Raising a child as an atheist

[Patrick Degan]

Yeah, and I bet a lot of other parents will parade around his front door with signs claiming he's the antichrist

He lives in Canada, not Jesustan.

[Civil War Man]

Yeah, and I bet a lot of other parents will parade around his front door with signs claiming he's the antichrist

He lives in Canada, not Jesustan.

Canada is not immune. Hell, Mike's told stories on this very site regarding attitudes held towards his marriage by Canadians who are just as narrow-minded as the fundamentalists in the US.

[SCRawl]

Yeah, and I bet a lot of other parents will parade around his front door with signs claiming he's the antichrist

He lives in Canada, not Jesustan.

Canada is not immune. Hell, Mike's told stories on this very site regarding attitudes held towards his marriage by Canadians who are just as narrow-minded as the fundamentalists in the US.

Yeah, but that was back in the sticks. Things are different in the big smoke.

[Aaron]

Yeah, but that was back in the sticks. Things are different in the big smoke.

I live in the most ass-backwards, poor and generally racist county in Ontario and the most people due to me is mutter. Of course I also happen to be white and have a Vets plate.

[Simon_Jester]

There is comfort to be found in science. Take space-time equivalence, since time is really just another spatial dimension we're all really 4th dimensional objects (possibly more) that exist eternally. Also, since a year is equal to just over 10 centimeters when your kid asks where grandma is, you can truthfully answer that she's not all that far away at all.

I'm sorry, but you just used the speed of light upside-down. It's three hundred million meters per second, not three hundred million seconds per meter. Insofar as your explanation makes sense*, a year is equivalent to a light-year, not four inches.

*I don't think that's very far, but I'll stipulate your assumptions about metaphysics for the sake of keeping things short.
_________

So, how to balance the truth and fairy tales? I remember how much joy meeting Santa Claus had given me when I was a kid and what a magical time Christmas was. But at the same time I will not let my child to be subjugated and scared by concepts like eternal damnation and hellish brimstone that are prepared for us by our "everloving, merciful God".

I suggest you pick and choose which tales to tell.

Santa Claus is a pretty safe bet, because every child eventually finds out that there is no such thing as Santa Claus. Indeed, if you're trying to raise an atheist child, you might consider that "there is no Santa Claus" moment to be productive.

You're not going to be able to convince a three year old to avoid magical thinking, because a three year old child doesn't have enough experience to know what qualifies as magic. Why is "Santa Claus" magic when "electricity" isn't? You and I know, but little Timmy is going to have some trouble with the idea.

So if you're trying to suppress magical thinking as far as possible, then I think you're best off channelizing it in directions where it won't carry over into the child's rationalist years.

[Oskuro]

He lives in Canada, not Jesustan.

Woah, way to overreact, I was kidding. Although it is a bit scary that such a comment might be considered serious.

The really serious part about my comment is that views such as those held by many on this board regarding education will be decried by many, through different media (not necessarily banner-toting demonstrations), while zealotish bullcrap will not be critcized because... I don't know, tradition? General lack of gust in the media to tackle religion?

This of course might have an impact when educating children, it can be hard for them to have everyone tell them their parents are wrong. I know my parents' decision not to baptize me or my brother still gets them some amount of flakk today, even from people who never met them and are hearing the anecdote from me.

[Patrick Degan]

So, how to balance the truth and fairy tales? I remember how much joy meeting Santa Claus had given me when I was a kid and what a magical time Christmas was. But at the same time I will not let my child to be subjugated and scared by concepts like eternal damnation and hellish brimstone that are prepared for us by our "everloving, merciful God".

If your child asks about whether God is real or not, you could try saying that he's as real as Santa Claus. When your child figures out Santa's not real, he may apply that same reasoning as far as the Invisible Cloud-Being goes.

[SCRawl]

He lives in Canada, not Jesustan.

Woah, way to overreact, I was kidding. Although it is a bit scary that such a comment might be considered serious.

While I might have wished to have made that post, the one you want to wink at is actually Patrick.

This of course might have an impact when educating children, it can be hard for them to have everyone tell them their parents are wrong. I know my parents' decision not to baptize me or my brother still gets them some amount of flakk today, even from people who never met them and are hearing the anecdote from me.

Unless you really care about remaining in the good graces of those who are delivering the flak, you have my permission to tell them to please fuck off. Your personal religious convictions, or those of your parents for that matter, are private, and not open to public scrutiny. I've never understood why anyone thinks that some other person's religious background ought to be their concern.

[Oskuro]

Woops, quoting misshap, but the wink was aimed at the whole discussion.

I've never understood why anyone thinks that some other person's religious background ought to be their concern.

