In his new book, “Trusting What You’re Told,” Paul L. Harris, a Victor S. Thomas Professor of Education at Harvard, argues that much of what we’ve assumed about our kids’ early learning may be misguided. Although many parents and teachers think of children as primarily independent “scientific” learners who best absorb knowledge by physically interacting with the world — an idea that informs everything from Montessori education to museum planning —  Harris believes it woefully underestimates the importance of dialogue in young kids’ lives. Conversation — and question asking — allows young children to grasp highly abstract concepts, from religion to history, at an earlier age. However, as Harris points out, the way young children learn can vary surprisingly between working-class and middle-class children, and people from different ethnic backgrounds.

Salon spoke to Harris over the phone about Montessori’s mistakes, Asian-American kids’ deference levels, and why working-class kids ask fewer questions.

Why is it so important to determine where young children actually get their information? 

A lot of research on cognitive development has argued that children do best when they’re exploring the world for themselves in a scientific fashion. That idea has a long pedigree. If you read someone like Rousseau, that’s what he’s basically advocating — along with more recent researchers or educators like Paget or Montessori. Even in the last decade or so there have been a lot of titles within the popular science mode that have focused on the “scientist in the crib” or the “child as a scientist.” But I think it dramatically underestimates children.

Where is this, as you argue, misguided approach to early education reflected?

If you go into a Montessori classroom, which is the archetype of this, the child is given materials to play with — be they rods or cones or things to assemble — and the assumption is that the child learns best about numbers and space from interacting with those concrete materials. I’m not quarreling with this as an educational device; I just don’t think it’s the whole story. You also see this philosophy in progressive science museums for children that pride themselves on being hands-on experiences: The child is not necessarily told very much, and he or she is encouraged to try things out for themselves.

You argue that, rather than allowing children simply to figure things out for themselves, it’s incredibly important that children learn things by interacting with adults from a young age. When does that form of learning start?

Probably before the child learns how to talk. There was a nice set of experiments where toddlers who were barely able to walk were given a slope to go down. The slope was made a little bit too steep for them to be confident on, and they’d often turn toward a parent of caregiver looking for advice. The evidence showed that if the parent looked anxious and apprehensive, the toddler would probably hesitate to tackle the slope, and if the caregiver looked encouraging and optimistic, the toddler would go ahead and try to negotiate it.

But this process of learning from others really comes into its own when the child is starting to talk, from 18 to 24 months upward. If, for example, the child puts a toy in a box in a room, and the child comes back into the room, and you tell the child that you’ve moved the toy to a different box, by around two and a half, children are very good at listening to you and will go search in the new place. This is a very early illustration of the way human children realize that the world may not be as they saw it, or as they see it, and that their best bet is to listen and trust other people for guidance.

At a certain point in their childhood, kids start asking lots and lots of inane question where they don’t even seem to be interested in the answer. It can be insanely annoying, and a lot of parents dismiss this as a way to get attention, but you argue that it’s actually incredibly important.

It’s true that children ask a lot of questions, but if you look more closely at the kinds of questions they ask, about 70 percent of them are seeking information as opposed to things like, for example, asking permission. And then when you look at those questions, 20 to 25 percent of them go beyond asking for bare facts like “Where are my socks?” Children ask for explanations, like “Why is my brother crying?” If a child spends one hour a day between the ages of 2 and 5 with a caregiver who is talking to them and interacting with them, they will ask 40,000 questions in which they are asking for some kind of explanation. That’s an enormous number of questions.

And it’s not just attention seeking. When children ask questions and you answer them, that is actually a setting for a sustained dialogue, and they’re trying to get clear in their minds about a particular issue that’s confusing to them or bothering them.

One disturbing finding you highlight in the book is that children in less wealthy families are far less likely to ask these kinds of inquisitive questions.

The most critical variable is the education of the mother. The more educated the mother, the greater the richness of the vocabulary and sentences they use with their children, and to some extent the greater the amount of time they talk to their children. One study was done in the U.K. with a group of working-class 4-year-olds and middle-class 4-year-olds, and the middle-class 4-year-olds were more likely to ask questions than the working-class 4-year-olds. This was also true not just of the single one-off questions but more persistent series of questions. That study also showed that children asked many more questions at home than at preschool, so when we send kids to preschool we’re giving them opportunities to play with other children and pretend play or whatever, but in terms of one-to-one dialogue where these kinds of sustained explorations can take place, we may be limiting the opportunities.

Children also seem to trust answers that come from parents more than other people they don’t know as well.

We’ve done a variety of experiments, and children seem to have a variety of biases that steer them more toward some informants than others. One of the most basic is that they’ll often turn to familiar people rather than strangers. Though by the time the child is 5, if a familiar person starts saying things that from the child’s point of view are incorrect or implausible, the child will become less receptive to that person.

There’s a surprising finding in the book that Asian-American children are more deferential in their early learning than others. What does that mean?

There is data comparing American children who are European-American and children from Asian-American families, and to cut a long story short, it looks as if the first-generation Asian-Americans children are more likely to scan the social horizon, more likely to listen to other people. I don’t think we should automatically jump to the conclusion that’s an intellectually inferior strategy; it’s actually an intellectually sophisticated strategy. We don’t know exactly what brings this cultural difference about, but our best guess is that it goes back to the dialogue between caregiver and children — that mothers differ in the extent to which they encourage children to voice their own opinions or record a child’s opinion as worthy of attention.

But the willingness to provide and act on what you’re told is not something that’s peculiar to any particular culture. Deference has been an important tool for the transmission of culture. Human technology becomes more elaborate, more complicated, from one generation to the next, and deference allows information to be picked up and acted upon. Chimpanzees, for example, deprive themselves of the ability to learn culturally inherited wisdom passed on from generation to generation. If we look at chimpanzee tool use, it tends to be unsophisticated; it doesn’t accumulate over generations.

You draw parallels and contrasts between childhood beliefs in  religion, in the sense of the existence of God, and in more scientific things, like germs. What are the conclusions you can draw from that?

