that he can also understand that they contradict each other. Especially because the two churches are likely to talk in different terms - to him it is like hearing from one place that all apples are red and the other is saying that all apples are fruit. He's likely got the cognitive ability to extrapolate that all apples are red fruit, but not to think to himself "wait a minute, some apples are green."

Kids that age certainly grasp a lot more than many people give them credit for. And things that adults don't think are very important can stick very vividly in their memories. But that also doesn't mean they have strongly developed cognitive abilities.

I'm also somewhat annoyed by the perspective that teaching your child about tolerance is "another side" as if you're explaining that some people like vanilla and some like chocolate or some go to Church X and some go to Church Y. But that anger likely has more to do with my reading of the situation than the actual reality of it.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I'm also somewhat annoyed by the perspective that teaching your child about tolerance is "another side" as if you're explaining that some people like vanilla and some like chocolate or some go to Church X and some go to Church Y. But that anger likely has more to do with my reading of the situation than the actual reality of it.

No, I'm right there with you on that one.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

One of the (many) things that bugs me about the boards at MDC is the belief that children are so bright and perceptive that they do not have the normal needs of children, and we can dispense with sheltering them.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

Basically, at 2.5, that child should just have graduated from full-time occupation of his or her mother's arms, and is apparently supposed to self-defend against religious wolves.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my reaction is that this is to a significant degree about the mother's belief that her toddler is Super Ultra Extra Special Smart.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

Not just her toddler though. The impression I get from MDC is that any attachment-parented, exclusively breastfed, unvaccinated kid should have a sufficiently unspoiled mind to be capable of whatever intellectual feat his or her parents would really like the child to pull off. Like, in this case, circumventing an otherwise necessary confrontation with the MIL about values.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Well, yes and no. Because there's also the whole "I would NEVER NOT EVER leave my child with a babysitter" thing.

I think it's less about "not having the normal needs of children" - I would argue that MDC creates abnormal needs, like the need for children never to be separated from their parents, even just to be put in a crib or stroller, until really quite advanced ages. It's more about romanticizing the special inner wisdom of children to the extent that you don't believe that they need any guidance.

I mean, people actually post about being opposed to passing any judgment on the things their children do. Or having any requirements. Or imposing parental authority. Because it's going to impair your child's inner sense of what is right.

This is the same kind of passing the buck. She doesn't need to stand up to her mother-in-law, because her child possesses intuitive wisdom about what is right.

[meglimir.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure the sermon messages would have as much impact as the social messages. I'd agree with you that the two-yo probably isn't interested enough in abstract or sexual concepts to pay 'em enough attention to remember. I'd worry more about the people she encounters in more interesting situations than when sitting in the pew, and how they might affect her feelings about one or another religion.

For example, the primary thing that gave me a basic "bad feeling" about the Methodist church, and that I had to consciously revise by working it through rationally as an adult, was the *mannerisms* of the ladies I encountered in Sunday School, between Service and Coffee Hour, etc. To a woman, they would greet me with (imagine Monty Pythonesque falsetto) Oooooooh! What a cyoooooooot little laaaaaaamb! How are weeeeeeeee today? You're getting so biiiig! *shudder* (It didn't help that these comments came at about the time of day I was starting to feel peckish about the nice leg o' lamb my Mama often had roasting in the oven for Sunday lunch!)

Similarly, I had for many years a great distaste for Druidism due to the very unpleasant, boundary-pushing (and probably, in retrospect, not very authentic) Druidic practitioners I met on campus during college.

Now, that is not much of a reason to reject any given religion or sect wholesale - and I'd think she'd want her child to make a rationally based decision about religion.

[meglimir.livejournal.com]

... OTOH I should add, as a young adult I did a send-up of those church ladies in a (different) church talent show, and had 'em rolling in the aisles :D so it wasn't a total loss!

[saoba.livejournal.com]

My take? There are adults who have trouble with the kind of critical thinking she's expecting of a two year old.

And I also think the earlier and more often a child hears fire+brimstone/anti-gay/racist/sexist language presented by authority figures the more likely it is to seep into their thinking. I could be all wet on that one, but it's my WAG, based on interacting with small kids.

I wouldn't let a two year old have unlimited TV access, because there are things that are not age appropriate. Not just porn, but, ohhhh- let's say 'Schindler's List'. A perfectly fine movie, but not for little children. Age inappropriate messages don't become less so for being heard face to face instead of from a TV.

