Archive for the ‘The Three Eyes’ Category

New Perspectives on Fatherhood

The Girl is approaching the ripe old age of one, and I’m finding that my perspectives on this whole skeptical parenting thing are become less abstract by the day. Call it what you will — early confusion, naive over-extension — but my views on what it means to be a father, particularly a father attempting to raise a critically thinking kid, have evolved and refined since a little more than a year ago (on the very verge of fatherhood) when I set out to build this blog.

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Full text from September 5, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: The Three Eyes, Thinking Back

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Thursday Thinkers: Too Young to Share

Thursday? Tinkering Thoughts on Thinking Tots.

Really, you know, the last thing I want for this blog is for a notion towards promoting personal integrity in children as a path to critical thought (see my explanation in “The Three Eyes“) to turn into a rant on teaching kids to share. For one thing, I don’t consider myself to be a particular good “sharer.” For another, I think this whole question of moral integrity might be wrapped a little deeper than some vague small-L liberal idealism of “why can’t we all just get along?” My disclosure is that I consider myself that small-L liberal. But I’m also a bit of a realist and sit squarely on the fence of debate on the benefits of passive versus assertive (and vice versa) involvement in society.

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Full text from May 1, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: The Three Eyes

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Creative Kids for March 2008

Why creativity? As I wrote in one of my first posts, I think there are “Three Eyes” to encouraging critical thought, and one of those is Imagination. And what I wrote then still holds true: Creative imagination is a double-edged sword for a skeptic; Imagination defines the ability to construct false realities as readily as it defines the ability to extend knowledge, seek answers, and forge new questions. But we need imagination. We need to understand the power and scope of this tool, to harness its potential for the right reasons and with the right momentum. As with any sword, the more apt one is with handling it the less likely one is to cause harm to oneself and others.

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Full text from March 8, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: The Three Eyes

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Avoiding the Rip Cord

As I write this I’m sitting on the floor of the living room in my pajamas struggling to find that internal parental peace that will prevent me from jumping in and rescuing my daughter from her struggles. She’s a few muscle-fibers short of being able to prop herself into a crawling position and in an effort to do so she is performing failed, faux push-ups and bemoaning the fact with an ongoing vocal tirade that is enough to drive me some sort of intervention. But in the name of all things ‘independence’ I resist, and so I’m distracting myself with a blog post.

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Full text from February 24, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: Skepdad thoughts, The Three Eyes

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An Imaginative Bonus Question

One would think that keeping a blog on the topics of critical thought, parenting, skepticism, and similarly related ideas is a difficult task — and one would be right. But, unexpectedly, when I set out to write here I was overwhelmed in a different way than I am now, having touched on a small handful of topics and researched twice again as many for future articles. The task is not difficult because there is a lack of subject matter. The task is difficult because there is far more to cover than I had ever anticipated. And I’ve been struggling not for lack of questions, but because I’ve been hesitant to ask the wrong ones.

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Full text from January 30, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: Meta-Skepdad, The Three Eyes

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Gaming and Critical Thought (Proposal)

In my everyday life I have been finding overlap between fellow skeptics and folks who game. That is to say, the people I know in real life and online who I would consider ‘critical thinkers’ and scientists have a notable affinity for playing complex and unique board games, dice games, or card games. It is not a closed-set of people by any means, but it makes me wonder: What do games teach us about thought? Are games good models for teaching integrity to kids (one of skep/dad’s claimed core pillars of critical thinking) or is it mere correlation? Or what else could we deduce from this seeming connection — if it even exists?

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Full text from January 25, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: Critical Thought Toolkit, The Three Eyes

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The Inevitable skep/dad Dichotomy

I’ve realized that my work on this blog can be neatly divided into two categories and I thought it might be useful to define those. Hopefully this will clear things up for new readers. So, if you are a new reader this post is a good post to read because it is going to talk about the difference between these two categories. I’ve simplified them as much as I could and have called them skeptical parenting versus raising critical thinkers — and they are not contradictory ideas. Rather, they compliment each other. And just a few months into this blog are very much at the core of what I’ve been trying to accomplish — and will continue to do.

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Full text from January 6, 2008 by Brad
Filed as: Meta-Skepdad, The Three Eyes

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Infant Independence and Sleep

One of the unexpected bits of advice we were given leading up the the birth of our child was to avoid routinely putting our baby to sleep. A registered nurse instructed us that “if baby doesn’t learn to sleep on her own when she’s young, it will only get harder as she gets older. Put her to bed when she seems tired or drowsy, not after you’ve lulled her to sleep in your arms.”

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Full text from September 6, 2007 by Brad
Filed as: The Three Eyes

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