This is another illustration of how the traditional portrait of the child as a little scientist doesn’t work. A 4- or 5-year-old child isn’t in a position to observe germs, but talk to one, and they are pretty convinced they exist. It’s perfectly routine for children to believe in things that they can’t observe, and they do that presumably by listening to what other people say and looking at the presuppositions in what people say. This is as much true of germs and oxygen as it is of special beings such as God or Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. From the perspective of the child the primary evidence they have is what other people tell them about these entities.

The making of that distinction between scientifically established and more religious or supernatural entities is far from straightforward. There’s a sense that children are a little bit like psephologists: They look at what people say around them, and they do a head count, and they see that there’s nobody who’s a skeptic about germs. But on the other hand there are very subtle signs that God has a different status. Then of course when it  comes to Santa Claus and the tooth fairy — and eventually in the schoolyard — they’re going to meet a skeptic if not several, so their belief in those entities is going to suffer a heavy blow at some point.

What do findings tell us about how children first learn about death and understand it?

They start by understanding that the body has a life cycle, and that people have these internal organs that have to be working for them to live — and that at a certain point in time the life cycle comes to an end. These internal organs cease to function. The biological account of death implies that once you’re dead, that’s it. Life has ceased. By contrast the religious conception of death typically carries with it the implication of some sort of afterlife. But it takes them a longer time to start accepting the claims that a particular community will make about the afterlife. The other interesting finding is that it’s not as if those two accounts are in competition with one another. So when children subscribe in the end to a Christian notion of the afterlife, it doesn’t lead them to abandon the biological conception. Both coexist in the child’s mind — and get recruited in different contexts.

Given your findings, how should we be changing the way we educate and parent our children?

One thing that it calls attention to is how much children can learn just by talking to people and engaging in dialogue with someone they’re familiar with. Even at a fairly young age, children can be guided to think about episodes, places, periods in history which are fairly remote from their own immediate experience. Part of the human experience is the capacity to leave behind the here and now and to think about very different times and times and places. I suppose the other aspect of the book that I didn’t dwell on, though it’s increasingly on our mind, is the fact that thanks to technology, children’s access to information is now amplified. At an early age children have these spontaneous filters. They’re trusting some people more than others; navigating the Internet, which is tricky; and many of them are left to their own devices in figuring out how to do that. It’s not as if we have educational programs which encourage children to think more carefully about where they gather information from. What we tend to do is try to guarantee that children’s access to certain misleading sources or difficult sources is blocked rather than giving them the tools to make assessments for themselves. In the future we’ll have to address that question more systematically than we do and at an earlier age.

Things are very different today. Kid-targeted movies filled with teenage actors like “The Hunger Games” and the “Harry Potter” franchise have found a huge adult audience, while actors like 15-year-old Chloë Moretz (who stars in the new movie “Hick,” opening this week) and the Fanning sisters are given prominent roles in serious dramas. On TV, children have become a regular part of many casts, from sitcoms (“The Middle,” “Modern Family”) to dramas (“Shameless,” ‘The Walking Dead”). Child actors, once a sign of cheesiness and unprofessional conduct, have become integral to the success of a large number of critically respected and commercially successful entertainment properties. And not only that, many of these child actors have gotten really, really good.

Think of Kodi Smit-McPhee from “The Road,” holding his own next to Viggo Mortensen. Or Emma Kenny’s Debs on “Shameless,” capable of moving from a funny scene — yelling “Eat my ass!” at a video game — to the heartbreaking moments she shares with her unappreciative father, slipping him beer or covering his passed-out body with a blanket without getting any thanks. Or even Aubrey Anderson-Emmons, the new Lily on “Modern Family,” only 4 years old but emphasizing the weirdness rather than the cuteness of the 2-year-old she plays. (When she was cast, other cast members talked about how good of an actress she was, which seemed strange to say about a 4-year-old, but she’s proved it this season.)

The rise of the quality child actor (coming, it should be noted, considerably later than the rise of “quality” TV) can be traced to two general phenomena. One is that scriptwriters and directors figured out how to use child actors effectively, emphasizing a naturalistic style that let them fit in with their costars and lose all the groan-worthy signals that a movie was just for kids. But the other is the emergence of that very parallel entertainment universe. Nickelodeon and Disney didn’t just create hugely successful TV shows and movies; they also created a reason for more and more child actors to come to California, to learn their craft and to be able to fill those new, cheese-free parts.

Why were child actors so reviled throughout the ’80s? Here are some names that might jog your memory: Michelle Tanner. Jennifer Keaton. Willis Jackson. Child actors seemed either designed to run onstage and say something cute to elicit an “awww!” in unison from the studio audience, or to smirk and hack their way through the broad teen comedies filling mall multiplexes. While directors like Stephen Spielberg and John Hughes were able to elicit compelling performances from younger actors, their technique didn’t seem to take and derivatives of their successes seemed to share more with the B-movies of yore than they did with “E.T.” or “The Breakfast Club.” (It didn’t help that a lot of those “kids” were being played by adults, either.)

It’s no surprise, then, that anyone backing a TV show or movie intended to be seen as serious and high-quality would do everything they could to keep kids out of it; even good shows focused on kids couldn’t survive on network TV during the dead zone between the mid-’90s and early ’00s, as “My So-Called Life” and “Freaks and Geeks” could attest. It’s a style of acting we still see today: think poor Jake Lloyd playing young Anakin Skywalker in “The Phantom Menace” in such a cutesy way that it rendered the movie nearly unwatchable. Or most of the actors on Disney and Nick shows, for that matter. (Though at least the kids are playing themselves; previously many “teenagers” were played by adults.)

Sometime during that fallow period, though, producers figured out how to not only capture that Spielberg magic, but even improve on it. There are times (see above, or here) when the acting in Spielberg’s kiddie flicks is so unaffected that it comes close to breaking the fourth wall. Young actors are now placed in fantastic situations (wizard school, vampire wars, Upper East Side prep schools) and expected to convincingly embody a real character — and they’ve become very good at it.

