Children are Always Learning

 But Parents Don’t Realize They’re Always Teaching

In the early years of life before adolescence, the human mind is only capable of inductive reasoning. Logic as an overarching rule for thought processes does not yet exist, and children must make inferences about the way the world works through direct stimuli. Abstract thought and meta-cognition develop along with deductive logic in the early teen years. Without these abilities, children accept the teachings of their elders as truth, since they lack the ability to discover these truths for themselves. 

This is why it is so easy for parents to convince their children that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, and perhaps God, all exist. Until a classmate or older sibling shatters the illusion, the child believes in these mythical figures with their parents pretending to believe as well, for the child’s sake. Eventually the child’s parents renounce all “mythical” (perhaps “invisible” is more suitable in this sense) figures and their practices, except for one: God. This is largely why children, even as they progress into adolescence, follow the religion of their parents without much question.

Let’s say a 3^rd grader is told by his peers, “Santa Claus is not real”. He returns home after school and asks his parents if this is true. His parents knew this time would come, and tell their child the truth.

The same 3^rd grader is later told by his peers, “God doesn’t exist”. Again, he asks his parents if this is true. But this time his parents, who have raised him to believe in God, are believers themselves. They confidently tell their son that God is real, God is good, but not all the other kids believe in the same God the same way. Confused but comforted, the 3^rd grader proceeds through his life following in his parents’ religious footsteps.

Whether it’s wrong or right, the problem here is not that the child will grow up to follow or not follow any given religion. The issue is that in many instances the individual is not choosing their religion because they think it’s right. They think their religion is right because it’s all they’ve ever known.

It’s kind of like Huxley’s Brave New World. Hypnopaedia has youngsters of every caste being trained while they sleep to believe their caste is the best, so that when they grow into adulthood, there is no civil unrest. “It’s great to be a Beta. Almost as smart as the Alphas, but with less responsibility. And Betas are much, much smarter than Deltas…” 

Children are not necessarily a tabula rasa, but perhaps a lump of clay. A parent may only have so much to work with from the outset. But every lump of clay can either be carefully tended to or shaped into something beautiful, or left to be distorted by the harsh weather of the world around it.

The scary thing is, this applies to much more than verbal instruction. Children acquire information and learn behaviors even when they are not verbally instructed. Observational learning (most famously displayed by Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment), better known as “monkey see, monkey do”, is one of the major ways that children learn behavior. Correcting this phenomenon with “do as I say, not as I do” doesn’t work. Children learn even when you don’t want them to be learning. Every stimulus a child is exposed to has a magnified effect, more powerful the younger they are. And if parents don’t fill in the gaps with truthful answers to questions and explanations for behaviors, the child will fill the gaps in themselves. And to them, mommy and daddy are always right.

To be continued.

-Mendelssohn