Who was Helen Keller?
If you are over the age of thirty, you probably learned about her in middle school history. The blind and deaf girl who, at the turn of the century, with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan, overcame impossible odds to learn not only to communicate with those around her through sign language, but to read and write through braille as well. She stands as one of the most inspirational figures of the twentieth century.
But do your teenagers know who she is? Go ask them, come back, and finish reading.
Chances are, your teenager knows who Helen Keller is; however, they likely didn’t meet her on the pages of a history book. They probably met her on TikTok. My teenage girls (18 & 15) did, in fact, meet Helen Keller in homeschool history class. My girls don’t even have TikTok, and yet, they, too, were introduced to a version of Helen Keller my fellow Gen Xers wouldn’t recognize.
According to TikTok lore, Helen Keller did in fact exist – she just didn’t live up to the character portrayed in The Miracle Worker. I’ve talked to multiple teenagers, and they all tell me the same thing: no one who was deaf and blind could do what she did. They simply don’t believe it’s true.
I applaud these teens for thinking critically and developing their own thoughts. But eyewitness accounts and primary source documents, the gold standard for historical data, stand in direct contradiction to their collective conclusion.
Why do teenagers believe strangers on TikTok over their parents or history books? As parents, we should be concerned with how quickly seeds of doubt can sway a generation. What if someone said that there’s no way a human could rise from the dead? Yes, maybe he lived and was a good person, but there’s no way someone could do what He claimed He did.
It is the same logic, and it is a dangerous path. Asking your kid if they believe in Helen Keller is just a litmus test to see who they consider credible sources of information. We can’t make our kids believe anything. It is not our job to try to force them or shame them into a set of beliefs, but it is our job as parents to first know truth ourselves and help present it in a compelling way to our kids. Kids ask questions like they are getting paid to be investigative journalists. We owe them answers to the straightforward questions of early childhood to the deeper, more substantive questions of young adulthood.
We have to build credibility with them from a young age by asking questions and doing whatever it takes to answer theirs. We need to guard the voices they are listening to because ideas are powerful. Powerful enough to erase an icon of the twentieth century from the history books.