Their number 1 excuse is that by being different, you're subjecting your children to an unfair situation. Same excuse used aganist homosexual marriage really.
I think the thing is, as has been commented in this thread, that to them being raised Catholic is the norm, they see nothing wrong with it, and can't understand why someone would not do it (just like those self-proclaimed atheists that enroll their children in religious camps because they did it at their age).

[Cairber]

I like that it was pointed out that it is easy to say you will 'just tell them the hard truth' but that that is actually very difficult in practice. This has been my experience when trying to decide how to talk about something like death. My oldest is four and recently she has experienced a lot of different kinds of death around her: the flower she planted died, she found a dead bird in our back yard, I had to stop next to the body of a dead deer on the thruway because of traffic, and we are also slowly preparing her for the coming death of her great grandfather who is end stage with pancreatic cancer.

We are going with the same angle that Darth talked about; that is, the 'recycling' of the body and circle of life type idea. It's still hard for her to understand and I don't think she sees it as a 'positive' thing, but that's fine by me.

On the other hand, one girl that she hangs out a lot is also 4 and asking about death. Her mom told me she tells her about heaven and it all being OK, being in a good place, God, seeing your family and all that. Yet her daughter is very upset and continues to worry about her own death. So the lies definitely are not a cure.

We also celebrate Christmas.

[Akhlut]

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do when my son asks about death. Best I can figure is "no one knows what happens, as everyone who has died hasn't come back to tell us what happens" and some sort of circle of life sort of thing.

Of course, since I'm still dealing with the terror of death, I can't think of a way to explain it to him that will eliminate it.

However, it might be a good jumping board for morality if it comes to it ('so that's why we should treat everyone nice, because we might only get one life and everyone should have it as nice as possible').

[Rye]

What are you going to say if your child figures out what death is at the age of 4, and is crying and saying "When I close my eyes, I won't even see black"? What will you say when your wife looks at you with pleading eyes and says "what do we tell him?"

I'd say it's like sleep or the time before he was born. I have a really good memory of my life as a kid, and this was one way of looking at it that really demystified it. Normalising it and having a familiar, daily frame of reference made it much easier to deal with. It could also have the reverse reaction of making him deathly afraid of sleep, but I would hope not.

Interestingly enough, as a kid, I did also come up with the reincarnation/circle of life idea you and Mufasa have told your kids, and independently of the Christian religion of my school and peers.

[Twoyboy]

What are you going to say if your child figures out what death is at the age of 4, and is crying and saying "When I close my eyes, I won't even see black"? What will you say when your wife looks at you with pleading eyes and says "what do we tell him?"

Yeah, and my advice when this type of thing happens is, be careful what you say... your child will take everything literally. When my wife's grandmother died last year, Bella was a little upset. Being the only daughter of the only daughter of the only daughter, she was essentially the golden child. She had just turned 3 at the time and is almost 4 now, and when her great granny died, my wife told her she was a star now, so we could take her outside and she could find the brightest star in the sky and say goodnight to it each night.

(Side note, we did this for 2 reasons, firstly she already had a fascination for the stars and moon; and secondly because it was a bit of a compromise, as I'm an atheist, but my wife is a deist who believes in an afterlife.)

Now the problem is, she takes it literally and thinks that she can visit the stars (she wants to be an astronaut... awwww!) and see her again. I'm gonna have some explaining to do now when she's older.

Also, the bit about kids starting to understand death and getting freaked out... it's true. Bella knows the her great granny was sick for a long time and now when people go to hospital she thinks they might "go to the stars" and she gets visibly upset about it. The star thing is difficult, but I'm gald I didn't tell her we turn to dust or get eaten by worms or something.

So, how to balance the truth and fairy tales? I remember how much joy meeting Santa Claus had given me when I was a kid and what a magical time Christmas was. But at the same time I will not let my child to be subjugated and scared by concepts like eternal damnation and hellish brimstone that are prepared for us by our "everloving, merciful God".

If your child asks about whether God is real or not, you could try saying that he's as real as Santa Claus. When your child figures out Santa's not real, he may apply that same reasoning as far as the Invisible Cloud-Being goes.

My wife is a deist who calls herself a Christian (mostly because she doesn't really understand what a deist is, all of her notions of God come from Christianity but she doesn't really believe in salvation through Jesus, so she can't really count as one), my kids are going to a public school until year 5 when they'll go to a Uniting Church school (I've explained why in other threads), Bella's Godparents are both Catholic and Dylan's are both Christian, so I'm pretty sure they'll be exposed to a crap load of religion. However, one day they'll want to know why I don't believe in it all. I hope that when that happens I can give a good enough explanation that will arm them to make the decision themselves without me needing to tell them what is or isn't real. After all, I'm pretty sure I'm the only true atheist anywhere in my family, so even one positive atheist role model for my kids should be enough to educate them

[Darth Wong]

What are you going to say if your child figures out what death is at the age of 4, and is crying and saying "When I close my eyes, I won't even see black"? What will you say when your wife looks at you with pleading eyes and says "what do we tell him?"