“Over the years, the acting style has changed,” said Harriet Greenspan, a casting agent and acting instructor in Los Angeles who has worked with a number of kids’ shows. “It’s become a lot more real. Thirty years ago, acting was acting. We look for kids that aren’t acting anymore, that are more real.”

The general path of child actors has always been commercials to TV shows to movies, but there was a long-standing block at that second level: There simply weren’t very many TV shows child actors could work on. Most “children’s entertainment” was cartoons or educational programming staffed by adults. Cable changed all that. While the first shows for tweens are generally thought to have aired on NBC during its Saturday-morning block of “Saved by the Bell” and its spinoffs, cable created a venue for kids to watch themselves acting like kids — and, unsurprisingly, it turned out they really liked it. (Cable also created the split, in its way: If the kids were off watching tween shows, “family hour” shows didn’t have to feature cute kids to get the parents to watch.) This marked an important shift in how kids were portrayed.

“Nickelodeon first came up with its ‘Kids Rule’ slogan quite purposefully in the early ’90s,” Dave Moore, a media expert at Temple University, wrote in an email. “This necessarily transformed kid actors from subservient to adult programs to perceived ‘rebels’ acting out against authority.”

Both Disney and Nickelodeon slowly built up universes of programming and stars that spanned media from TV to music to movies, a world with kids playing kids to an audience of kids. The acting there was frequently as broad as you might have seen on any ’80s sitcom, but that wasn’t the important thing. “Child actor” isn’t a career anyone decides to pursue; first you get a gig, and then you make a life of it. The emergence of so many more roles for younger actors created a much larger pool of actors other projects could draw from. By the time a child actor is being asked to play an 8-year-old, he or she is likely to have more experience now than ever before.

“The trend of ‘grooming’ child actors from a young age has probably been facilitated in an age with more media exposure sooner,” Moore noted. But this has not always been a positive development.

“It’s a kids’ world out there,” said Greenspan. “So many families are picking up their lives and moving to California because of their child’s career. Of course, kids get bad advice — they get one role and the parents pack up and move, and sometimes it’s months or years before they get another gig.”

Exploitation has always been a concern when it comes to child actors; while California has strict rules about how long kids are allowed to work per day, it can’t control the bad decisions parents might make when their kid isn’t working. Bogus “talent searches” and managers ostensibly trying to discover the next big child actor or model pop up regularly in cities small and large, and most of these are scams. Nor has the fate of child actors generally been smooth.

All that said, the return of younger characters to mainstream entertainment has been a welcome one. In the last decade, both comedies and dramas have gotten a lot better at showing us adults who are recognizable humans, not just collections of showbiz gestures assembled into a numbing whole. While that sophistication in storytelling techniques was happening, though, children were largely left out, as if adults wouldn’t be interested in seeing compelling portrayals of kids (even as they cropped up in shows like “Malcolm in the Middle” or movies like “The Sixth Sense”). Now, Chloë Moretz can give us a dark comedic take on a character her age while Helena Bonham Carter does the same; Kiernan Shipka shows us how girls like Sally Draper deal with the socio-historical shifts of the ’60s just as Elisabeth Moss does the same for young women; and if Chandler Riggs’ portrayal of Carl on “The Walking Dead” sometimes makes you root for his death, well, he’s right there alongside Dale and Lori. On the children’s shows of Disney and Nickelodeon, kids have been portrayed from their own perspective for the last few decades. Now, adults are getting to see kids as real humans, too.

It was around the time that Bart died of AIDS that things began to get really bad. That was when my dad had dyed his bangs platinum, which didn’t go over so well with the congregation he then served and would not serve much longer. This was around the time that in a fifth- or sixth grade art class I made a painting of a male seraph sealed in a black box in the center of an otherwise Edenic scene and wrote, in black block letters across the top, Who are you forcing into the closet? A nasty debate ensued over whether it could go up on the middle-school wall. I can only imagine that my dad had gone to see “Angels in America,” talked about it at home. It is, however, also possible that this episode lends credence to his idea that I knew all along. He talked about theater a lot back then and gave me John Simon’s reviews to read when he thought they were particularly savage. They were confusing for a 10-year-old. But I liked waking up in the morning to clippings he’d left under my door. Sometimes he said he’d wished he’d been an actor, had become a rabbi less for the liturgical than for the performative aspects of the job, and because he’d so much liked spending time in Israel and speaking Hebrew. This was also around the time my dad started to seem arbitrary and punitive, when he would come home late and throw all my CDs down the stairs because there was unfolded laundry on the dining room table. I began then to understand there were sealed-off swaths of my dad’s time, and that the patterns of his emotional climate could neither be predicted nor accounted for.

“Bart was the first person I ever told I was gay. That was in 1986. I was taking social-work classes one night a week in New York. It was raining and I was headed downtown in a cab. The cabbie asked if I minded if we picked up a guy standing in the rain. He got in the cab and looked at me and knew right away, and we went out for coffee. He was the first person I could talk to openly.” Again, it’s hard to get his stories straight (again: so to speak). When he told me, at nineteen, that he knew I already knew he might prefer men, the backstory went like this: In the early to mid-’90s he discovered he was bisexual but chose to live with this knowledge and remain in his marriage. In 1997 or 1998, after meeting Brett, he began to envision a different sort of life. It was time for him to do something for himself for a change, put himself first. This meant the license to make up for lost time. There was a lifetime of Palm Springs poolside drag parties to catch up on.

After five or six years he was telling a new version, or hinting at one. There were salacious allusions to the loss of his virginity, wistful ones to his first love. But these comments felt more like boasts than invitations to further inquiry. Under the pretense of closeness it expanded the distance between us. His unexplored asides reminded me of how much I didn’t know, how much had happened that had nothing to do with me. “I had a boyfriend who sold drugs to John Lennon. Someday I’ll tell you about that,” he’d say, and then smile and trail off. These conversations made me angry. No, more than that, they made me feel stupid, gullible, excluded. He’d deceived me, deceived us, and then everything he ever said could only appear in that light. His clumsy attempts to clue us in only ever deepened my sense of deception. The implication of this second story was that he’d been with men before and then decided—in a way that somehow suggested a proleptic sacrifice — to martyr himself with a straight life. Twenty years later he found the strength to live once more for himself. His stories always ended with this new resolve, a moment in which he at last was able to swear off his burdensome obligations.

