Weird Science! : When It Comes To Science, How Young Is Too Young?
Today my daughter found herself in a bit of trouble. To understand why she was in trouble though, you need to understand a bit about the parenting philosophy that my wife and I have always used.
When we first decided to have children, we resolved that no matter what, we would never lie to our children. We would teach them to seek truth and give them tools to know how to distinguish the very few grains of truth in the great sandy beach of reality.
This means none of the normal parental induced fantasies like tooth fairies, Santa Claus etc were ever allowed. We did teach them that these are games some parents play with their children, and that they should play along, but that every present, under every pillow or tree, cost someone's mommy and daddy some actual effort to get it there.
Our parenting philosophy has always meant being completely honest for every question they ask, no matter how far down the rabbit hole it would take us. Some rabbit holes can go really, really deep too! Many questions end with, "Why don't you look it up and ask me to help if you get stuck?"
The net result has been pretty good!
You ask any of our kids why the sky is blue and they will give you a reasonable explanation of Rayleigh scattering. They don't have the math to work it out, and they don't actually know the words. But they understand the concept that light is both a particle and a wave, and that there are molecules in the atmosphere that absorb, re-emit and scatter the light.
Now this isn't to say that we've denigrated imagination at all. But we've taught our children that if they want to break the laws of physics, they have to create a new universe with new physical laws. These universes are where their stuffed animals and toys become sentient and where there can be magic, fairies, unicorns, dragons etc.
Lately my youngest daughter has become interested in relativity.
She understands that spacetime is bent in the presence of mass like a bowling ball on a trampoline and that time slows down in the presence of mass and that mass and energy are coequal. She also understands that we trade momentum through time for momentum through space and vice versa. She understands at a basic level what time dilation is and what it's implications are.
At this point though I think it's safe to call this elasticity to spacetime an obsession for her. This is something that her mother and I thought we had planned for.
We wanted our kids to be excited about science, math, engineering and computers from the get go.
Our belief was that if we raised them with tales of the wonders of science, instead of fairy tales, they would apply scientific reasoning to their playtime. Basically allowing them to leverage the most powerful tool for scientific inquiry they will ever have, their imagination!
By stretching and strengthening this incredible tool while they are young, our hope is to give them an edge in a world that is increasingly defined in scientific terms. This way they don't have to struggle later to come to grips with some of the really weird stuff in our world.
So far this has gone really well!
But Houston, I think we may have a problem here!
Today she was playing the "Lets build rockets and fly to outerspace" game with other kids in the neighborhood. One of the other little girls in the neighborhood said something along the lines of "Look! My rocket is flying faster than light!"
Of course my youngest daughter wouldn't have any of that! She quickly set about correcting her friend's misguided attempts to break the speed limit of the universe. Eventually they were able to conclude that her cardboard rocket was only going really, really close to the speed of light and this would limit how far they could travel.
I'm not sure what adventures they had, and right now I'm really wishing someone would have filmed that!
Anyways, they traveled only to the nearby stars.
Years passed for them on their journey and they had a lot of adventures.
In fact I will probably invite her to write the story down and post it under either my account or her mother's soon.
I'm still lobbying her mother to let her have her own account on here, but that's a different subject.
Then my daughter went about explaining that even though only a few years had passed for them, and they were still little girls, that in fact thousands of years had passed here on earth.
Meaning that everyone they ever knew were long since dead!
I have a feeling she was probably trying to setup for an adventure through a wormhole. I say this, because even though I wasn't there for this, the story my wife related to me, sounded suspiciously like a thought experiment I had gone over with my little daughter a few years ago and we resolved that little problem by finding a nearby wormhole to step through.
Whatever she was trying to accomplish, this freaked her friend out bad enough that the little girl ran home in tears and got her mom to talk to my wife.
Alright I'll admit that this is actually really cute, but it begs a question...
Are we possibly the ones making a mistake here?
We've taught our children to apply critical thinking skills at all times. We've taught them to question everything they're told, no matter the source. Even parents.