I'd say it's like sleep or the time before he was born.

Did you even read what I wrote? When a kid says something like that, it means he's figured out precisely what you're saying, and he doesn't like it.

First parenting tip: actually listen to what the child says, instead of blindly assuming he's just like you and that whatever comforts you will necessarily comfort him. For fuck's sake.

[Cairber]

One day Anna woke up screaming and she told me "I had a story in my head and I couldn't stop the story." It was a rough few weeks after that; she was afraid to sleep, especially alone. In the second week, I made the mistake of trying to explain the length of time we had before our trip by saying "you will sleep two more times and then we will go" and she freaked out because of her sleeping fear at that time. So planning ahead what you are going to say sometimes just isn't going to work; I think if I had compared death to sleep during that period for her it would have been vary hard on her and extremely upsetting. Sometimes you just can't plan ahead; you just have to know your kids and listen and learn what worries and frightens them.

[Straha]

I was raised an inadvertent atheist by my parents, especially by my father. Whenever I had a question about something he'd answer it scientifically and explain it as best he could (I still remember him explaining relativity to me when I was young. He used the fireworks on the car example.) He never gave 'child' answers, always encouraged me to ask questions, and when he didn't want to answer questions he'd tell me to ask later or to go look it up myself (something I got in the habit of doing at a young age. I still remember learning what sex was by looking up 'Love' in the World Book encyclopedia and being directed to sex. ) I also remember being very annoyed when I got waffle answers, like when I asked why someone died at breakfast with my parents and my mother got very teary eyed and tried to start explaining death and I cut her off and said something like, "I don't mean that. I mean what made her die? Like a heart attack or blood loss?" Looking back on it I think I was six or seven at the time, and my mother was very nonplussed by that.

However, the crucial thing is to know your kid. My father could get away with telling me horrible things about death and war because he knew I could take it. e.g. He tells the story (and I can't remember this) that when I was three or four I took my class pet caterpillar home for the weekend, and it died. He saw I was looking at it sadly and came to tell me what had happened and started trying to explain death to me. I looked up at him and said "I know, dad." And drew my finger across my throat making a choking sound, but explain that I was sad that it had died before it could turn into a butterfly. My (much) younger brothers were/are always more sensitive about things like that and I don't think I've ever heard him be as callous with them as he is with me, and that's the crux of it. Know your kid, judge what your kid can handle and work within that. Always give them the full information, but never sugar-coat it more than you have to.

Looking back on it now, I'm not sure what I would have done if my brothers had asked me about death when they were very little. I don't think either of them would have liked it unvarnished, and I don't think I could have sopped them off with a "we all return to nature" style answer. I did have my youngest brother ask me if Everyone dies, but that's different.

tl;dr Know your kid and understand what they can handle, then tell them everything they can handle and always encourage them to ask questions about it.

[Surlethe]

To tell my child anything else would ultimately, I feel, be a disservice, even if it causes some emotional distress at the time - one of my goals in raising my daughter (and my other children, when they come) is to teach them how to handle the world as it actually is, instead of as they'd like it to be; a part of that is accepting that things exist they don't and won't like, and they have to figure out (I have to teach them) how to deal with that.

It's easy to say what you would do when you haven't actually had to put it into practice.

What are you going to say if your child figures out what death is at the age of 4, and is crying and saying "When I close my eyes, I won't even see black"? What will you say when your wife looks at you with pleading eyes and says "what do we tell him?"

Hmm? Oh yeah, it's easy to sit on a fucking webboard and confidently say "Oh yeah, I'll just give my kid the hard truth, and it will be a good lesson in how tough life is!" But that won't help you when the moment comes, if it comes. Some kids don't ask those kinds of questions. David didn't. But Matthew did, because he's a very philosophical child.

Very good point. To me, right now, it's an academic question. I'll definitely bear the emotional reality of the situation in mind.

Even if you must do that, you should at least try to put it in the most uplifting light possible. 4 years old is too young to be introduced to the "life's a bitch and then you die" harsh reality school of teaching. I told Matthew that when we die, we return to the great cycle of life, and we eventually become reborn into other living things. Which is technically true; our organic material returns to the biosystem and will eventually be recycled into other living organisms. That seemed to make him feel better.