I told people, when they asked me about my expectations for Rosh Hashanah in Uman, that what I thought was going to happen — what I wanted to best-case-scenario happen — was to hear the third version of his story, the one where Micah and I found out he’d been with men all along. I wanted to hear this in part because I wanted to feel undeceived. Of course, though, there’s no such thing as making yourself undeceived; I suppose I wanted the deception confirmed. Contained. Laid bare. There had always been rumors. My freshman year in high school I heard third-hand from a classmate that my father had told someone he was gay, or maybe had been seen at a gay fundraiser. What was worse than not knowing was that other people did somehow.

“I told Max in 1988. I went to Philadelphia on business and I stopped into his office at the thermocouple plant when I knew I only had 10 minutes to talk. I told him and I walked right out before he could really respond. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t say he knew all along. I think he was stunned.”

“Did Max seem accepting?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t give him a chance to say anything. I told my mother a few months later. By then Bart was taking me out and introducing me to people, showing me around, taking me to the Roxy.”

“So you and Bart were involved, then?” I tried to keep my voice even.

“No! Never. That first time I met him, over coffee, I made a pass, but he looked at me and said I was craaaazy, that he’d have to be crazy, that I had a wife and two little kids at home. He didn’t want to get involved with that. So we were only ever friends, which was better anyway, because what I needed then was a friend I could talk to about things I’d never talked to anybody about.”

“I want to know how you were feeling then. Did you wake up in the morning at home and look around you and think, This is not really my life?” I thought of David Byrne, This is not my beautiful house . . . this is not my beautiful wife.

“No. I wanted that life too. I wanted to be married. I loved you guys, and I loved your mother, and I know you don’t believe me but I still love your mother. I never thought about doing anything differently.”

“But didn’t you feel regrets? Don’t you feel regrets now? Wasn’t it hard to live this double life?” I was baiting him a little. It seemed important to me, had seemed important to me for a long time, to know he regretted everything, he was sorry for everything, he wished it had been otherwise. I do not know how to account for this but there was some part of me that wanted to hear he regretted we’d been born.

“Gay guys compartmentalize. It’s just what you have to do. No, it wasn’t that hard, mostly, and I really have no regrets at all. At that point in my life I had no way to imagine anything else. In 1974 there was simply no openly gay role model in my life that might have shown me a way to live differently. And I never didn’t want to be married. I never didn’t want to have my family. I’d always wanted a family.”

“So, what made you finally stop? What made you decide it was time to come out. Also, wait a second, what’s 1974?”

“I wanted to give your mother her life back.” Micah and I exchanged our long-practiced well-that’s-bullshit look. The one thing we knew we were absolutely not going to talk about was our mom, because whatever he was possibly going to say was going to make us angry. “And I wanted to do something for myself. I wanted to put myself first.”

“But weren’t you already putting yourself first, at least half the time? In your New York life? In whatever was going on in the other compartment? Weren’t you number one there?”

“I guess I wanted to put myself first successfully.”

“And you couldn’t have done that before? And you never regretted not having done that before?”

“No, really, Gideon. I am not lying to you. I couldn’t and didn’t.”

We stood over fragments of Jewish gravestones strewn amid the clumps of dead grass. This was all a little much, the broken gravestones, the pogrom detritus. I was surprised. I’d always imagined this was going to be a conversation about his regrets, about the psychic strain of having committed to a life that didn’t feel like yours, that didn’t feel like what you’d wanted or chosen for yourself. I was prepared to be sympathetic to him — the volatility, the punitive tendencies, the absences — if I could hear from him that he’d been driven out of his mind by the suspicion that his real life was happening elsewhere. If he’d had two lives, I could have been at the very center of one and at the very periphery of the other, and I would have known to take only the first one personally.

But my dad was making it clear that he did not feel as though his real life had been elsewhere. I had suggested it must have been hard to have two lives, and he’d agreed, but he didn’t actually have two lives. Nobody has two lives, just like nobody lives an imitation life. He had one life, a real life, and in that one life he’d told a lot of lies and kept a lot of secrets, and it was never clear if I was — if we were — at the center or on the margin. I’d never wanted to think of him as a liar. I’d never wanted to feel like someone who could be so easily lied to. I’d wanted him to have regretted a lot of things because that might also have meant he hadn’t lied about a lot of things, and if he regretted them, it meant he was acknowledging he hadn’t made the best decisions — even if he continued to think of the consequences of those decisions in terms of his own life, not in terms of ours.

But I could hardly deal with his regret, either. If he was a liar, I was an idiot; but if he was regretful, Micah and I had been burdens. It would be better to admit I’d been deceived, deceived by the person in the world I most wanted to be like — the navigator who knew all the long-cut (mileage-saving, time-adding) hypotenuses on local back roads; the only parent who was willing to drive around on empty unplowed streets after a blizzard to pick up all of our friends on the way to the secret sledding hill he’d found; the former college radio DJ who’d always been so endearingly baffled by the part in “MacArthur Park” (the Donna Summer version, of course) where someone leaves a cake out in the rain; the news junkie who came to dinner with labeled manila folders for each of us, full of relevant and absurd clippings from the five daily newspapers and three weekly magazines he read; the theatergoer who loved the savagery of this John Simon guy and took me to off -off -Broadway productions in dingy Greenwich Village basements when the other suburban parents made the thirty-minute trip into New York once a year to go skating at Rockefeller Center; the rabbi who seemed so proud and calm and authoritative giving demanding High Holiday sermons in which he alluded to the lyrics of Queen and Procol Harum, who made me so proud to be the rabbi’s son, progeny of moral authority, near to a moral center, even if I had so little practical knowledge of Judaism — than to continue to feel as though my existence as the rabbi’s son had thwarted his chance at having the life he deserved. I did not want to have to imagine my childhood and adolescence as an obstacle. I wanted to be able to think of his happy gay life now in terms other than contrastive freedom.

