Advice for Atheists Raising Babies

Excellent video.

P.s. Points 5 and 6 should be one point.

This is pretty much the approach I took. The result? One had a religious phase which lasted for two years until age 13, the other never took religion seriously – despite regular encouragement from school.

The most important thing is to give them permission to make their own mind up – and show them it’s OK to be sceptical by your own example.

#2 and #4 directly contradict each other.

Stating a fact is not being biased. Nor is stating an opinion. “Biased” is distorting the stated facts due to your opinion.

I have a catholic mother, and an atheist father. Neither one of them ever tried to force their beliefs on me.

I would say that the one thing that should be added, is to let your child be what they believe.

If you’re an atheist and your child believes in a god, let them. Don’t reprimand your child for their view. Give them their own time to figure out what exactly it is they believe.

I refuse to encourage tolerance, but I’ll certainly encourage respect.

I have additional points.

Be prepared to learn things from your children. They may lack experience but this just means that they are free to ask really stupid questions. Really stupid questions are great because the answers often enlighten us and make us think of old ideas in new ways. Parenting isn’t simply a one way exercise.

That goes hand in hand with my second point which is never to be afraid not to have an answer. Children may well look up to parents and believe that they know everything and can do anything (at least while they’re quite young) but this isn’t the case. Often it is better to help a child (or an adult) to think through a point or question for themselves than to provide them with an opinion or half an answer. If you don’t know, say so. Maybe your kid will grow up to discover something new.

Laci and I share a similarly strict fundamentalist upbringing.

So, I’d say that if you want to raise an atheist child, bring them up in the strictest fundamentalist household you can muster.

It worked on me.

We don’t live in a vacuum so we are all influenced by our families and community. We display biases all the time, especially self serving ones. Try to promote a Socratic dialog with the aim of understanding different ideas that would include atheistic and theistic ideas. This is essential to helping others form their own opinions and beliefs.

As an atheist parent of two children, now 14 and 11 years of age, my advice is not to be afraid to expose them to religious ideas and never to force atheism on your children. Children are often smarter than we give them credit for. In fact, in my experience, exposure to religious ideas backfired on those trying to “convert” them.
Years ago, when my oldest son was about 4 years of age, some religious relatives gave our children some “Veggietales” videos (hoping, I’m sure, that they would pick up on the program’s religious message.) Rather than prevent my children from watching them, I let them go ahead and enjoy them. Despite the religious message, the shows are well done and kinda cute for what they are. Besides, they’re going to find out about the god stuff sometime. After watching some of the videos, my son told me that he “kind of” believed in god.
“That’s fine”, I answered. “That’s your choice and I love you no matter what you believe.”
But then he started asking specific questions about what they talked about in the show.
“What’s ‘omnipresent’ mean?” he asked.
“It means that something is everywhere at the same time.” I replied.
At that, he was deep in thought for a couple minutes.
“But that means they’re saying god is everywhere at the same time! That’s STUPID! I guess I don’t believe in god anymore.”
Out of the mouths of children!
He’s been an atheist ever since.

makarios

I loled 🙂