AUTHENTIC SECULAR PARENTING: LETTING CHILDREN CHOOSE

BE-ASIA McKERRACHER

It was when my oldest daughter turned five that I saw her for the person she’d always been. Essence is resilient, fiercely independent, and unabashedly logical in her approach to the world. Even at five, these qualities shone strong. It was the Picture Day fiasco, the day kids learn to dread but parents love—at first.

Essence chose her outfit: a long dress, with layers of pink lace nearly to the ground. It’s an elegant garb for a dainty little girl. Instead of soft white or petal pink shoes to match her over-the-top ensemble, my daughter wore her Velcro, strap-across sandals. I despised these sandals. They were hideous: The pink had faded, an inch of brown covered the bottom half, all of the fake bling had fallen off, the Velcro strips were almost two inches longer than the shoes’ width—and they smelled. Bad.

My hatred of her shoes didn’t really matter to Essence; she had this outfit chosen the day she came home with the picture packet. There would be no changing her mind. And while she floated safe in the security of her coming day, I spent a full week fixated on that pair of shoes. If she took pictures in those sandals, it would ruin everything—for me.

(Hold that thought.)

When she rounded the corner into the living room on picture day, she was so proud of herself—from top to bottom—shoes included. She had listened to me say (in so many words) that I didn’t want her to take a picture in those shoes, but Essence turned down every offer for something different. She didn’t want new ones, she refused to let me clean those, and she saw nothing whatsoever wrong with them. She left the house ready for picture day and all I could do was shake my head.

I’d wanted to raise a freethinking child—and I had!

Parenting affords us the luxury of children who want to be themselves in all areas of their lives and as secular parents, we are more than happy to oblige them. But I didn’t learn this powerful parenting skill on my own, and I now know individuality in children is not limited to what they wear. Beyond clothing or vegetable choices, children have a sense of individuality that must be nurtured on every level as they grow and mature.

While there may be a plethora of parenting books designed to offer advice and guidance, few offer a method. But I stumbled across an author video that moved me from “parenting” children to teaching them. The author’s name was Barbara Coloroso. She was utterly captivating, but initially, her respect for children left me swirling in confusion. Many of us first-generation secular parents came from a world of obedience and respect—for adults, that is. Children were seen and not heard. The notion of giving children the authority—the power—over their wants and desires simply didn’t happen.

But Coloroso’s methods come from a child-centered perspective, one that most secular parents have absorbed. The plain truth is that you cannot force children to do anything without breaking who they are inside. Children, like adults, are people who yearn to understand and have ownership in their lives.

Superficial power is a start, but if we are to raise independent critical thinkers, we must go further. Coloroso’s method for helping parents raise self-controlling and positive children centers on what she calls the six critical life messages parents must convey to their children through our actions, our words, and our deeds. Those messages are simple, focused, and worth adopting as secular parents. They say:

I believe in you.

I trust in you.

I know you can handle this.

You are listened to.

You are cared for.

You are important to me.

As I fumbled through my parenting, I used Coloroso’s critical messages as my light in the darkness. I devoured her book Kids Are Worth It!: Giving Your Child the Gift of Inner Discipline. Those messages are the foundation to raising children who are just as empathetic to the plight of the dying bumblebee population as they are to children in war-torn areas. If we want children to have the self-confidence to stand up to bullies (in child or adult form), then they need to know that behind their words are parents who say, “I know that you can do this.”

And while Barbara Coloroso was not herself a secular parent, taking those six critical life messages that she developed and moving them into the realm of nonreligious parenting affords us an opportunity for a new kind of conversation.

One subject that tests this commitment to raising independent, self-determining kids is the right of a freethinking child to adopt a religious identity if he or she so chooses.

Such a conversation may sound absurd, but the reality is that we are raising freethinkers—young people who are afforded a life that revolves around critical thinking, choice, and using reason and logic to view the world. These are the basic principles of secular parenting. But what if a secular child uses that freedom to choose faith? Is such a thing possible? Can faith be a choice?

Instead of keeping this conversation in the shadows, I propose that we begin as a secular community to sound the alarm of rationality. Of course a secular child can become a believer in adulthood. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Survey, of the 9.2 percent of American adults who say they were raised in religiously unaffiliated homes, nearly half came to identify with a religion at some later point. The reasons these young adults decided against a secular life vary, though many experts suspect the main culprit is marriage or relationship conformity.¹

Instead of embracing religious literacy for our children, secular parents often shelter their kids from religious texts and religious spaces. . . . This is not the way to raise a genuine freethinker. Instead of shielding our babes in hopes of keeping them secular, we must allow them to breathe.

Sadly, the secular community has taken the bait of those who abhor rational discussion on the topic of faith, scrambling to come up with reasons for the data. We have succumbed to the fear of becoming invisible once again. Instead of embracing religious literacy for our children, secular parents often shelter their kids from religious texts and religious spaces. For some reason, we have shrunk against the pressure of reality. This is not the way to raise a genuine freethinker. Instead of shielding our babes in hopes of keeping them secular, we must allow them to breathe.