We paused under a lone shade tree and looked at a few sheared-off gravestones with Hebrew names. We picked our way over the uneven ground. Micah had grown completely quiet. He’s got other issues, or maybe he doesn’t have any issues at all. He doesn’t remember as much as I do. He’s much quicker to let go of things.

“But, Dad, wait a second.” I felt as though we’d skipped something here, that whatever had actually been going on — this other life we’d started to talk about — was being acknowledged without being admitted. If he wasn’t going to talk about regret, then we were going to talk about lies.

“You said that Bart was the first person you ever told you were gay. But didn’t you have relationships with men before that?”

“Well, there were always physical things. Bart would take me out and I’d find gratification. After a certain point you just get tired of masturbation, you know? But there was nothing emotional, nothing serious. It was all just physical. After all, don’t forget, I was married.”

I hadn’t forgotten. This felt so unfair. If your dad casually admits to having serially cheated on your mom for your entire childhood with other women, you have the right to be furious. If your dad casually admits to having serially cheated on your mom for your entire childhood with men, you’re supposed to be sympathetic. Or I felt as though I had to be sympathetic. He was such a convincing martyr. I hadn’t been allowed — hadn’t allowed myself — to be furious for so long, because I’d believed the story of sacrifice my dad told. I wanted to feel furious now, but all I could feel was a surprising sense of gratitude. I felt as though these casual admissions had fixed something for me, both in the sense of repair and in the sense of the record I’d come to get, and I was somehow finally understanding where I stood in relation to him.

“No, I mean, that’s interesting,” I said, eager to keep this going, “but that wasn’t quite what I meant. I thought once when you were visiting me in Berlin you made some comment about your first boyfriend, your first love. And a minute ago I thought you said something about 1974.”

“Oh, well, that was before my marriage. That was Rocky.”

My dad stopped and smiled his least melodramatic smile. The imminent unveiling of these memories made the moment seem staged, as if he’d been given a script and asked to play the part of a father overcome with nostalgia. He looked engulfed, totally convincing. I didn’t know if I wanted to hear what was coming. When so much has been kept secret, it’s impossible to know what you do and what you don’t want to know, what ought to be shared and what might best be kept to oneself.

“I was twenty-one and in Jerusalem alone. I’d wanted to go abroad to Russia but it was hard to do that in 1974, and my plans fell through at the last minute. So I scrambled and went to Israel instead. If I’d gone to Russia, I probably would’ve ended up in the CIA or the State Department or something, but as it was I went to Israel and I met Rocky, and I loved Hebrew and I loved Israel and I thought, I’ll just stay here and become a rabbi. Rocky was in his forties. He was an ophthalmologist. He once fitted Golda Meir for contact lenses.” My dad laughed.

“Where did you guys meet?”

“At the Turkish bathhouse, which was the only thing like a gay scene in Jerusalem in the seventies. You could go and, you know, have sex with young Arab boys.” I hadn’t known that. Micah, I am willing to guess, hadn’t known that.

“Rocky had money, and he had this great apartment, an entire floor on the fourth floor of a building on King David Street, right near the YMCA and HUC,” the reform rabbinical seminary where my dad met my mom a year or two later. “He had such nice things, such beautiful furniture, wonderful rugs. Exquisite taste. I was a kid and away from home and he took care of me.” My dad looked so sweet and serene as he remembered this other place, this thing it’s tempting to call a previous life. We all kept stumbling on the shards of pogrom gravestones underfoot.

“When did it end?”

“I started rabbinical school the next year and met your mother and that’s what I wanted then, so I broke it off with Rocky.”

“And there was really no way for you to imagine living a gay life then? No role model?”

“It was unimaginable to me.” I wondered why Rocky himself didn’t count.

“How did he take it when you broke up with him?”

“To be honest with you, I can’t remember. I hadn’t made any promises to him. I was really just a kid. But then” — he paused  — “I went and saw him once, years later, maybe 15 years later, I looked him up when I was back in Jerusalem.” We’d gone to Israel as a family in 1988, when I was eight and Micah was five. Micah had been run over in the street by a kid on a bike. “I can’t remember what we said to each other, though.”

“I’m sad that you were never able to tell us these stories. I’m sorry you weren’t able to tell them to us growing up.” I was a little shaky, but it was a lot easier to hear stories that predated my mom than the other ones he’d been telling. We’d gone back past the mikveh and were walking by a low-slung trailer soliciting donations for a “Fond Rising for the Monuments to Victims of Holohost.” I wanted to hear these stories, didn’t want to hear these stories, felt bad about needing to hear them, felt bad about not wanting to hear them, doubted that even this third version of his life was totally honest, angry to have to feel doubt, very sorry for my mom — sorry for my mom both because of what she went through and because it felt like a kind of betrayal to feel so good that talking to him about all this stuff made him feel so good.

It is nothing special that my dad had a life separate from me, or that he kept secrets; this is something all parents do — straight ones, scrupulous ones — and it’s what we grapple with, to varying degrees of success, our whole lives. What’s unusual about my relationship to my dad’s life is not that there were things about it I didn’t know because he was gay. It’s that I was able to indulge the fantasy that he kept secrets only because he was gay, that if he had been able to be openly gay he would’ve shared his entire life with me and I always would have known exactly where I stood. At a certain point other people have to understand that parents keep secrets, that parents close parts of themselves off to their children, because that is what parents do.