That's a good one. The best I'd come up with was gently telling her, "No, you won't even see black anymore - but it will be a long, long, long time before that happen," and somehow emphasize that Mommy and Daddy love her very, very much.

[Ford Prefect]

Sometimes you just can't plan ahead; you just have to know your kids and listen and learn what worries and frightens them.

Reading through this thread, I think this struck me as being ludicrously obvious: how can you possibly plan how to respond to a child who hasn't been born or conceived yet? It's actually extremely difficult to do this with people whom you know particularly well, with situations which are significantly more trivial than trying to explain death (of all things) to a young child. It's in considering this sort of situation that you can see why religion is so popular, because it provides really easy answers to complex questions, though this is a concept we should all be familiar with.

[Coyote]

And, people are learning... that there is no one-size-fits-all boilerplate answer to these questions, and that each child will have to be approached individually, with individually tailored answers based on the parent's experience with that child. Hopefully, they've been paying attention...

[Simon_Jester]

First parenting tip: actually listen to what the child says, instead of blindly assuming he's just like you and that whatever comforts you will necessarily comfort him. For fuck's sake.

Having gone through the counterexample, I agree. Being treated like a small copy of one's parent is not fun.

Postscript: you can substitute "convince," "entertain," "frighten," or just about any other verb that has to do with mental state for "comfort" and this stays true.
_________

Sometimes you just can't plan ahead; you just have to know your kids and listen and learn what worries and frightens them.

Reading through this thread, I think this struck me as being ludicrously obvious: how can you possibly plan how to respond to a child who hasn't been born or conceived yet? It's actually extremely difficult to do this with people whom you know particularly well, with situations which are significantly more trivial than trying to explain death (of all things) to a young child. It's in considering this sort of situation that you can see why religion is so popular, because it provides really easy answers to complex questions, though this is a concept we should all be familiar with.

True. On the other hand, it's at least worth thinking the problem through in advance to avoid the obviously bad answers, if possible. It can't hurt.

[Stark]

That's a good one. The best I'd come up with was gently telling her, "No, you won't even see black anymore - but it will be a long, long, long time before that happen," and somehow emphasize that Mommy and Daddy love her very, very much.

Does that really help? I was a pretty philospohical kid, and I found the platitudes of my parents just as uncomforting as the horseshit in religion. Saying things are XYZ -now- didn't help me reconcile myself to the way things are going to be -in the future-.

Frankly, most adults can't reconcile themselves to oblivion, so is this just an attempt to change the subject from 'horrifying inescapable truth about life' to 'whee family hugs'?

[Covenant]

I don't know about anyone else here, but death never had to be a 'place' for me, I think that until you're told that you 'go somewhere' after you die and it's reinforced... and only until then, does it seem strange to conceive of nonexistence, and to have that seem scary. My parents didn't really get much into it. Know where I learned about death as a concept? Short Circuit. When you break something alive, it's broken, and it's too complex to fix.

If you really want your kids to learn about death in a way that makes it simple for them to get, buy the kid a goldfish and wait a bit. Soon you'll have a conversation starter for both responsibility, being a good parent, and death. Harsh, but at least it gives you a real simple way to show what happens. One day you're on, the next you're not.

Honestly, the oblivion of death is only scary to those people who as kids had previously been offered everlasting bliss. For the rest of us it seems kinda obvious. Treat your kids with a greater degree of respect. A lie to them to make them feel happier or 'sweeten' the concept of death is removing your sensation of guilt and giving them a potentially nasty case of the terrors later on in life. Take the guilt, let the kid be sad for all of two minutes, and watch them handle it like a thinking being.

[Aaron]

It's amazing how attached a kid can get to a goldfish, we've gone through three or four of them but as you say it's a great in for the death conversation. And flushing him down the toilet was also a great way to introduce them to the recycling example that many folks have given here for what happens after you die.

[Mayabird]

Huh, I guess it's another point in favor of "know your kids well" since what my parents did for me was what everybody is saying is the absolute wrong thing to do, and yet I had no problem with it.

[Oskuro]

I think that the issue is not really the possibility of your child getting some massive mental trauma, you really have to blow things out of proportion for that, and kids can be tougher mentally than many adults give them credit for. I think the important bit is the more subtle issue of how your kid learns to think. I see this around me. Most people eventually come to terms with issues like death or Santa Claus as they grow older, but you can spot how many of them still cling to the irrational frame of mind that was indoctrinated into them at an early age. I'd even say that this subtle indoctrination is partly to blame for the prevalence of pseudo-scientific mystical bullshit that so many people take to be true.

Of course I'm speaking as a layman with an opinion, although I'm aware of how things that shaped my personality as a child still affect the way I think and act today.