There was a time when I thought I knew a whole lot more about raising children than I really did. But now that I know better, I sometimes feel like Socrates when he said: "All I know is that I know nothing." Still, I think being the mother of five children ages ranging in age up to 8 years, and including a set of 13-month-old twins, does qualify me as knowing a good deal about pregnancy, childbirth, and raising small children. There are a lot of self-proclaimed - and highly-paid - "experts" running around with less experience than I have. Mr. "Focus on Fundamentalism" comes to mind, for example.

I'm going to try to cover a lot of material in a short amount of time, now. But I will try to more-or-less stick to a chronological pattern of sorts.

Happily, for most people getting pregnant is no more difficult than falling off a log. But any woman who could become pregnant, and certainly any woman intending to become pregnant, should be on a folic acid supplement. Folic acid is one of the B vitamins that's been proven to reduce the risk of malformations of the brain and central nervous system. A generic store brand multivitamin with 400 micrograms of folate is fine: literally pennies a day. Don't get ripped off by fancy mail order and multi-level-marketing stuff.

And once you're pregnant, see your doctor and follow your doctor's instructions. Quit smoking. Better to do that before you get pregnant, in fact.

Tim is the Ob/Gyn doctor, of course, but my point is simply this: do what is reasonable and necessary to maximize the chances of good health for a child, this human being that you are intentionally bringing into the world. Think of how you would feel if you suffered from some disability that could easily have been prevented if your parents had only taken appropriate measures. Or think of how you might feel yourself if you have a child with an impairment that might have been avoided. There are never any guarantees in life, no matter what anybody tells you, of course, but why set yourself up for a lifetime of nagging feelings of how things "might have been" if only you had done the right thing when it mattered.

Now, newborns don't appeal to everyone, especially when they're screaming and hollering. But babies always scream and holler for a reason, even if it's just because they want to be held. And even if you feed them and diaper them and hold them and there's nothing seriously wrong with them, sometimes they'll still insist on throwing a fit. But that's OK sometimes. Just as sometimes, when you're unhappy and nothing will cheer you up, you still prefer to have someone else to complain to and sympathize with you. You can't spoil a newborn, though there are some tricks.

Even in infancy, I think, children are learning by example. They are born imitators and they are continually looking to you for what they are to become. If you react calmly and deliberately to their fussing, for example, they are more likely to do the same. Every child has his or her own personality, of course. And there is absolutely no scientific evidence that conclusively proves that controlling one's own emotions and behaviors helps a child do the same. But it's a reasonable supposition. And it's a whole lot less of a strain on oneself to cultivate an even temper when dealing with children.

Now, even before a child's rudimentary thinking abilities start becoming apparent, there are ways to foster its development. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) compiled some fascinating observations about how this works. For example, he tracked the development of a child's ability to figure out that when an object goes behind or under something else that it does not simply cease to exist but is merely hidden.

So it doesn't matter that small children do not fully understand what they perceive. They learn to talk from hearing what they do not understand. So it stands to reason that they also learn about cause and effect, as well as many other things that are almost too simple for us to think about, in the same way. The big sensation not long ago was that children have better math skills when they are exposed to music when young. It's nice to see it demonstrated, but it's also exactly what you'd expect since music is rooted in mathematics. This is all by way of saying that children, even small infants, need to see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the world. They need to get out and they need to have a variety of experiences, up close and personal, if possible. No, they won't be able to pay attention for more than a few moments, or perhaps a few minutes at a time very often. But modern neuroscience has shown that it takes time to establish the synaptic connections and pathways that are associated with learning and memory. It's a good thing, too, since it makes children a bit more "forgiving" of parental mistakes. If, as a parent, you can avoid the occasional error from turning into a bad habit, your children are in no danger of "catching it" from you. In fact, as they get older they'll even point out your mistakes to you!

In my experience, with my oldest child now age 8 so far, as I said, the whole process simply becomes more detailed and more nuanced as children grow up.

Filling a child's head with knowledge is perhaps the easiest thing. It's a cliche that they "are like sponges." Still, there are several things that make a big difference:

As far as intellectual knowledge is concerned, realize that it all amounts to language. It amounts to categorization. To name a thing is to know it: that's the essence of knowledge. (It's also the reason why god-believers are so obsessed with their gods' names!) And there are a great many things that are easy to teach children that amount to nothing more than naming things. The obvious ones, of course, are shapes and colors and the like. But there are lots of other things immediately available to a child's experience, including the different varieties of animals, plants, foodstuffs and other materials in the house, and even the different varieties of clouds in the sky. Oh, and don't forget human anatomy. Children are not embarrassed to learn that all the parts of their bodies have correct names.