What was I getting out of learning this now? In part, I wanted to hear him tell a story about his life in which he claimed some responsibility for the way things had turned out, rather than a story in which he was first in thrall to social mores and later in thrall to biological urges, in which the pretexts had shifted but the irresponsibility had remained. In which he’d never simply said, “I did it because I felt like it.” I wanted him to be a father who provided an example of how to live a life that he could describe as more than just a series of obligations to others, a life in which he did more than just hurt others under the cover of conflicting obligations. We follow St. James to the end of the world, and follow Kōbō Daishi in his path around that horrible island, because we want to associate ourselves with their absurd decisiveness. We want to inherit from them the ability to make our own absurd decisions, even when that means taking the damn train to the karaoke party. But we also want to know that when people get hurt it’s because they had to be hurt. We also want to be reassured that the eight innocent sons of Emon Saburō had to die in order for justice to reign. That the promises he made had to be broken, that he could not possibly have done what he said he was going to do.

This longing for his decisiveness helped explain my preoccupation with the history of his sexuality. There are very few examples in modern adult life of the successful instantaneous transformation, the switch that is flicked to make everything new — the fantasy of the transformative arrival in Santiago — but the example of coming out is one of them. Which I think is why I’d for so long kept such careful tabs on what story he was telling whom when: I wanted to nail down the moment of his coming out, with the hope that if I could pinpoint that transformation I could . . . I don’t know what I could do, I would just feel better, would be able to look to him as a model of resolve. I wanted to identify the moment that he decided to live for himself despite the costs involved. I wanted to know where he stood.

I wanted him to have been able to say, “I did this because I felt like it.” I wanted that example. But I didn’t want him to stop saying, “I did it because I had to.” I wanted that example too. It is an intolerable conflict to want your father to have been resolute and unapologetic and also need him to have not hurt you, to want to take nothing personally and everything personally.

What I was finally coming to understand here was that there was no such moment, no grand gesture of repudiation, no final grace, no scene of coming through the Wall, nothing you can do now that makes all future cost considerations fall away, no way to know what you might regret. There was just a long muddle in which he’d had terribly conflicting desires and had been doing his best to resolve them. I still do not believe he’s ever reckoned with the costs — or perhaps he’s reckoned with the costs he paid, but not the costs borne by others. But in Uman I accepted, in a way that felt new, that he had been in a crisis, and that he had also been doing what he wanted.

I’d drawn exactly the wrong lesson from his surfeit of contradictory stories. I thought it was just his standard obfuscation. But it was just his ongoing and incomplete attempt to tell a story about his life that made everything make sense.

There is no such thing as knowing, once and for all, where you stand with someone. Life has no fixed points. But pilgrimage does; that is the point. And the fixed points of a pilgrimage allow people to exist for each other in motion. There is no such thing as coming out.

In Tokyo, three months later, we’ll be having a great time — a really remarkable time — at Thanksgiving dinner and I’ll ask Brett what he thinks about the idea of coming out.

“I’m 48,” he’ll say, “and I’ve been in the process of coming out for 30 years.”

From “A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, to be published on May 12, 2012, by Riverhead Books. Reprinted by arrangement with the author.

“I think every parent has to step back and say, ‘I have an equal chance that any child I bear will be heterosexual or homosexual,” says Paul V., who created the Born This Way blog as a showcase for photographs and stories of growing up gay — and whose book based upon it comes out later this year.

A compelling argument for the persistence of identity, Born This Way is a powerhouse testimonial in words and images. “I knew I liked women at the age of five,” writes one woman. A photo at age 6 is accompanied by the words, “Though I didn’t really understand it then, I was attracted to Superman.” Another contributor writes, “I think I first realized I was gay around 3 or 4, but I didn’t know it was called being gay.”

Though Paul says he created the site for gay men and women to share their stories, it has also attracted a sizable — and different — audience that he hadn’t predicted. “Most of the emails off the blog have been from parents who say, ‘I see some of these signs in my own child,’ and they don’t know how to bring it up,” he says. “I tell them, just address the topic. Tell your children, ‘You can talk to me about anything because I love you.’ It’s not taboo and it’s not dirty and it’s not shameful. These attractions and these innate feelings you can’t describe — every kid goes through their own version of them. I think the big mistake these anti-gay people make is to confuse emotions and feelings with sexuality.”

When we conflate identity strictly with sex, we make the error of postponing having conversations about sexual orientation. We run the risk of not equipping all our children with the vocabulary for their feelings, and not preparing them for the social storms of middle and high school. When that happens, we wind up losing more children like Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, a straight-identified kid who was bullied and taunted with gay slurs. He killed himself in 2009, before his 12th birthday.

You’d think that in a world where kids now have far more opportunities to see both gay and straight characters and images, when your daughter is likely having play dates with a classmate with two dads, the notion that a child might be gay wouldn’t be so strange or confusing. Yet heterosexuality is still very much the expected course. From before birth, kids are jokingly paired off in future prom dates; they still get more than their share of princesses marrying handsome princes and swashbuckling pirates saving ladies in distress. If you’re looking for indoctrination, I think the straights have that one sewn up.

Lauren, who grew up gay in Kentucky in the late 1980s, says, “One of the things that makes it hard on very young gay children is that parents have a tendency to unintentionally force this very straight narrative on them, and to do so even in the face of evidence that said children might not be straight. I was mostly just called a tomboy, and it was assumed I’d grow up and get over it.” She advises, “The best things parents can do for both their straight and gay children is just not to presume anything about their kid’s sexuality — and to admit that, even early on, your kid has one. Talk openly — and casually! — about gay people. Then, years later, if they realize they’re gay, they can just be like, ‘Hey guess what? I’m gay!’ and their parents can be all, ‘Cool!’ and they won’t build it up in their heads as some arduous, difficult task.”

Furthermore, when they have those conversations with their children, parents need to respect what their kids tell them. Amelia, who has been writing about her parenting experience since her son began insisting that “Glee’s” Blaine was his boyfriend, says, “I think people are more dismissive of it than anything else. Like, ‘Oh, whatever, he’s 7. He doesn’t know.’ I say, this is my child. His feelings are serious to me. What’s important is that this is who he sees himself to be, and the last thing he needs is for us to give him the idea that he should be someone else.” She tells parents, “The more we take away that stigma and fear and hate, the more and more of those young people who know they are gay are going to talk about it. I get that it’s really frickin’ unusual to have a 7-year-old who identifies as gay. But I can’t help but think this is the tip of the iceberg.”

