Kids and Religion
When the holidays come, we feel obliged to make that once seasonal pilgrimage to our supposed church/synagogue/temple. That’s when we’re reminded that another year has passed, and gulp, weren’t we supposed to be doing something about our children’s religious education?
Let’s face it’a lot of young families don’t do ‘religion’ anymore for a lot of different reasons. There has been a decline in both attendance and membership at churches and other places of worship over the last decade. This means a growing number of kids have no sense of affiliation with a faith or a faith community at all.
Extremists argue both sides’some stating that parents who don’t bring faith to their children’s upbringing should be deemed ‘negligent.’ At the polar end, some hold the opinion that parents who force their faith on their impressionable child are being abusive, comparing it to mind control and brainwashing.
Many of the world religions have core themes taught through different accounts of history and story narratives but virtually every religion has a version of ‘the golden rule’ whether it is Christianity’s ‘In everything, do onto others as you would have done unto you, for this is the law and the prophets’ or Buddhism’s ‘Treat not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.’
Regardless of our individual views, we have to at least teach children to be tolerant of religious differences. Our society is multicultural and diverse. Parents of two different religious backgrounds can model how to live with this difference. Bottom line: don’t fight about how to love!
So we can’t leave our children’s moral and ethical development to chance. Have you got a plan at all? If not’work on one.
However you spend the holidays’Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Diwali, Kwanza and more!
