Friday, January 05, 2007

teaching kids

When I first left, I really wondered how to teach our child morals and all that. I thought we would find a nice liberal church like UU for that. I didn't know how to teach him that stuff at home. Actually, I still don't. But I know that a lot of people do just that.

Then I felt silly about the idea of having to sent my son to church to teach him morals when talking to a semi-NOM friend of mine and her neverMo, atheist husband. She said to him, "Fta says she wants to take her son to church in order to teach him morals." It sounded like she was defending her desire to take their future children to the Mormon church. Then her atheist husband said, "You don't need church for that. My parents never took us to church, and we learned morals."

I sat there looking at this brilliant, good, kind, upstanding, moral man who has hardly been to church in his life, and got extremely embarrassed that I had made the assumption church in necessary. Children can learn to be good people outside of a church setting.

What do you think?

8 comments:

Sideon said...

You summed it up best yourself in your concerns about teaching kids, that "this brilliant, good, kind, upstanding, moral man who has hardly been to church in his life..."

I think it says a lot about you that you care so much about your kids to ask the question, but you also listened and found your own answers.

Anonymous said...

This is an important issue for me, too. Some of my earliest misgivings about leaving the church were moral questions, such as: Without the church, will I have any reason to be dedicated to ethical behavior? What will be my basis for decision making? Can I still be a moral person? What does it even mean to be moral, anyway? Nowadays, I feel much more secure about my internal moral compass. But despite my desire to be free from religion, I can't help but wonder if my kids will "need church" in order to become decent human beings. Here are a few of my strikes against that idea:

1) As (former) Mormons, I think it is particularly difficult for us to separate what we learned at home vs. what was taught at church, so while I can't say for sure, I believe the vast majority of my learning occurred at home as the result of my parents' teaching. That includes direct methods and by example. At best, the church served as the community that would reinforce certain principles (honesty, kindness, etc.) But you hardly need a church for that. Contrary to what many Mormons seem to believe, the majority of people in "the world" are quite in favor of honesty and kindness. It also helps that my wife was raised by non-religious parents who did a perfectly good job of instilling moral behavior without the need (or reinforcement) of a church community.

2) Kids may not necessarily learn the greatest morals from church. It may not always be as obvious as "lying for the Lord" or slaughtering Canaanites, but there are a lot of religious principles that I would consider borderline unethical. Doing good deeds in order to earn a reward in the afterlife, for example. Doing good deeds in order to earn the love of a supernatural father figure is another. Learning to view decisions and people in terms of "sin" and "righteousness" is where a lot of unnecessary guilt and bigotry comes from. If your kids learn to do the "right things," but for the wrong reasons, was it really worth it?

3) Any church (with the possible exception of UU) will teach kids things I don't agree with. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since they do need to learn how to discriminate between competing ideas, but I also don't want to spend my Sunday afternoons de-programming what their Sunday School teacher said. This would probably rarely have to do with ethical principles, but may include things like relying on answers to prayers, distrusting well-founded scientific theories, believing that Jesus is going to come back and fix all our problems, that the Old Testament stories and New Testament miracles are factual, and so on. It's just not worth the supernatural baggage. It seems magical thinking is present to a greater or lesser extent in all religions, and I think kids are better off without it.

There are a lot of things we can do to teach kids morals. It's cliche, but I don't think anything has a greater impact than example. There are teaching moments all the time in everyday life. With regard to more formal methods, I still remember the stories my parents read to me--fables and mythology about moral dilemmas, choosing the right path, how to be a good person, etc. Stories stick with you for a long time and can serve to guide behavior. I think religious stories could certainly be used, such as the parables of Jesus. American kids should be at least somewhat biblically literate, if only to know what people mean by constant references to "David and Goliath" and such.

In short, everything kids need to know about proper behavior can and will happen naturally at home, with friends and neighbors, at school, etc. No church required.

Anonymous said...

My siblings are TBM's, and their kids are thoughtless, and rude.

When my mom comes into town, mine run out the door, and bring in all of her luggage. She never carries in a bag. They help her in and out of her car, and attend to her needs. She is capable of doing these things on her own, but my children have been taught to honor her and respect her as their Grammy.

None of her other grandchildren outside of my home do these things. Thoughtless and selfish people raise thoughtless and selfish children.

You don't learn honor, respect, and morals in church; they are taught and learned daily in the home.

from the ashes said...

Poker and Abner both make the point that teaching in the home is more important. Looking back, I'm sure I learned more from my parents than from the Sunday school lessons.

But when my son is a teenager and tries marijuana like many teenagers do, TBM family will blame our apostasy (if they ever found out--I would not tell them!). As if there aren't drug users in our old Mormon ward.

MattMan said...

If you don't already follow it, I highly recommend Agnostic Mom's blog -- especially look for her links to articles on the HNN (humanist news network?), and there's a book reference on this topic in there somewhere.

One of her December posts was about this topic of your blog post specifically.

I think with her focus on developing empathy in children, agnostic mom is spot on and how non-religious parents do it, even if it isn't necessarily a conscious focus.

from the ashes said...

Matt- I am familiar with Agnostic Mom's blog. I've haven't started reading her HNN stuff, though I should.

Anonymous said...

I agree that kids don't need church to be moral. But church (if done right) can provide a space in which to reflect and talk about morals. You can simply be moral without ever talking about it, and if that works for you, great. But many people, especially young people, find it helpful to have a community in which to hash out their personal moral code and talk about the "mysteries of the kingdom."

I taught UU Sunday School (4th through 6th graders) for a couple of years, and we were not teaching morals so much as giving kids a chance to talk about spirituality and morals. A lot of them don't have anyone to talk about that with because their public school teachers fear violating the separation of church and state (good on them). Their peers at school are unquestioning fundamentalists with whom it's impossible to get traction for a fruitful discussion. Their atheist parents seem to say "there's no God, end of discussion" and their agnostic parents seem to do the "what do you think, honey?" approach, which is good, but I think it just leaves the kids a little too lost and drifting on the big questions of life (I know, aren't we all?).

The kids want to talk about who or what God is, they want to see whether they personally can experience God somehow, they want to know why their peers at school believe weird things, they want to know why it's such a big deal that the Ten Commandments get posted or not, etc. They love learning about how different cultures and religions and thinkers have approached the big questions of life because that gives them a jumping off point for creating their own philosophy of life.

from the ashes said...

beijing- So nice to see you here. Welcome. I like your points about UU sunday school. I'll have to chew on that. UU is the closest I've come to joining a church, and is still the meeting I attend when I feel in the mood for spirituality.

My argument that church isn't necessary certainly doesn't mean that a church can't be a good forum for discussing and teaching morality. The way you describe your class makes it sound quite appealing, really. I'll have to check UU youth programs out more.