You cannot teach a language, including any knowledge, unless you know it yourself. Oh, sure, you can teach a child the few words of Swahili or Welsh that you might happen to know. But that's all you can teach them and so that's all your children will know. So you might have to educate yourself or "refresh your memory" about what the difference is between a porpoise and a dolphin or why some vegetables are fruits and others aren't. The only alternative is trying to teach what you don't know very well yourself by rote memorization and then being stymied with questions you don't know the answers to. And believe me, children know when you don't know. If you try to pretend otherwise, all you're doing is teaching them that it's OK to fake it.

The more and the greater variety of knowledge that you can impart to children, the better. That's because, while a single example of something can be illustrative, many examples provide the opportunity of comparison and contrast. This is especially true when it comes to the subject of the supernatural, which, of course, is of particular interest to us as Freethinkers. A child who knows the names of ten gods besides Yahweh and three or four demigods besides Jesus has a better grasp of the true nature of the divine than the most learned of theologians.

When children have made a good start on these things, they can start to think. For thinking is the elaboration of ideas and their relations, just as thoughts and ideas are the elaboration of perceptions to which are attached words. This is why it is also important for children - or anyone - to learn new things in the context of their own immediate experience. Again, there's a relationship here with Freethought. Believers in the supernatural try to get around the obvious lack of evidence for god(s) by trying to attach such labels to everyday experiences. They say things like "you can't see air either, but it's there!" This should be seen as both a challenge and a suggestion to Freethinkers that we need to find ways to make supposedly abstract concepts like air and electrons more immediately apparent to children. And there are lots of "science experiments" that help to do this. I highly recommend some of these "how to do science experiments in your kitchen" books, for example.

A large part of teaching children about the world can also be effectively done on a spontaneous basis by taking advantage of circumstances. For example, when the kids are waiting for their toast to come up for breakfast, draw their attention to the Schlieren patterns formed above the toaster where the warmer and colder air are mixing. So much air being "invisible," like god(s)! Many ordinary things provide such opportunities. Driving in the car in the evening, for example, one can see that the city lights are different colors. Why? On the way here this morning you may well have seen some airplanes arriving at or leaving D/FW airport. Why does the sound they make seem to be a somewhere behind where you actually see them? And during this time of year we typically hear a lot of birds singing, and flapping their wings at each other and carrying around bits of grass and sticks. Why?

If it is good for adults to wonder, and to think of how and why the world is as it is, and what it might take for it to be a better place in the future, it has got to start with children learning those same habits of mind. Since they learn by both instruction and example, these can be taught by drawing their attention to the ordinary things around them and encouraging their own efforts to investigate and try to understand from their own experience.

Now all these things work together. I'll give you another example. When my oldest daughter, Genevieve, was a year old, we drove her to Austin to enroll her in a clinical trial of a chickenpox vaccine. When she was older, she heard about chickenpox but explained that she probably wouldn't get it because she had had this vaccine. But this was all in the context of knowledge that she acquired over time about some of the different reasons why people get sick - from bacteria and viruses, for example - and how they recover - in part from antibodies - and so on. But to some degree all of this remains inevitably abstract - and therefore somewhat incomprehensible - for a small child.

Now about a month before this same chickenpox vaccine was released by the FDA for general use, Genevieve's sister came down with chickenpox. Since the virus is highly contagious, we resigned ourselves to the fact that their brother would soon begin showing symptoms as well, which, of course, duly appeared. But despite the misery of her younger sister and brother, Genevieve never developed a single spot. She was perfectly fine. You can imagine how this must have felt for her: like being the only one left standing in front of a firing squad and thinking, "Wow, this 'bullet-proof' vest thing really works!"

Here's the curious thing, though: at one point during this whole ordeal she asked her father if it might be possible to take some of her antibodies and give them to her sister and brother. In fact, she even had some idea as to how this should be done. She didn't want to give all her antibodies, for example. And she realized that it would probably be necessary to remove her blood since that's where the antibodies were, but she knew that people need blood too. So she proposed removing a little blood at a time, taking out the antibodies, and putting what remained back in, then taking out a bit more blood, and so on. And guess what? This very thing is actually done. It's called plasmapheresis, and the "zoster immune globulin" that is obtained from it is actually used to give temporary immunity to people exposed to chickenpox virus who are at high risk of becoming seriously ill from it.

