On Raising Thinkers

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Sometimes I just need some simple, mindless distraction to recover a few brain cells and regain composure after an extra chaotic day (ahem, children anyone?). There are moments we just need to give our brains a break don't we? I completely get it.

But sometimes I worry. I worry that the fast-paced, endless barrage of distraction around every corner is slowly chipping away at our ability to think. I’m particularly afraid for our kids. Many of them will spend childhoods shaped by massive media influence and never learn for themselves how to think critically. While there's certainly a place for media and screen time, screens seem to primarily nourish a child's appetite for content consumption, starving an appetite for content creation and personal critical thinking. I think this is a big deal.

Obviously none of this is scientific. I’m just going off of my own personal experience. I feel like the more time I spend on my phone, the more I’m training my mind to be a passive idea consumer rather than an active idea generator. A million other people online are ready at hand at any given second to think for us. And because we're clicking a hundred links and are too distracted to really process any of the messages that we're consuming on our screens, we're left with a brain programmed with all the ideas other people came up with, but no real original opinions of our own about what all those people were saying. We tend to be allllll over the place, with attention spans being programmed to last only as long it takes to click from one link to the next. 

Except when we fight back. Personally, I want to model for my kids that, to have well-informed, intelligible ideas about anything, we MUST carve out time occasionally for focused reading, sitting quietly in thought, and processing ideas. As an adult, I have to fight for time to maintain my mind and think and process things. It demands trade offs of time, compromising some of the rare few extra minutes I could spend getting more things done on my to-do list. I KNOW my kids will have to fight even harder to find this time and make these compromises.

And there's something else at stake here. Not only do I want my kids to learn how to form intelligent ideas, but I also want them to become creators of beauty who pour words and art and ideas of value back into their world. I believe that for any of us to be able to contribute anything into the world, we must be in the habit of nourishing our minds. We have to feed and care for the thought center from which all creativity flows.

For all these reasons and more, I'm deeply committed as a mom to do my very best to raise kids who have learned to think. Who have learned to question. Who combat the urge to spend 5 minutes reading other people's opinions about crucial topics and then quickly jump on a bandwagon of thought that is built almost entirely on the backs of other people’s thoughts.

Two ultimate goals keep me motivated. First, I want my kids to be present in and passionate about life. Second, I long for my kids to hold fast to their faith.

Let me unpack that first goal a bit. I believe passion and thought go hand in hand. It’s hard to feel much of anything when we don’t slow down and ponder things we’re grateful for, get to the bottom of things we have questions about, or contemplate the world around us.

I believe that distraction is often the biggest thief of passion. It keeps our brain busy, fools us into feeling like our lives are full, and before we know it, we just don’t….feel much. We just start going through the motions and live on the outskirts of our own consciousness. We don’t take the time to wrestle through doubts or dig deeper into our convictions, and we just….live on the surface. We don’t feel much of anything for anything. Ask me how I know. 

But when we discipline ourselves to lean deeper into thought and take time to ponder things, it can re-tether our consciousness to feeling, reigniting passion and mental presence. It can help us re-engage us in our own lives.

Now on to the second goal of kids who hold fast to their faith.

I would argue that the most important reason to try to raise kids who are thinkers is this:  kids who haven’t learned to think, to reason, to ask questions, to consider, to dig, or to contemplate will be at tremendous risk for falling away from their faith. When they get to college or enter the workforce and realize how huge the world of ideas is, it’s going to be really hard to hold fast to any belief without knowing how to think. Without the anchor of a well-trained mind that is conditioned in the art evaluating the truth-claims embedded in various messages, our kids will be blown any which way the winds of popular ideology are blowing at the time.

I so hope to raise kids who have mastered the ability to reason, look for coherence, and approach complex issues with logic and rationality to arrive at a reasonable conclusions in light of all evidence available. Because when they are bombarded with a hundred different world views, I don’t want them to just stick their head in the sand and blindly hold on to the faith they were taught just because they’re scared to investigate or question things further. I want to equip them, starting now, with tools to logically, rationally, and reasonably examine the evidence for ANY world view they encounter. I don’t want to just teach them the evidence for the faith I hope to pass down to them. I want to equip them so that when they study other world views, as they should, they will hold them to the very same standards of rationality, internal coherence, logic, and evidence that we demand of Christianity.

We must equip our kids to think.

And for clarity, I don’t believe knowledge alone will save us, and I believe God must do work in our individual hearts, and we must choose or not choose to respond to His gentle prodding.

But.

I also believe with all my heart that God gave us a mind to evaluate and navigate information about Him. It’s a mighty tool in our toolbox. I believe our God-given ability to think and reason can actually help us fall even more deeply in love with Him. I can attest that reason and evidence and taking the time to dig and think deeply can ignite even greater depths of reverence and awe than we previously thought possible. When we go deeper, we can uncover a more reasonable, more beautiful, richer faith grounded in truth and robust enough to sustain us throughout the course of our lives. It can infuse our lives with deeper purpose, hope, and gratitude. It can resuscitate our imagination, helping us to re-engage in our own existence so we can live with a renewed attention to and fascination with all that God is doing in and through and around us every day.

A mind truly is a terrible thing to waste.