I agree with her. This year, when my elder daughter Lucy started middle school, she promptly formed a close friendship with a gay classmate. Fortunately, she’s in a school that has an active anti-bullying curriculum and LGBT resources for kids as young as sixth grade, but it’s still middle school. It’s challenging for anybody, let alone an 11-year-old child who’s out.

The other boys, Lucy says, horse around freely with each other or just can walk together in the halls. But when her friend tries to jump in, the kids are quick to speculate on his imagined hidden agenda. “I feel like that’s not fair,” she says. “Nobody makes a big deal about who I hang around with.” She adds, “Some of the kids are big jerks to him because they’re already big jerks anyway. Having one thing to be mean about and focus on makes it easier for them.” But it doesn’t change her friend. “He knows who he is,” Lucy says. That’s something that any uncomfortable classmates will just have to get used to.

All kids develop at their own paces, and that includes how they develop in their awareness of orientation. Not every 7-year-old is solid in his gayness or straightness. But what all of us as parents and educators need to do is create space in our children’s lives to let them come to their own understanding of themselves. Amelia says, “We need to start parenting equal rights. We need to ask, what kind of message am I sending my kids — and is that message harmful? I get letters all the time from people saying, ‘My dad didn’t mean to be awful.’” She reminds parents, “People have been trying to make gay kids straight for a long time and it hasn’t been working.”

It’s a sentiment that Paul echoes. “I grew up in a completely heterosexual society,” he says, “and it didn’t take. You can believe what you want, but when you’ve got 600 people on your blog telling you, ‘I knew when I was a child,’ why wouldn’t you believe them?” He adds, “Can you imagine how great and better the world will be when every kid is nurtured young, and isn’t quashed until he’s 19?”

If we can get past the idea that being gay is something you become one day because you did or didn’t play football or dress-up, and past the idea that sexual orientation equals sex, we can conquer fear and homophobia. We can stop freaking out and trying to change individuals. We can grasp that when we’re loving and accepting of all people, we’re including children in that number. And children need all the love and acceptance we can give them. As Amelia explains, “Parenting is something you choose. Being gay isn’t.” Then she breaks it all down to its most basic, essential element. “This is our kid,” she says of her 7-year-old gay son. “Whoever he is, he’s awesome.”

Bullying, unfortunately, was a part of the warp and weave of my childhood. I grew up in northern Minnesota in the ’70s, where my Asian family was the only color in a sea of Scandinavians. When I was in second grade, a crew-cutted boy shoved me against some metal monkey bars, cracking the back of my head open.

But the most difficult time came when I entered junior high. I was underweight, bookish, bespectacled. Gym class was a convergence of all my anxieties. The other girls were tall with pretty hair that feathered and training bras, while I had no breasts and not even an undershirt for camouflage underneath the one-piece uniforms that looked like a baby’s onesie.

Mary was the instigator. She was not particularly popular or athletic. She had that kind of genericism that I would have killed for — she was just like everybody else.

One day in the locker room, Mary leapt out in front of me and started to sing, “ching-ching-a-ling” while doing some kind of interpretive dance that involved pulling the lids of her eyes into slits. Her friend Terry (also not her real name) echoed her taunts. I had a feeling this was not the end of it — and it wasn’t.

My Asian parents valued nonconfrontation over everything. When I vaguely hinted at this assault that waited for me daily (or, at least as it seemed at the time), they suggested I stay quiet and concentrate on my schoolwork. Some people didn’t know how to deal with minorities, they said. One day, this would pass, and I would leave Hibbing behind for an Ivy League school, and everything would be all right. That might have been good advice for the long term, but in the meantime, the ching-ching-a-ling routine continued, my only solace being that it often fell flat.

And then one day, two “tough” girls brought the whole thing to an end. They spoke quietly to Mary and Terry, who then approached me, ashy-faced, and each muttered, “I’m sorry, I won’t ever do it again.”

Now in my 40s, enter the brave new world of Facebook. Like many, I receive requests from classmates I barely knew — including this: Mary the Bully wants to be friends! I deleted the request and didn’t think about it. But after a few months, another request would appear. Then another.

It occurred to me that maybe Mary had read one of my novels, including one, in which a Korean American girl growing up in Minnesota — surprise, surprise — suffers through a “ching-ching-a-ling” song (and in the novel, at least, the protagonist manages to fight back). There was a mention of my novel in People, and classmates were definitely reading it. But while people like my piano teacher wrote tearful letters (“I had no idea this was going on”), the apologies I thought I might receive never arrived. The closest thing to an apology: “I didn’t know why you let it bother you so much, people were just kidding.”

With Mary’s enthusiastic friending — she also went to the trouble to find and join my Facebook author page — I thought, maybe the novel had made her more reflective, and now as adults it would be possible to talk about what happened. I accepted her friend request, only to discover she just liked to write things about Sarah Palin on my wall. But after more time passed, I thought this was a unique opportunity to do something I never had the courage to do when I was younger. I wanted to try one last time to understand my bully.

Mary lives in Oregon now and is married with an assortment of children, stepchildren and grandchildren. She agreed to talk with me, and we had an hour-long conversation on Skype.

When I asked her why she had tormented me for so long in junior high, she said she didn’t remember the specific incident nor its duration. In a rush, she told me she had “blacked out” most memories of junior high because her parents had gotten divorced and she was having a hard time; therefore, she didn’t have any memories of me, specifically. In fact, she went on, she was bullied: Right before entering junior high, she’d moved among the town’s three elementary schools where “people were mean” to her, particularly at her last elementary school, where “the bitches” made her life miserable.  She added that she had older brothers who beat her up all the time. At one point, I almost wanted to say plaintively, “But what about my being bullied?”

The more I tried to pin her down about the “ching-ching-a-ling” routine, though, the more she sought cover.

