The very 1'st post from my iPhone! Gotta love the Blogger App }:) I'd like to take you back to Christmas 2K. (or there abouts) I'd just been laid off from Freightliner & had to move Sara & our 3 boys back into a 2 bedroom apt.
At the time Joshua had just started grade 1, Joseph: kindergarten & Jack was 4yrs. old. Having just gone through a lay-off & having to move made it a very difficult time for all of us, but we were together & that's what was most important for Sara & I. I had been deeply embroiled in a study w/ a couple of friends & lay offs aside I was batting around a very real internal struggle. I had made a decision a number of years before. I had decided to be brutally honest w/ the people in my life. This meant that hurt feelings aside, I would approach any confrontation w/ truth 1'st. Sara & I, at the very beginning of our relationship, had decided we'd have no secrets.
We'd opted, almost immediately, for complete honesty.
With these absolutes in my life, coupled w/ the study I was doing, I found myself very torn. I found myself raising children & feeding them a lie. We had been actively participating in the perpetuation of a myth, told to children for generations, & I couldn't do it anymore. I had to tell our children the truth, I had to tell them there is no Santa Claus. My decision was welcomed by my wife. Sara agreed it was far better to share the joy & wonder of the holiday, than it was to perpetuate a myth. For us the joy of family, of giving and putting aside age old family garbage for the sake of togetherness has always the wonder of Christmas. Sharing that w/ our children was of absolute importance. We also recognized the importance of integrity. To claim things like truth & honesty as a part of our belief structure & then blatantly take part in the mythical story of a fantasy character was hypocritical to say the least.
So there it was, and some people in our lives were horrified, "how dare we take the magic of Christmas from our children". Jack was 4, Joe in J.K. & Josh just starting grade 1. We told them the truth, there's no such person as Santa Claus. We told them that even the person of "Jesus Christ", to the best of our knowledge, while most certainly a real person that existed, scholars had learned much in recent years. For instance the figure of Jesus was quite possibly modeled after the mythical Pagan God Mithras, who had been worshiped by the Roman Soldiers. That these military men were more then likely the reason Rome eventually adopted Christianity. We shared how the traditional practices we recognize were mostly practices borrowed over time from Saturnalia celebrations; & how these and many other traditions, borrowed from many other cultures and their practices have come together to "evolve" into the holiday we now celebrate today. We shared w/ these young boys, barely out of toddler age, that the rest was for them to discover on their own, and that we'd always do our best to help them find real answers to their questions, and we'd always share our own faith's, our doubts & experiences openly, always making truth the absolute goal.
My question to you the reader is simple; what do your kids believe? What truth do you openly share with them? Are they under the false belief that a bunny brings chocolate in the middle of the night? Do you claim to seek truth, but allow your children to believe that a fat man with reindeer brings them presents? Are you bashing mysticism but tucking away a nice comfortably convenient justification to keep this one going? "Well their kidz, come on this one's O.K." Children smell bullshit & hypocrisy like a dog smells fear. I'm committed to the pursuit of truth in my life, & while so many mock my faith as weakness, my children, who've lived with truth & integrity as a staple in their lives, know their parents as a source of absolute truth. Even when the only real truth is that I don't know, & we may have to find out together. There is no bullshit here, I think it's because I have no fear; of those things I know nothing about.
Be Good, Love; S.
3 comments:
Anyone who knows me or reads my opinions will know that I’m a strong advocate of seeking truth, of logic, and of critical thinking. I believe that these things are vital to an informed, intelligent, thoughtful and productive life. However I am also an incredibly imaginative person and it would be an understatement to say that I have a rich internal fantasy life. A great deal of the mental energy used in my life has been used building elaborate fictions in my head. I find these fictions incredibly valuable and therapeutic in my life. I know that I am only capable of this level of imagination and creativity because it was fostered and nurtured in me at a young age.
I struggled with whether or not to introduce the concepts of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy et cetera with my son for a lot of the same reasons posted in this blog. That to me it seemed dishonest, as well as fostering a system of myth much like the mythologies and superstitions I regularly rail against. I wanted my son to trust what I tell him and to know that he’s only going to get truth from me. However I realized a couple of things, with help from my wife, and upon deeper reflection. The search for truth is and should be the province of adult intellect. It’s only with maturity that we become capable of judging the world critically. To instil an entirely rational, entirely critical outlook in a child is, in my view, to rob them of the one time in their lives when it is permissible, and even beneficial to indulge in undiluted fantasy. One of our jobs as parents is to encourage a sense of wonder and imagination in our children. A belief in Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny, or any of the other childhood myths that quickly pass away as the child matures helps to build that sense of the fantastic, helps to fire the imagination. What’s more, as the child develops intellectually they step away from those beliefs in favour of more a rational outlook. That is really a child’s first steps toward critical thinking. They independently begin to examine what they’ve been told versus the evidence of their senses and experience in order to come to their own conclusions. I believe that this exercise has value, and should be allowed to occur naturally. I remember feeling a sense of accomplishment when I figured out that Santa Claus was really my parents, I didn’t resent them for lying to me or perpetuating some false mythology, but I did feel good about the fact that I’d discovered a truth about reality on my own. I had the same sense of accomplishment after my first in depth study of religion led me to the conclusion that it was really not very different from the mythologies which I’d been taught were just stories told to explain a world that a simpler version of man didn‘t understand.
Personally I don’t want my son to just believe anything, even if it was me who told it to him, I don’t need him to see me as a bastion of perfect truth. I would much prefer if he listens to anyone, including myself, weighs their words against his own experience, knowledge and feelings and comes to his own truth. Children CAN smell bullshit, as you so correctly put it, they do know when something’s not right and they should be allowed to work that out for themselves, but while they’re too young to appreciate the true wonders of reality what is harmed by allowing them to indulge in wonders they CAN appreciate, even if they happen to be false? The time for cold hard truth will come soon enough.
I see no hypocrisy in allowing children to be children. I see great benefits in encouraging fantasy and imagination in children and I also see benefits in allowing children to sift fact from fiction on their own. Critical thinking and logic have to be learned and exercised, like a muscle, one of the ways we do that is by weighing and measuring the data we once believed so passionately and deciding, based on the best evidence we have available whether or not it’s true or false. My son will get the pleasure and anticipation of waiting for Santa to come, of wondering how the Tooth Fairy gets under his pillow without waking him and the host of other childhood experiences that most of us had and he’ll also get the sense of accomplishment and pride I got when I took that first step into mature thinking and realized that a great many of the things that I thought were true are not. In due time children will put away childish things. In the mean time, let’s just let them play
Adam, at the very least you have the testicular fortitude to offer your comments & contributions here. I "wish" I could say the same for others. The sideways comments from family are both tragic, & sadly not unexpected. I'd caution your line of thinking on this. Our children would sit for interviews and relay the broken hearts they witnessed in grades 8 & 9, from friends that had never been told. This moment in our lives stands as testimony to the level of truth we are committed to. The fantasy life we all enjoy, is alive & well, through RPG's we enjoy together, stories we tell, and the fun we share as a family. Not to mention the DnD I now enjoy with my grown sons! Welcome to Nerdtopia, please roll 1d20 for initiative! }:) I'll quote my son here, after reading your comment, "the only thing I was robbed of, was the opportunity to be lied to" hopefully food for thought, As a parent our walk must go ahead of our talk ...
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