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A TOUGH JOB MADE TOUGHER: An Introduction to the Family Issues Section by Dale McGowan, Family Issues Editor Parenting, the most difficult and important of jobs, is left to amateurs. Terribly cliché, I know, but like most clichés, it's dead-on. And just as you've mastered the infant (ha!), there's each succeeding age, every one a deeply different set of tasks. Second children still have amateur parents, of course, for the tasks are redefined --- infant-with-older sibling, toddler-with-older-sibling, and so on. We finally attain mastery only when the task is pretty much finished. At which point we attempt to pass our wisdom on to our children to make their parenting easier, and... well, we know how well that goes. So it's a challenge without equal to raise kids with all the right pieces in place and the heads and hearts to continue assembling the puzzle on their own. Hard enough, in other words, without adding a heartfelt desire that they find the courage and insight to opt out of the religious default. Not that we atheist parents generally help the process much. Most of us are deeply uncertain how to proceed, step by step, day by day: What's the goal here? Do I steer the kids toward disbelief, or is that indoctrination? Maybe we should just go to church so they see all options, make their own choices... but those are the years when they're so vulnerable to the pretty myths, not to mention the ugly ones... will I ever be able to salvage a rational thinker out of a Sunday School kid? And do I want them hearing that Daddy and/or Mommy is hellbound? And if I raise them to reject religion, how will they handle the ignorant judgments of their peers? Heck with that, what will my MOTHER think? How do I deal with Christmas? With Easter? And what do I say when Grandma dies? If your spouse is a Christian, multiply the complexities by your zipcode squared. I'm the first to admit that Christianity offers a darned useful mythology for children, especially while staring into Gramma's casket. The problem is that Christian illusions don't usually go the way of Santa Claus and the tooth fairy as we grow up. The reasons are simple enough: the presents keep coming even after Santa is defrocked, but we know the return address says "Mom and Dad." No real loss there. And the tooth fairy generally isn't debunked until the big teeth are all in, by which time it's a moot point. Again, no loss. But letting go of Christian mythology is another thing entirely. Once you have eternal life in your sights, it can be hard to let go in favor of mere reality. At first. I don't need to tell this audience how much more sensible and elegant the reality is, but I'd humbly suggest it takes an adult mind --- and a fairly well-developed one --- to prefer oblivion to immortality. So then... what do we tell the kids about Death? There are good answers to all of these questions, surely --- but the path is anything but well-trodden. How do you Do The Right Thing by your kids without pretending a five year old can handle full-bore realities so awesome that the whole human race has hidden from them for millennia? The same as with all parenting challenges: talk and listen and think with other parents. Our challenge is magnified by our small numbers and the terribly sparse literature. This section will attempt to step into that gap by featuring essays new and old, interviews with actual parents, book reviews, and web links for those of us grappling with the challenges of raising freethinking kids AND dealing with all other issues of atheism and family. Despite every effort to be evenhanded, editors are inevitably influenced by their own preferences and biases, so a personal introduction seems in order as I take over the editorship of Family Issues. I am a college music professor in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a lifetime non-believer, married for eleven years to an increasingly-skeptical Christian who is extraordinarily intelligent and receptive to my freethinking point of view. We are parents of a boy and two girls (Connor six, Erin four, Delaney four months). I teach at a Catholic college, where I have been gradually outing my atheist self over the past three years. This process culminated with the publication of my secular humanist satirical novel "Calling Bernadette's Bluff" and my recent efforts to launch a student freethought group on campus. I'm generally dissatisfied with freethought literature that presents atheism as a simplistic panacea --- the sterling silver key to a bright and shining future --- and the raising of freethinking kids as a matter of self-evident principles. Similarly unsatisfying are arguments that throw out all aspects of Christian practice along with absurd Christian beliefs. Babies and bathwater, you know. And as you can see by my own lexicon, I think the differences between freethinker, atheist, humanist, secularist, rationalist, and all the rest of our many labels are greatly overemphasized and not in our best interest as a movement. I for one am all of those things --- and I'm a believer that our numbers are small enough without additional denominationalizing. In addition to highlighting good existing resources, I will be continuously searching for well-written, well-conceived articles dealing with family issues and freethought. Please contact Family Issues editor Dale McGowan or webmaster Joe Zemel with feedback or with articles for consideration. |
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