[ailbhe]

For the record, Linnea knew that Lola was "being silly" in that book before Emer was born, mainly because she has extensive library use experience herself, so that's possible - but I agree that I strongly doubt she or Alex or any exceptionally bright two-year-old could compare and contrast the logical arguments. What they might grasp firmly is the difference in atmosphere between a condemnatory church and a liberal, accepting one - but I'd worry that they'd find the scary one more plausible on a gut level, though less attractive, because kids are sometimes *like* that.

[(Anonymous)]

I think I was probably four when I went to nursery school, and -- without my parents knowing about it until much later -- ended up with a more or less fundamentalist teacher who decided to teach us all about the Second Coming and the Last Judgement. By four, though, I'd more or less internalized a value system based mostly on my parents' values, so I simply filtered everything I heard through that and turned it into something that, to me, seemed to work. (As I recall, it was roughly that Jesus was this really nice man who had to go away from earth for some reason, and couldn't come back until everyone was nice, so we should all try to be nice so that Jesus could come back and have good times with us -- how I managed to filter out absolutely everything to do with judgement and punishment I don't know, but it's kind of impressive, in retrospect).

Four is very different than two,however.

[em-h.livejournal.com]

Oops, that was me. Didn't realize I wasn't logged in. Sorry.

[boubabe.livejournal.com]

I think your friend needs to read a little of Jean Piaget's Stage Theory and James Fowler's Stages of Faith.

Taken from http://www.unityofkent.org/newthought-stages.html (I did the bolding):

Stage One: Intuitive/Projective Faith

The first stage we call intuitive/projective faith. It characterizes the child of two to six or seven. It's a changing and growing and dynamic faith. It's marked by the rise of imagination. The child doesn't have the kind of logic that makes possible or necessary the questioning of perceptions or fantasies. Therefore the child's mind is "religiously pregnant," one might say. It is striking how many times in our interviews we find that experiences and images that occur and take form before the child is six have powerful and long-lasting effects on the life of faith both positive and negative.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

To use a very concrete example that a toddler will pick up on, the preschool class of a fundamentalist church is quite likely to assign different roles to boys and girls in the class. I don't know when a child would pick up on the part about non-churchgoers going to hell, but I've heard an awful story of 6yo nightmares which turned out to be due to what a zealous Catholic-school teacher seemed to be saying about non-Catholic Daddy.

In this situation, it sounds to me as if the poster is trying to avoid pissing off the m-i-l. But I agree with you that it's not fair to expose a toddler to poisonous ideas in the mouths of people his parents respect. I wonder if the grandmother tends to ignore some of the preaching herself and would be receptive to her son pointing out that it doesn't fit with his values ... or whether the grandmother does believe the things and either is unaware that her son doesn't, or is intentionally trying to influence her grandson in ways her son and d-i-l wouldn't approve of. Either way, it's a conflict that isn't going to get better by ignoring it.

[(Anonymous)]

My 8-year old granddaughter is very bright. (Trust me on this.) She had not been exposed to religion at all prior to going to an English government (what we'd in the US call "public") school where they have some mandatory classes on Church of England religious beliefs. She was **very** upset on hearing about the Last Judgement and similar concepts. (Her parents hadn't realized the need to prepare her for this in advance.)

Although I was always a non-believer it wasn't until sometime when I was in college that I realized non-belief was a defensible position and not a personal failing.

These are tough situations.

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

Rivka, have you seen my recent posts? I don't know if I have been particularly inarticulate, but I feel like the posters are just not getting what I am trying to say - basically, a. kids at this age will believe everything an authority figure tells them and a. I don't want my kids to believe many of the messages many mainstream Christian churches sell, and b. I don't want my kids to believe many of the messages many mainstream Christian churches teach.

I tried to make the analogy with concern over exposure to commercials and other media that many parents are concerned about but I don't see anyone getting the connection.

Bah, maybe I should give up.

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

wow, I made some weird editing errors in the above reply. Perhaps I have been very inarticulate lately...

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I hadn't seen your posts, actually, because I had fallen a few days behind. I think it's a great analogy, but it seems to have been too subtle for a lot of people, who probably aren't used to thinking of churches as "selling" something.

Once again, I am grateful to be a UU.