Understanding Child Development

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Children naturally practice discernment by noticing distinctions adults often overlook.

Discernment is not just thinking but a sensory skill that can be strengthened or lost.

Adults often discourage discernment by prioritizing obedience over precise understanding.

Teaching discernment begins by taking children's perceptions seriously.

As contradictions abound and even truth can seem expendable or only mildly interesting, it is worth asking why. Why does it sometimes feel as though the distinctions that once anchored judgment, the difference between true and false, careful and careless, credible and merely persuasive, have begun to flatten?

This flattening is not just a crisis of the mind. It is a loss of the senses. We see it in the literal disappearance of the fine line. Hey, what happened? They discontinued teaching cursive?

I always thought cursive was a sneaky way to teach the artist’s way, a pencil-and-paper initiation into the grace of the curve, the pressure of the lead, the unique mark of a hand. If we stop training the hand to draw distinctions, why are we surprised when the eye stops looking for them? And when the eye stops looking, the mind stops expecting them. How will I know what is real? And how have we ever known?

An antidote to this flattening is a renewed consciousness of discernment. Use it or lose it. And, at the very least, we have misplaced it.

Children are taught to distinguish shapes and learn words, and they are often fiercely literal in their beliefs and definitions. When I called my mother on something I knew to be true, she said, “You should become a lawyer.” I remember stopping, trying to figure out what she meant. Are lawyers........

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