“I’m a good person, I’m compassionate,” she said. She never came out and said, “I didn’t do it,” or “You’re crazy.” Instead, she said, “I’m not a racist.” And, “I don’t see color.” She went on to postulate that if she did do that routine, it wasn’t an expression of racism, it was more out of a desperate need to get laughs. “And it was at your expense,” she admitted. “I tried to be nice to all these other girls and they weren’t nice back to me. All I wanted to do was fit in.” She started crying. She apologized. I suggested she didn’t need to apologize for something she can’t remember doing.  We said goodbye. Cordially, I thought.

There is a quote attributed to Plato and/or Philo of Alexandria — “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” — that is probably anachronistic to both, but still useful. Hearing about what was going on in Mary’s life at the time made me open to the possibility that she wasn’t motivated by racism, or, at least, that wasn’t the primary motivation. I believed her: She was desperate to get laughs from our peers, and my being Asian conveniently sat right in front of her, and my 85-pound weakling demeanor made it all the more attractive.

But that’s certainly not how the seventh-grade me perceived it. It has been disturbing to read that a government study found that Asian Americans endure the most bullying in school of all ethnic groups: 54 percent of Asian American teens compared with 38 percent of blacks, 34 percent of Latinos, 31 percent of whites. This study was released last October, the same month U.S. Army Pvt. Danny Chen was dragged from his bed on a base in Afghanistan and forced to crawl on the ground while his fellow soldiers threw rocks at him while yelling ethnic slurs.

Hours later, Danny Chen shot himself. His journal read, “Everyone here jokingly makes fun of me for being Asian.”

One lingering effect of this bullying was that for years afterward, I disavowed all things Asian that could in any way be connected to me; I even turned away from the Seoul Olympics, refusing to watch any non-event footage, puzzling my college boyfriend who thought I might at least want to watch a cultural spectacle with him. Living in New York and meeting other Korean and Asian American friends who did not deny or avoid their ethnicity helped me get over my self-loathing, as did a year I spent living in Asia.

But even now, as a fairly composed adult, when I read about bullying, particularly racial bullying, I am back in seventh grade with Mary, while she pleads amnesia, telling me: “Honestly, my first memories of you aren’t until high school.”

The day after we spoke, Mary further muddied the water by sending me a long email that was at once apologetic, evasive, ambiguous, contradictory, ashamed, conciliatory:

Again, I can only say that if I did do those things you say I did, I am truly sorry. I was a dumb, insecure preteen who was trying to fit in and in doing so I hurt you, and I am very sorry. I cannot change the past, or your memory of what may or may not have happened.

Followed by,

What I am equally ashamed about is that during the course of that call, my 26 year old daughter was in the other room listening to the entire conversation. Imagine the shame of having your child hear these terrible accusations, of which, she does not believe. Thank goodness.

Then she closed with this:

Its’ [sic] not always about you being Asian. You need to understand that the world is not against you because your [sic] Asian…I will continue to be the woman I am, I am kind, considerate, caring, compassionate & loving. I am a good mother and grandmother. I raised my children to be compassionate, caring and good stewards of our environment.

It occurred to me that she could indeed be a good steward of the environment and still be the girl who made my life a living hell in junior high. Don’t we all recast our memories to bolster the stories we tell ourselves, about who we are? My friend who also grew up Asian in the Midwest had an unforgettable experience of having her face slammed into a brick wall, breaking a bunch of her teeth, but the perpetrator now tells people, oh, no, she was trying to help by putting a hand on her back to stop her face from hitting the wall. Perhaps she honestly believes it. Mary told me many times she is not a racist but that Terry, well, she never liked minorities too much; what was her point revealing that? I could whine that what I hoped would be a spiritual exercise ended up an unproductive mobius-loop meditation on the fungibility of memory.

Another possibility, however, is that while that experience colored my life, it wasn’t a big deal to her, maybe it even fell in the category of affectionate “teasing” and was thus unworthy of remembering; it has been 30 years. Another friend says she receives Facebook friend requests all the time from mean girls who singled her out; clearly, to them, their behavior was not a big deal. That’s the insidious underside to this: What may be unremarkable, forgettable, deniable (“I was just joking!”) for one person can cause wounds that never fully heal in another.

There was a girl, let’s call her Heather, who came to our high school senior year. She, like me, was bookish and the subject of unkind remarks about her looks, and, as we were all graduating in a few months, no one bothered to befriend her. At least she was brilliant in physics class, and I presumed in a few short months she’d be out and on to some great career as a rocket scientist.

She came to a book signing I had in Minneapolis, and at first I didn’t recognize her. She was disheveled, with at least three equally disheveled children in tow. We had a short, uncomfortable chat where she informed me she was a single mother on welfare (and possibly drugs?). Right before she left, she asked, in a voice full of pain: “How did you do it? How did you get past it?”

I didn’t know what to say. I was lucky?  The most damaging part of being bullied is the awful feeling of being alone. Maybe what saved me was that I wasn’t alone. In seventh grade I had the tough girls who stood up for me. By high school, I had teachers, friends and writing to carry me through. Writing nonfiction helped me figure out the world, fiction allowed me to revisit these memories, examine them as an outside observer, and to alchemize them into art, something I was proud to own. My earliest novels were young adult and middle grade novels, set in junior high and high school, and perhaps they were a message-in-a-bottle to the next generation of kids: You are not alone.

Ironically, while I was reading Mary’s long, conflicted, seemingly heartfelt note to me, she was composing a different kind of screed on Facebook — one that I was blocked from, but calling out an “Asian” from school, prompting a few helpful classmates to forward it to me. Her blacked-out memories of me apparently had been miraculously revived:

I’m tired and weary of people making everything about their race. Guess what, if you perceive people as mean to you solely due to your race, maybe they just don’t like you as a person? Perhaps they don’t give a rats [sic] ass what your race is…maybe your [sic] just a bitch, with a giant chip on your shoulder!!

At least, I don’t have to worry about defriending her on Facebook again. Maybe Judy was right. This was a can of worms I might have been better to leave alone.