Trust Your Gut

The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to the publication to stay up-to-date on Alvaro’s writing.

If you are a regular reader of this publication, or if you think deeply about education and formation, then you know that theoretical musings can take you only so far. Books on parenting and treatises on education are good and helpful—at least, I hope so, given my own writing and speaking on these topics—but as someone whose main work remains the imperfect business of walking with real parents of real boys, I know firsthand a truth that many books can obscure: raising boys is an art, not a science.

Frameworks and formulae can give us helpful heuristics, but experienced parents know that reality is always more complex than rigid paradigms can capture. There are no universal functions for plug-and-chug parenting. There are no fixed rules that every parent must follow.

There are principles, there is common sense, and there is God’s guiding grace.

One such principle—a principle that itself resists being reduced to an algorithm—is the importance of following your gut.

Thinking without Thinking

Following your gut proves helpful in a wide variety of cases. Indeed, Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author of Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, argues that this sort of intuitive thinking can often be just as good as, or even better than, the slow, analytical, articulated reasoning we tend to assume is best.

I agree with Gladwell. Whether we attribute these intuitive decisions to instinct or experience—or, more likely, a mixture of both—we can make good, even positively life-shaping choices based on how we feel about a situation. There are important caveats to this, of course, but the principle generally holds. Gladwell uses numerous studies of ER doctors, firefighters, marriage counselors, and speed daters to illustrate the way that gut instinct and pattern recognition are often better predictors of success than exhaustive research.

Psychologist John Gottman is a powerful example of this sort of blink-of-the-eye judgment in action. Gottman can watch a married couple talk for as little as fifteen minutes and predict with 90 percent accuracy whether they will still be married fifteen years later. He does this by “thin-slicing” their emotional interaction—reading micro-expressions, tone of voice, and subtle patterns such as contempt, defensiveness, or stonewalling. As Gladwell explains, thin-slicing is “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.”

Though we may never reach Gottman-level accuracy in foretelling destinies, we all have the ability to make reliable judgments in everyday situations. When it comes to parenting, you may not be an expert doctor, therapist, or educator, but you are an expert in your own son. You should, then, trust your gut.

How and When to Follow Your Gut

Two practical questions naturally arise:

1. How do you know your gut will be right?
2. How do you know what your gut is telling you?

Your gut is right when it is well calibrated. Here are three essential ways to calibrate your parenting instincts:

1. Check in with your spouse early and often. Those conversations help you corroborate, correct, clarify, and articulate what your gut is telling you. Over time, you will develop a strong trust in your intuitive reactions—but never close yourself off to checking them, especially when emotions are running high. Anger, frustration, and disappointment can cloud not only our analytic reasoning but our intuition as well.
2. Cultivate a life of virtue. Virtue guards against emotions that distort our perception of reality. The more virtuous our lives, the more clearly we see our sons—their strengths and their weaknesses—and the more sensitively we perceive their behavior. This sensitivity allows us to respond quickly and correctly to their needs.
3. Pray daily for parental wisdom. God wants to grant it; all you need to do is ask. Prayer is where common sense and grace meet, and from that meeting comes sound parental judgment.

With a well calibrated gut, the next question is simpler: What does it mean to follow your gut? It means: if you sense something, do something. In deciding when and how to follow your gut, I recommend following these two principles:

1. Respond immediately if you need to stop immediate harm. 
2. Wait to respond if there is no immediate harm. 

Sometimes your son will say or do something that rubs you the wrong way. Maybe it’s obvious—like a boy rolling his eyes at you. Maybe it’s subtle—like taking an extra second to respond to your call for help with some chores. In both cases, your gut signals that something is off, and that behavior needs correction.

But if no immediate harm is occurring, the response doesn’t have to happen on the spot. If you notice the eye-roll, and if the siblings do too, then the boy must be corrected right away—otherwise his behavior plus your inaction may communicate the wrong message to him and the other children. But if the slow reaction to being called goes unnoticed, you can wait until later that day or the next. This gives you time to choose the right words and the most effective manner to deliver the message. It also allows you to parent from a place of peace, not emotion, allowing the message to land more powerfully. 

Even when you must stop a behavior right away, you do not need to offer a full explanation of it in the moment. It is perfectly fine to say, “We’ll talk about this later.” Again, that pause gives you time to think, and ensures the subsequent conversation will be more fruitful.

Following your gut is not irrational parenting. At its best, following your gut is following a deeply ingrained rationality. It is the cultivated ability to feel what the situation requires. Star Trek’s Dr. Spock was an excellent first officer for dangerous voyages—but he would make a terrible father because he is too calculating. He lacks intuition. He would not know how to follow his gut.