How parents approach the task of passing on religious faith and practice to their children How do American parents pass their religion on to their children? At a time of overall decline of traditional religion and an increased interest in personal “spirituality,” Religious Parenting investigates the ways that parents transmit religious beliefs, values, and practices to their kids. We know that parents are the most important influence on their children’s religious lives, yet parents have been virtually ignored in previous work on religious socialization. Renowned religion scholar Christian Smith and his collaborators Bridget Ritz and Michael Rotolo explore American parents’ strategies, experiences, beliefs, and anxieties regarding religious transmission through hundreds of in-depth interviews that span religious traditions, social classes, and family types all around the country. Throughout we hear the voices of evangelical, Catholic, Mormon, mainline and black Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist parents and discover that, despite massive diversity, American parents share a nearly identical approach to socializing their children religiously. For almost all, religion is important for the foundation it provides for becoming one’s best self on life’s difficult journey. Religion is primarily a resource for navigating the challenges of this life, not preparing for an afterlife. Parents view it as their job, not religious professionals’, to ground their children in life-enhancing religious values that provide resilience, morality, and a sense of purpose. Challenging longstanding sociological and anthropological assumptions about culture, the authors demonstrate that parents of highly dissimilar backgrounds share the same “cultural models” when passing on religion to their children. Taking an extensive look into questions of religious practice and childrearing, Religious Parenting uncovers parents’ real-life challenges while breaking innovative theoretical ground.

"Gathering the perspectives of educators and psychologists, as well as wisdom from everyday parents, Parenting Beyond Belief offers insights and advice on a wide range of topics including instilling values, finding meaning and purpose, navigating holidays, coping with loss, finding community without religion, and more. The second edition of this secular parenting bestseller brings back reflections from such celebrated freethinkers as Richard Dawkins and Julia Sweeney, and adds new voices including journalist Wendy Thomas Russell, essayist Katherine Ozment, sociologist Phil Zuckerman, and many others" --

A progressive Christian parenting book with a social-justice orientation How do we build a better world? One key way, says Cindy Wang Brandt, is by learning to raise our children with justice, mercy, and kindness. In Parenting Forward Brandt equips Christian parents to model a way of following Jesus that has an outward focus, putting priority on loving others, avoiding judgment, and helping those in need. She shows how parents must work on dismantling their own racial, cultural, gender, economic, and religious biases in order to avoid passing them on to their children. “By becoming aware of the complex ways we participate in systems of inequal­ity or hierarchy,” she says, “we begin to resist systemic injustice ourselves, empower our children, and change our communities.”

A new examination of how and why American religious parents seek to pass on religion to their children The most important influence shaping the religious and spiritual lives of children, youth, and teenagers is their parents. A myriad of studies show that the parents of American youth play the leading role in shaping the character of their religious and spiritual lives, even well after they leave home and often for the rest of their lives. We know a lot about the importance of parents in faith transmission. However we know much less about the actual beliefs, feelings, and activities of the parents themselves, what Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk call the "intergenerational transmission of religious faith and practice." To address that gap, this book reports the findings of a new national study of religious parents in the United States. The findings and conclusions in Handing Down the Faith are based on 215 in-depth, personal interviews with religious parents from many traditions and different parts of the country, and sophisticated analyses of two nationally representative surveys of American parents about their religious parenting. Handing Down the Faith explores the background beliefs informing how and why religious parents seek to pass on religion to their children; examines how parenting styles interact with parent religiousness to shape effective religious transmission; shows how parents have been influenced by their experiences as children influenced by their own parents; reveals how religious parents view their congregations and what they most seek out in a local church, synagogue, temple, or mosque; explores the experiences and outlooks of immigrant parents including Latino Catholics, East Asian Buddhists, South Asian Muslims, and Indian Hindus. Smith and Adamczyk step back to consider how American religion has transformed over the last 100 years and to explain why parents today shoulder such a huge responsibility in transmitting religious faith and practice to their children. The book is rich in empirical evidence and unique in many of the topics it explores and explains, providing a variety of sometimes counterintuitive findings that will interest scholars of religion, social scientists interested in the family, parenting, and socialization; clergy and religious educators and leaders; and religious parents themselves.

"How do religiously-observant American parents pass on their religion to their children? Sociologist Christian Smith and his team sought to answer this question by interviewing over two hundred parents from across the U.S. affiliated with religious congregations of various types. The book presents the voices of parents from diverse socioeconomic and religious backgrounds interested in passing on their religious convictions and practices to their children, with the focus on why they think this matters, and how they do it. What Smith and his team found was surprising. Almost all the parents interviewed- whether Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish, Muslim, Mormon, or Hindu, and whether politically or theologically conservative or liberal-view the transmission of religion in much the same way. Most religious parents do not expect professional clergy and youth ministries to play a large role in imparting to young people a taste for continued religious affiliation and participation. Rather, they expect to do this work themselves, viewing their children as ongoing "projects". Moreover, very few of these religious parents regard what we might call the "truth" of religious claims-beliefs in salvation or the trinity (for example), the afterlife, heaven, etc.-as important reasons for the centrality of religion in their lives and the lives of their children. For nearly all, including the most conservative, religion is almost always about community, morality, and a sense of purpose, all of which lead to a better quality of life for themselves and their children in the here and now. Smith and his co-authors ground their discussion of religious parenting in a broader set of theoretical claims about the way in which religious transmission occurs. Drawing on cognitive anthropology and inspired by work in cognitive science, the authors present and describe the background "cultural models" that American religious parents hold and use to inform their parenting"--

This revealing, disturbing, and thoroughly researched book exposes a dark side of faith that most Americans do not know exists or have ignored for a long time—religious child maltreatment. After speaking with dozens of victims, perpetrators, and experts, and reviewing a myriad of court cases and studies, the author explains how religious child maltreatment happens. She then takes an in-depth look at the many forms of child maltreatment found in religious contexts, including biblically-prescribed corporal punishment and beliefs about the necessity of "breaking the wills" of children; scaring kids into faith and other types of emotional maltreatment such as spurning, isolating, and withholding love; pedophilic abuse by religious authorities and the failure of religious organizations to support the victims and punish the perpetrators; and religiously-motivated medical neglect in cases of serious health problems. In a concluding chapter, Heimlich raises questions about children’s rights and proposes changes in societal attitudes and improved legislation to protect children from harm. While fully acknowledging that religion can be a source of great comfort, strength, and inspiration to many young people, Heimlich makes a compelling case that, regardless of one’s religious or secular orientation, maltreatment of children under the cloak of religion can never be justified and should not be tolerated.

It is eighteen years after the birth of your child. He is now stronger than you. She is now taller than you. Either one of them can work a cell phone faster, text message, IM, or design a Web page while you're still reading the newspaper. How did your baby grow up so quickly? As a parent, do you have anything left to say to your son or daughter? Is there anything your child still needs to hear from you--or will tolerate you saying?--from the Introduction Parenting Your Adult Child addresses such thorny issues as: When to rescue and when to not. When to push and when to restrain yourself. How to keep your faith when your child seems to be abandoning it. How to forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in parenting along the way. How to move into an adult/adult relationship with this amazing person you have raised. The audio edition of this book can be downloaded via Audible.