In fact, I challenge my kids all the time by telling them something extremely bizarre and then having them prove me right or wrong and I make sure I'm wrong often enough that they can be confident in telling me I'm wrong. After all, if a parent can be wrong, then so can every one else in the world! It's the process of inquiry that matters, not the answer nor it's source.
It also means teaching them that knowledge changes with time. What we believe to be gospel truth today can easily be found to be completely fallacious if new evidence comes to light. But that does require new evidence and a theory that explains existing observations as well or better than existing theories.
The result of this is that my kids have come up with some amazing theories! It blows my mind, the way the mind of a child is able to cut through the Gordian knot of reality.
Yet children are supposed to naturally suspend disbelief in order to engage in imaginary play. We've taught ours to try and use critical thinking when imagining and I can see now that this decision may be effecting their interpersonal dynamics. Our goal was to give them the skills they needed in order to be leaders in a world that may one day be in a state of crisis due to over reliance on "thinking machines".
I won't go too into depth on this, but for those who are reading me for the first time. My job involves trying to figure out where technology is going in a few years. One consequence of our current direction is that we are relying more and more on our machines to think for us. Because of this we are rapidly losing the ability to think for ourselves. Even I rarely go beyond wikipedia or a quick google search for answers, and this is dangerous because when our machines which do our thinking for us break, who's going to know how to fix them? So by teaching our children to rely on machines as a "quick fact check" instead of a primary source, my wife and I have hoped to give our children a skill we think they will need in the future.
The problem here is that after hearing this story I'm faced with a sense of ambivalence.
Do we need to figure out a way to get them to dial this back a bit in order to avoid the risk of alienation? Or are other parents taking on similar philosophies and if so how do we find them? Perhaps the most important question is...
"Now we've taught them to think critically all the time, how do we teach them to suspend disbelief?"
all images courtesy pixabay.com
Almost the best stuff I ever read here on steemit. Thank you very much for the story and the philosophy bedded within.
Upvoted and resteemed.
Wow! Thank you! I really appreciate the compliments! Following you now!
When we first decided to have children, we resolved that no matter what, we would never lie to our children.
Damn Straight!
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
There are damn few of us who feel that way. Many, if not most, say let the children be children, by which they really mean. I'm too stupid, ignorant, and mostly too lazy, to go to the effort to teach my child the right way
So they delegate the responsibility of raising their children to Public Schools, Hollyweird, and the TV.
and for NO REASON. It's a misconception to think that children are hard to teach. All you have to do is lead that horse to water and GET OUT OF THE WAY.
Ignorance in the age of information is a choice.
Never lie to your children. It won't work...and you'll lose trust if you do. The news media, public schools, congress and religion lied to us. They still do. We know that thanks to the internet and we no longer trust them.
If you want to retain the trust of your children.
NEVER, no NEVER, not EVER, lie to them.
I fully agree with you!
Thank you for that. It makes me feel much more certain that we did the right thing by teaching them analysis and critical thinking skills at an early age.
Great article. I'm the same about Santa Clause, etc. My parents did that with my and my siblings too. And I want them to question everything, and it's even okay to question mom. Sometimes when I've said no to something, they have used their reasoning to show me that I was wrong or didn't have all the facts and I have changed my mind. That's okay!
Excellent point! Also I've never seen you before but I've upvoted and I'm following you now!
That's an amazing form of parenting, wish people were taught to question everything more. Sounds like you're giving your kids a head start in life. :)
But maybe it would be a good thing to teach them about making compromises and saying things more gently, kids can be way too direct and that might make them become outsiders, I know what it's like to think differently than everyone else in a room and people usually can't stand someone who proves them wrong all the time, is too different etc.
Please don't think I want your kids to be a part of the herd, but it can sometimes be advantageous and a bit easier.
I actually agree with you. I don't want them fall into the herd, but I think it wouldn't hurt to work out some way to keep them from becoming alienated and that may mean letting their friends bend the laws of this universe from time to time ;)
I think the whole point of this article was that we've driven this concept now so deeply that it could be beginning to backfire. It's also possible that this isn't the problem and it's just that 2 little girls failed to find common ground in their imaginary play. As a parent I always worry about giving my children bad advice that could alienate them though. Hence the questions.