Now Genevieve is a smart girl, and I'm very proud of her, but she's no sage or savant. She simply had been given the simple intellectual tools and the terminology with which to think about something important that was happening in her life. And she happened to hit on a combination of ideas that fit the situation very well. So, if that's "genius," then I think children can be taught to be geniuses.

The moral education of Freethinking children is both easier and harder than might be supposed. It is conceptually easier than the superstitious religious moralists make it. But, in practical terms, it can be a strenuous and exhausting task.

The thing to realize in the moral education of children is that there are things that are right and wrong in themselves and that there are things that are right and wrong according to one or another set of rules. This has been said in various ways over and over again, here and by many Freethinkers, for centuries. But it bears repeating until it becomes understood. After that it will bear repeating until it is trite. And after that it must be repeated until it has taken such a hold over people's thoughts and behaviors that they can no longer conceive of these two things as being the same or even comparable. Because, if, as some say, we are still living in an age of moral poverty, it is the illicit fusion and the consequent widespread confusion of these two ideas that is contributing the most to it. Right and Wrong are one thing. And Rules and Commandments and Laws are quite another. It is quite sensible, obviously, to want the one to connect to the other. But they are not, and can never be, precisely the same.

The interesting thing is that children don't seem to have a lot of trouble in grasping this distinction. In fact, it often makes things easier to distinguish between bad behavior that is "wrong" and bad behavior that is "not the way it's done." Because the why of these two different things is entirely different. And the consequences, while they may seem similar, can also be very different in terms of the impact on their person and character.

The most important thing, of course, is for children to learn to distinguish between right and wrong and to learn the habit of choosing what is right even if everything else should happen to demand that they do what is wrong. Now I don't think this happens to very many people very often. But it happens sometimes. It happens to some people. And choosing what's right when it's the hardest thing to do is what makes a good person. Learning to do the right thing when it's easy is not what a moral education is about. This opens up into a very big and complex subject, but I think that, for a child it can be made very simple by the standard parental expedient of "How would you like it?" That is, children can be taught to test a choice of action by imagining themselves in the place of others. "How would you like it if someone else hit you?" "How would you like it if someone else tried to take away your toy?" "How would you like it if someone else lied to you?"

I know there is disagreement on this but there is no magic or long term benefit to physical punishment. But timeout is not punishment, either. It's timeout to think about those "How would you like it?" questions. I have made it a habit to always terminate timeouts by reviewing the events that preceded it and extracting from the offender an acknowledgment and some sign of contrition of the problem. Could a child "fake it" and not really be sorry? Maybe. But I think it would be tough for a 4-year-old. And human beings at any age are peculiar animals: the spoken word - and even the written word - has a powerful effect, as psychologists and psychiatrists can confirm. So this kind of discipline, to my mind, is a kind of guided self-examination and self-affirmation.

Now the part of a child's moral education that has to do with following rules is no less important because it is not so closely linked to good and evil as such. In some ways, it's more important in that it involves many things which are seldom intuitively obvious. Why is it OK for dogs to urinate on people's lawns but not for people to do the same, for example? Why must you look at people when they are talking to you or you are talking to them? You get the idea. Knowing how the world of nature and technology works is important. But so is knowing how the world of human beings and their conventions and institutions works. And understanding what makes them not work is a real accomplishment.

That being said, the moral education of children is also unique in that children don't just "soak it up" the way they absorb facts and knowledge. It's a bit more like toilet-training in that it's a much more active process that takes more effort on the part of both the parents and the children. For moral education consists first in mastering and bringing under control the normal sense of uncertainty. Insecurity, and fear that lives in the depths of every human being. And to learn this kind of self-control a child has to be taught how to come to grips with the most fundamental and primal instincts that we have, including the very will to survive. Because to live as a human being by doing what is right is seldom compatible with getting whatever you want whenever you want it. Much of our civilization depends on the practice of delayed gratification. But we're still not very good at it. And sometimes doing what is right is not even compatible with life itself. But what real choice is there between living as something less than human and not living? To "be good for goodness sake" is, in an important sense, nothing less than to either live as a human being or not.

