When should you introduce your child to evolution?

Most public schools would introduce concepts of evolutionary biology long before that though. Even if your kids watch PBS they are going to hear about it from a young age.

I feel like this topic was already discussed in a thread somewhere…

Anyway, as soon as I was able to read books to my kids and talk to them about the world around us, I told them a storified version of the scientific consensus of life’s unfolding over hundreds of millions of years. I personally find it utterly fascinating and an amazing testimony to the glory of God, so why should I withhold it from them? I find the very idea strange.

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Didn’t know about another thread.

I am speaking as a biology teacher in a school with over 90 different churches represented, so officially we don’t get into a topic as big as evolution/creation until students are mentally in a place to start handling the varying aspects of the discussion.

The interesting thing about public schools teaching starting earlier is that you would think they would get so much deeper, yet they don’t.

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I think there is a fundamental difference when you are introducing evolution to students in a group where a good number of them have been explicitly taught anti-evolution arguments since they were young, and introducing evolution to your own child as a Christian who also wants them to be developing a respect for the truth of the word of God. For fifteen-year-olds who have been led to believe that evolution is incompatible with God’s truth, there is a whole different kind of cognitive dissonance than for seven-year-olds who read in their picture Bibles about creation week and then watch Dinosaur Train and learn about the difference between the triassic and jurassic dinosaurs. I don’t think the younger child experiences the same level of conflict.

When my kids were little we talked about germs and how our immune systems fight disease, be we also acknowledged that God heals people so we should pray for those who are sick. We talked about the weather cycle and what affects climates but we also read in the Bible that God sends rain and makes everything come to life in spring. We learned how babies are made, but we also freely talked about God creating us special from the time we were in our moms. I don’t think talking about how creatures today have very different ancestors and have changed over time or how we can tell the earth is billions of years old was experienced by my children as a contradiction the way it would be experienced as a contradiction by children who had grown up being explicitly told it was.

That said, I think human origins is tricky for EC parents. It is a little messier than simply explaining basic genetics and descent with modification.

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I apologize for my hair trigger. Yes of course, your situation in a school setting is quite different from mine in a home. And I was reacting less to you, actually (poor form for me there), and more to the very notion of waiting to teach one’s kids about “evolution.” In the setting of an EC home (not your setting), I think the notion is absurd.

At my kids’ youngest introduction to the consensus model of natural history, I didn’t actually teach them about “evolution” (insert requisite bogey-man shudder). I just taught them about how God created the world gradually over many millions of years, in a particular order. It was only later that I had to tell them, “Now kids, when your [Christian school] class talks about creation, you need to be aware that for some people this is a really sensitive topic, and we don’t want to lose friends over this. So please think hard before you go around talking about what Daddy’s taught you about these things.”

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P.S. If you’re curious, it’s here: When should you introduce your child to evolution? But I’m not sure whether it’s worth your time! :slight_smile:

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At one point during some software upgrade or something, the system was randomly generating new threads for old blog posts, which is where this one came from. I could merge the two.

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I agree with the teaching of human origins. With all of the other disciplines I am trying to be reasonably knowledgable about, that is one I have not yet picked up; yet I need to.

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