So how do we encourage free choice of worldview for our children while upholding the principles of secular parenting? On the surface, the answer is straightforward: Free choice is one of the principles of secular parenting. But putting that principle into practice takes some doing.

The first step revolves around those same principles that Coloroso beautifully gifted the parenting community with not so long ago. When we say, “You are listened to,” to our freethinking children, secular parents commit ourselves to an open and honest dialogue about faith and the choices they have. We are committing ourselves to something that our parents couldn’t or wouldn’t do for us. To do that in reality, we need to add to Coloroso’s list. Here are a few important truisms secular parents need in order to really listen to our kiddos as they work to create their own worldview. We need to be willing to say:

My reality is not your reality.

Faith cannot divide us.

We can love each other and disagree at the same time.

This really hit home for our family when we took our then thirteen- and fourteen-year-old daughters to Europe. As much as I hated going to church as a kid—and I really did hate going—my reality isn’t their reality. They were mesmerized by the churches and cathedrals in London. Before we even entered, their eyes were drawn to the sheer size and craftsmanship of these great artifacts of history. They took dozens of pictures, lit prayer candles, and had quiet moments in the churches that they visited. As a family, we descended the stairs of Saint Martin’s Church in London and created intricate brass rubbings, all while in the company of the religiously devout.

The beauty of these experiences was that we as a family were safe in our secularity; that is, we had no fear of conversion or coercion. That’s because as parents, we embraced the mantra that says, “Our reality is not your reality.”

Yes, most secular parents were forced, bullied, or guilt-tripped into faith as children. But for secular children being raised by first-generation secular parents, things are different. They can be exposed to concepts like prayer, ritual, and orthodox tradition with an open, skeptical mind. In this way, faith as an exploration becomes a family goal—something for everyone to get excited about. Our girls went to those churches not because they were forced to go, or to save their souls, but because of their natural curiosity. They found them charming, and because at the end of the day they knew that the second truism, “Faith cannot divide us,” reigns supreme in our home, they spent that time making connections instead of worrying about ill intentions. The drive to know and learn, present in all children, is particularly cultivated in those raised by secular parents.

This is the legacy that we want to leave our children. We must combat the apprehension and anxiety religious spaces cause us by knowing that our children’s choices are not ours to make. You cannot choose your child’s faith any more than your parents were able to ultimately choose your faith. Our responsibility as secular parents is to remind our kids of this one real fact: No matter their choice of faith, our love for them will stay forever true. It is when parents reactively do the opposite—shelter their children to keep them uninformed—that we encourage them to “leave the fold.” How else can secular kids get the knowledge their minds crave if parents are not creating opportunities for understanding? This strains family relationships and creates tension—and the cycle of faith-based trauma continues.

It all boils down to this: What is our intention as secular parents? Is it to make an army of little atheists and agnostics in the war against faith? Or do we want to raise educated citizens, capable of making their own decisions about everything, including faith? Secular parenting is about offering more than a shelter from the damaging effects of faith. We cannot parade our young ones into the chapel or the mosque and simply walk back out the door. Considerations of age, maturation, and actual desire all come into play. We also cannot fear the reality of choice: that our children may not grow up to be secular adults. Fearing this reality will not keep it from happening.

Our chief goal as secular parents is to instill a real passion for critical thinking and evaluation. The world our children will inherit is masked in a shroud of sexual innuendo, deceptive advertising, and the cruel manipulation of those not clever enough to understand the game. If we fail to allow our little freethinkers a chance to flex their critical thinking muscles often, and about issues that affect their worldview, then we have failed to prepare them for the most important struggles that lie ahead: those that are fought inside their own minds.

When we as secular parents focus on instilling critical thinking and positive self-awareness, we are helping them free themselves from the undue influence of media and culture that threatens to make their decisions for them. The idea of a child choosing faith over a secular life then becomes something that is not to be feared; child choice becomes a celebration.

When my daughter spent two months researching Buddhism—and seriously considering conversion—I didn’t harass her. I chose not to bully her into my choice of secularism. I took her to the library, we watched videos, and I tried to find a Buddhist temple for her to investigate. Had she moved to convert, I can’t say how I would have handled it. As children, many of us had our paths chosen for us—forced by tradition and mental manipulation. Our children, however, do have a choice, and we are the ones as secular parents responsible for enabling such options.

This is the crucial difference—not between secularism and religion, but between choice and choicelessness.

If secular parenting is to survive and thrive in the current millennium, it will need to adjust. Part of that is knowing that not all children born and raised secular will choose that path in their adult lives. As long as communication is open and love is apparent, we will have left a lasting legacy of freethought, and we, as secular parents, will have thoroughly done our job.

BE-ASIA McKERRACHER is the author of Secular Parenting in a Religious World (2014). She holds a master’s degree in English from Truman State University and teaches English at the high school and college levels. Her website, The Secular Parent (thesecularparent.com), focuses on a wide range of issues affecting secular parents and their children. Be-Asia lives in Kansas City, Missouri, with her husband and two children.