The types of explanations we received as kids about the mundane questions of life, alters how we develop our capacity for internal reasoning. Becoming educated with diversity of subjects, perspectives, and even a diversity of people is a well-rounded way to develop a calm and rational approach to life when you need it.
Yesterday my 13 year old son yells up the stairs to me. He was making his lunch and didn’t know what to do about some bagged cold cuts.
The chicken bag looks like someone took a bite out of it. The bag is ripped and the meat has a missing part!
Uh huh.
So what do I do?
Maybe what grandma always said when it comes to odd food, “when in doubt, throw it out”?
But what happened to it?!
Maybe the dog got at it when it was left on the counter? I countered.
I’m not going to eat it!
Ok
This morning, I’m downstairs making sandwiches. The wacky chicken bag is still in play.
I say to my husband, looks like an animal pulled this thing apart.
Yeah, cheap zipper.
Makes sense.
This is how internal reasoning works, and judgement calls get developed too: a combination of experience, knowledge, observations, explanations, and sometimes even family stories and expressions. That is, this may be how it begins: I’m not a scientist nor philosopher in any proper sense.
And for kids, every unexpected thing is a learning opportunity.
Most of the time we get actionable information from perspective and experience. Also, by direct communication. But as children, we also develop a workable world view from adults explaining the world to us, sometimes in detail, sometimes by long or seemingly unrelated stories…. and sometimes by reading or formal education1.
If we leaned only on familial expressions vs science-based exploration, we may have a very different understanding for why things happen the way they do. This is probably true for a huge population of folks, and it is valid. This kind of learning comes from family loyalty, trust and love. For some folks, their understanding of life comes via religion.
But wow, does it help to ask someone who has a specialization to get a meaningful, factual answer.
Kids only have explanations to draw from that touch on what they know: in this case animals and bites seemed the most rapid response I could give because I was a floor away and couldn’t see the issue.
After all, our dog does like to eat cold cuts. What dog doesn’t?
As adults, we instantly understood it was poorly made packaging: a defective bag in a cheapening, efficiency-driven industrial age. Something familiar. Makes cents, makes sense.
I wonder how many explanations I have made about things, or come to create a logic around based on my unique experience, or the older people around me – when there was no one else to talk to?
I also wonder how the different kinds of familial expressions and truisms color our lives and spread simple wisdom about what to do next?
So, for the chicken bag, I made another Dagwood, then tossed it out empty.
- Crafting a sense of reason by experience, stories, expressions, direct answers or education are not mutually exclusive options for crafting a sense of internal logic. I feel like the real answer for most folks is option e) all of the above. ↩︎