Parents who want to pass faith on to their children are facing an uphill battle. School, friends, media, and the internet tend to hinder rather than help religious formation.
In a new report on faith and families developed in collaboration with the Institute for Family Studies and Communio, we examined which factors during childhood were most important for passing on faith into adulthood. Our results show that parents need to be active and intentional about keeping their children in the fold.
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The data indicate that one of the most important things parents can do to raise religious children is surprisingly simple: talk about faith at home.
Children from Christian households who had multiple faith conversations with their parents each week were twice as likely to be regular churchgoers, pray daily, and say religion was very important to them as adults. They were 20 percentage points more likely to identify as Christian and report a belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Regular religious discussion at home is one of the strongest factors we found in our analysis for keeping children in the faith.
This may sound obvious, but many well-intentioned parents find talking about faith with their children to be challenging. When days are organized around school, sports, activities, hobbies, or friends, it can be hard to see where faith fits. Religion gets compartmentalized into an ever-smaller space as everything else crowds it out.
Parents might also worry about coming off as preachy and turning their children off to religion. For that reason, they may choose to take a light touch. Some parents may not feel well-informed about religious matters or may want to avoid difficult conversations they worry they might get wrong. These concerns are understandable, especially for difficult moral topics that may conflict with cultural sensibilities.
The problem is that if children aren’t learning about religion at home, they probably aren’t learning it much at all. Church is crucial, but a couple of hours of sermons or Sunday school each week can’t compete with a culture that regularly communicates that faith isn’t important, or at best just one lifestyle choice among others.
Religious messages need regular reinforcement at home. Children need their parents, who know them better than anyone, to help them understand how faith applies to their lives seven days a week. They need to learn from their parents how what they hear at church applies in every domain of their lives. When children have questions or doubts, lines of communication need to be open for parents to help them work through these challenges. It’s not enough to show. Parents need to tell.
To be clear, it’s possible to talk about faith in the wrong way or take it too far. Some children do report being pushed away from religion by parents who were overbearing or couldn’t answer their difficult questions. Younger children may need more religious instruction, but for older children, the emphasis should be on two-way conversations about what faith means and why it matters for their lives.
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Parents should try to prepare themselves to talk about religion in the right way, ideally with the assistance of pastors, other parents, or religious resources to provide support. The prevalence of online arguments against Christianity makes it even more important for churches to take an active role in helping parents feel comfortable discussing theological topics that might not be intuitive to older children.
Our report suggests, however, that on average, parents should worry less about saying the wrong thing and more about what happens when they say nothing at all. Children learning about what it means to live a faithful life don’t just need role models. They need guides. In our fragmented and secularizing culture, that responsibility lands first and foremost on their families.
Drs. Jesse Smith and Jane Lankes Smith are sociologists who co-authored a new report on religious retention alongside the Institute for Family Studies and Communio.