What Do We Teach Our Kids About God?
giving them the good stuff while protecting them from harm
I took my oldest to church for the first time at six days old. We were regular churchgoers until he was five before stopping abruptly. As I started to face up to my own religious trauma, church was too triggering. I couldn’t manage my own mental health there while also parenting, though I did feel guilty for taking church away from them. Not that my kids seemed to mind! But I worried that they were missing out on potential friendships and on developing a good ethical framework. As they’ve gotten older, the question has remained: what does it look like to teach your kids about spirituality when you, the parent, are uncertain about it?
I’ve had the opportunity to pick a lot of brains on this topic. Responses tend to fall into three different categories:
Let kids figure out spirituality for themselves. At first, I was taken with this child-led approach. It’s certainly good for kids to follow their curiosity and learn to listen to their intuition. But there are also problems. As one friend pointed out, there’s no other area of life where we leave kids to their own devices to figure things out sans guidance. Imagine saying, “she’ll figure out her own method of long division when she feels like it,” or “we’re letting them discover table manners for themselves.”
Another friend who was raised in laissez-faire spirituality worries that a lack of parental guidance around the topic left him vulnerable to fundamentalists when he reached adolescence. When people around you are wishy-washy on a topic, a voice of certainty can be very appealing, even if it’s wrong.
Delegate their spiritual development to church. This is a lot less work for parents, which is definitely a bonus! There’s a reason that churches have staff, volunteers, and professionally developed curriculum to teach kids about God, because IT’S A LOT OF WORK. Teaching kids about morality or spirituality is probably very far down a very long list of most parents’ priorities. But entrusting this aspect of your kid’s upbringing to someone you might not know very well can have its downsides. Even in progressive churches, you might get a Sunday School teacher with fundamentalist leanings who will confuse, shame, or scare your kid. That’s not to say that hearing about Hell once from a Sunday School teacher is going to traumatize your kid, but if your kid is learning things you disagree with, you’ll want to act as a counterweight, which you might not know about unless you’re really clued in to what they’re learning.
The German Approach. In Germany (where I lived for a few years) school children have a mandatory class in either religion or ethics. I was pretty shocked by this, coming from the land of lines between church and state. But other countries do things differently, and you might imagine that if you were going through a longstanding national reckoning about ordinary citizens committing genocide, (as our country ought to but hasn’t) you might want to make sure your future citizens are exposed to various frameworks for understanding morality.
Of course, I don’t live in Germany anymore, and my kids’ public schools, while great, don’t have ethics or religion classes. (Though I do like their social-emotional learning framework!) So this becomes a DIY approach. You already know what the cons of that: it’s a lot of work, and it requires you to have a plan of some sort. That can be a tall order if you’re deconstructing or processing your religious trauma. Earlier on in my journey, I could barely face my own spirituality, let alone think of what I’d like to teach my kids about it. For years the Bible felt too triggering to read.
Another challenge with this approach: what if you’re not sure what you believe? Or what if you and your coparent believe different things? Honesty is the best policy here—think less about telling your children what to believe and more about encouraging them to reflect and ask questions. If you are Christian-ish and your partner no longer believes, what are the areas you can agree on? My husband and I decided that it would be good for our kids to learn some basic Bible stories and some moral philosophy. For the philosophy part, we’re watching The Good Place, which my 8- and 11-year-olds don’t always understand, but they enjoy, and it gives us a good starting point for talking about morality. Our goal is to dedicate our nightly read aloud time to something moral/spiritual once a week. It doesn’t always happen, but it’s something.
When it came to reading the Bible, I decided to start with the low-hanging fruit. What are the moral lessons or Bible stories I felt unreservedly good about? For me, it was the golden rule, nonviolence/turning the other cheek, and forgiveness. That gave us a jumping off point. Other lessons came to mind based on things we read or saw in the news.
If you want to try a more DIY approach here are some tips I wish I’d known before getting started:
asking your kids questions is more important than telling them what to believe. When they give an opinion, ask “Why?” or “How did you make that decision?”
are there certain holidays (religious or otherwise) you feel drawn towards that you can celebrate together? MLK Day always sparks a lot of discussion round here. Short-term periods like Lent or Advent can be a good time for a family project, like discussing a book or movie
leaving a newspaper lying around is great fodder for discussions about morality. So is reading books together. Nothing got my kids as fired up about right and wrong as Draco Malfoy.
try not to be shocked if they make jokes or have opinions that would’ve gotten you in trouble as a kid. Their baggage is different than your baggage! Ask questions or offer a counter argument, but don’t judgee them for thinking differently.
If you’re reading the Bible and your kids ask, “did this really happen?” I like Brian McLaren’s approach. To paraphrase, he imagines telling a kid, “Some stories are make-believe, some really happened, and some are in-between.” As my kids have become more interested in mythology, it’s helped us talk through different types of stories and what they mean to different people.
Actions speak louder than words. If you’re telling your kids one thing while doing the other, they will copy your actions, not your words. Kids are amazing bullshit detectors, especially as they grow into adolescence.
I’m still relatively new to this journey of teaching my kids about spirituality, so I’d love to hear from you on this topic. What, if anything, do you teach your kids about God? What form does it take or not? Do you think explicit instruction time is necessary? Are there any writers or podcasters I should be following on this topic? Let me know in the comments.
Programming note: I will be out of town next week, so your next Heretic Hereafter will be coming in two weeks.
Oh man - this is a tough one. My kids are 14, 12, 10, 8 and 5, and we stopped going to church when my oldest was 11. We were all in, pastors for five years at one point, almost missionaries kind of all in.
For now, I have landed on a “Jesus’s core messages rocked but I don’t believe in atonement theology anymore, agnostic theist” kind of place. My husband I think is likely still Christian, but more progressive/universalist.
My kids kind of watched me deconstruct. They heard my rants, for better or for worse. They know why Im still angry at the church - I was taught to spank anytime kids disobeyed and to be anti-LGBTQ. The judgment, the anti-trans, end times theology, climate change doesn’t matter cuz we’re leaving, the “you can’t curse but you must vote for Trump” kind of bs. I saw family relationships strained and ruined because one party kept evangelizing when the other was an atheist. I no longer believe in hell (eternal conscious torment). I’ve had to undo a lot of harmful theology in front of my older kids.
We experienced a grandparent death recently, and I’ve had to say things like “I’m not sure heaven is real, but I do hope we get to see Grandpa again.” I have said emphatically that I don’t believe hell is real anymore, and my 11 year old said it gave him a lot of peace because even after “accepting Jesus” and getting baptized, he was scared about going to hell.
We talk a lot about what it means to be a good human, especially since we have seen so so many not good human behavior from Christians. And a lot of good behavior from atheists. My older two told me they think they’re agnostic atheists, which is fine. I did tell them I think you can be a atheist and still respect the heck out of Jesus’s basic life principles (love others, help the poor, defend the marginalized, stand up to religious bs).
I care a lot more about raising good humans who know themselves really well and won’t be swayed by someone trying to give them meaning (I was a people pleasing, follow the Jesus crowd, didn’t know herself type - I was raised with authoritarian Dobson parenting 😉).
Whew, that was long-winded. Hope this helps someone.
This one is really tricky. I think the best is a modification of option 1, let them figure it out for themselves but give them some guidance from a good liberal, far from evangelical church. Beliefs are never forced upon children in Sunday school and there are no "fire and brimstone" teachings. After that they are pretty well-equipped on spiritual matters, learn to reflect on the existence or absence of God(s), and the end result is hopefully a turning away from extremist evangelical culture.