Children are after all, the weirdest science experiment around. ;)
Yeah maybe we're both just putting too much weight on a thing that 2 little girls said haha :)
That has been an issue for us as well. There was a time around pre-school / kindergarten when my son was having a lot of conversations in which little kids told him (seemingly with the best of intentions) that he was going to hell, based on what they had heard from their parents. It took him a while to develop any kind of filter, or a concept of "choose your battles." Have you seen The Invention of Lying with Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner? Those people had no filters either, going well beyond deliberate falsehood in their definition of lying.
Hmm... Having raised my kids, I made it a point to say what I mean and mean what I say. That's not to say I never lied to them. For a short while they did believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I found no harm in that at all. In fact, as they grew older, they began to question those things and I gladly took them to a private room and let them in on an "adult" secret. Instead of being pissed about being lied to, they actually enjoyed the fact that the got a sneak peek into something their younger brother(s) didn't know...and they never ratted on me. LOL
In my personal opinion, there must be some sort of imagery into the fantastical. For example: When my youngest came home from school one day, he was like, "MOM! Did you know that we only use 10% of our brain?" (Well, I know that's not the complete truth, but he was excited about it and it was contagious. Then he asked, "What do you think we could accomplish if we used 100% of our brain?" I just shrugged with a big smile. "Maybe we could FLY." I wish I could capture the look of wonder on his face as he smiled back and hugged me. "Yeah...that would be cool."
But see, I never worried so much about fantasy and folklore because many of them are basically traditions passed down throughout the generations of my family.
But when it comes to saying what you mean and meaning what you say, I am very conscious about that!
When my kids were young, we'd be in the supermarket and I'd inevitably hear a mother screaming at her kids to put her coat on or she was going to throw it away. My kids and I would look at each other with knowing looks. "Do you think mama's gonna throw out the coat?" I would ask. "Nope," they'd answer. "That's why the kid's not listening."
By enforcing this policy with my kids, they have grown up knowing I'm a woman of my word. If I say yes, I mean it. If I say I'll be there, they know I'll kill myself to make it so. And in turn, I often get strange Skype messages from my kids introducing me to a bunch of their friends - or simply talking to me about anything - even when I sometimes have to remind them that I'm still their mother and don't need to know those things...ever. LOL
Now, my oldest son has Asperger's. He's 21 and will probably be living with me for a long time until he's comfortable taking the step toward independence like his younger brothers, so my policy on say what you mean really came from his need to rely on "truth" in me.
But let me be clear about something @williambanks - NO parent does it completely right. And NO parent does it completely wrong. To this day I have doubts about what I've done and how I've raised them. But I sleep better at night knowing that I've done the best that I could.
I have a feeling your daughter may find herself alienated a bit simply because she's frikken brilliant - and that bothers kids with less intellect. But there's no way you can dial it back for her. She will figure it out on her own. It's part of growing pains and balancing sense of self with public projection. That being said, IMHO, just be her solid go-to foundation when she has those bad days. Don't try and fix anything. Just be there with open arms and ears. She'll be fine. I know...because I was her once.
Wow @merej99 that is incredible and thank you for the kind words! I love how much thought you put into your reply. You really are brilliant!
Age before beauty? LOL
That's a very good way of educating your children so that they could develop their critical sense!
Thank you! As you can see though, it does appear to be having a slight negative consequence. It might be partly where we live.
What is different/uncommon is always scaring, from the external point of view. I would just ignore.
This is a major theme that runs through Captain Fantastic, and something that I've had to finesse in my relationship with my own son. My wife's family was all-in on the Santa Claus thing, and I had to be careful about the way I stated, "I do not personally believe in Santa Claus, and if you get a present from me it will have my name on it" without starting fights with them. Of course, it meant that I gained a lot of credibility with the boy when the ruse was revealed.
Suspending disbelief has never really been a problem for us since I always drew a bright line of "now we're pretending." Gerard Jones's Killing Monsters was really helpful to me in this regard. Children are perfectly capable of reacting appropriately when violence in media is real and when it is not real. The problem comes when parents confuse the issue by trying to outlaw even symbolic violence, which children use as a tool to deal with their fears.