I think the struggle to make some progress in this daunting task of moral growth and development accounts for the tremendous interest, on the part of children especially, in fairy tales and fantastic stories. They are enthralled by all the variations on the basic theme of good versus evil, usually embedded in a winner-takes-all, life-or-death struggle. And when they play their games they're usually acting out similar kinds of dramas.

Children don't seem to need much encouragement when it comes to things imaginary. But they should get it anyway. As I said, they should be told about the immense variety and the incredible richness of the stories and traditions of the gods and demigods and heroes of myth and legend, whether from the Iliad or the Odyysey, the Vedas, the Edda, or the Bible. This is also the context in which they can most easily grasp the nature of superstition as being historically, culturally, and geographically based.

What is particularly rewarding is exploring the frontiers of fact and fiction with children. How much of what exists only in the imagination be discovered or created in reality, for example? Can antibodies be taken from one person and given to another, for example? Or can space ships really travel as fast or faster than light as they do in Star Wars and Star Trek? Why or why not? Again, if you have no inkling about these kinds of things, learn them. Or draw examples from things that you do know about.

I think it is important not to set a child up for developing a morbid curiosity or fascination in the unreal. The irrational repression of normal human interests tend to have a paradoxical effect. So I caution Freethinking parents, who know the harm that superstition can do, not to run the risk of fostering the very thing they wish to guard their children against. Our loyalty, of course, is first and foremost to facts and reason. But the fact is that the human imagination complements and enlarges the world of fact. It is the engine of discovery and innovation.

It is only necessary to learn to draw the proper distinctions and to be very careful before moving something from the category of speculation or fantasy into that of fact. Again, I think children are capable of grasping this notion, especially if you give them examples that relate to their world of immediate experience. But this is the essence of science as well, as Richard Feynman put it, to "bend over backward" in considering the possibility of our being mistaken about something, and to learn, as Thomas Jefferson advised, to prefer ignorance to error.

Children should be encouraged to be skeptical. They should be praised for having doubts.

Finally, - and this is extremely important! - Freethinking parents should take care to help their children realize that they are an important part of the human adventure. Too many unbelieving parents are afraid to foster a sense of identity in their children because they are afraid that this would amount to "indoctrination" and "brainwashing" of the very sort that we object to when it is practiced by adherents of the various superstitious religions. That is a grave error, because an Atheist is not a nothing. An Atheist does not simply stand against god(s).

If you are convinced of the truth and object to others who teach their children to believe injurious lies, you surely would not raise your children "neutrally" and "let them decide for themselves," would you? I am teaching my children what it is to be a Freethinker: to put the highest value on being good. And being good means choosing what is right: right about the facts and how to identify them, knowledgeable and insightful about the nature and power of fantasy, and continually pursuing the right habits of thought and action.

It is also extremely valuable for Freethinking children to have a sense of connectedness to other Freethinkers of the past and present, including those who, whether once, often, or habitually seized hold of the spirit of Freethought. Children delight in the traditional stories of Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, and George Washington. But tell them also about Jenner, Pasteur, Darwin, Curie, Einstein, Meitner, and others who have contributed to human progress by refusing to accept the idea that everything worth knowing and understanding is contained in a book or in a body of theological doctrines.

Finally, Freethinking parents can feel comfortable in letting their children know that the standard to which they will be held is not perfection. But there is, nonetheless, a standard. The world is not perfect, and people are not perfect, and Freethinking parents should make sure their children know that this is not anyone's fault. But everyone has a responsibility not to make things worse than they are, and everyone ought to do what they can (not what others think they can, but what they themselves honestly believe they can) to make things better.

Young Freethinkers need the same thing that the rest of us do, just ground up a bit finer and in smaller bites.

Suggested Reading:

• Your One To Fourteen Year Old (A book for each age) Gesell Institute of Human Development 1976

• Teach Your Child How To Think by Edward de Bono 1993

• Raising A Thinking Child by Myrna B. Shure 1994

• How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

• Siblings Without Rivalry by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

• Teach Your Child Science by Michael Shermer

• The Hurried Child by David Elkind

• Raising Good Children by Dr. Thomas Lickona

• Megaskills by Dorothy Rich

• Raising Kids Who Love To Learn by David Elkind

• The Montessori Method by Maria Montessori

• Teaching Peace by Jan Arnow

Presented at the May, 1998 Sunday Service of The North Texas Church of Freethought