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Parenting with Faith
Posted by Single Mom Superhero in Family, Tribal Concerns
Posted by Emilie Kuperman in Family, Tribal Concerns
It was your average December dilemma time: that shapeless stretch of time between Chanukah and Christmas when our eight crazy nights had wrapped up and the man in the big red suit seemed to be looming, Big-Brother-esque, too closely on the horizon. Half of H’s classmates weren’t Jewish (as is common at nearly every JCC preschool), but this didn’t mean a heck of a lot to any of the lot. I had just finished explaining to H that even though we know that Santa doesn’t exist, we don’t need to impose this truth on anyone else in case they believe differently.
“Just like we know that God doesn’t exist?” she remarked, eyes wide with commitment and conviction.
“Well, kind of…. Just keep it down about the Santa business.” I said, not so adeptly sidestepping my four year old.
It didn’t create the firestorm of faith and questioning I had envisioned, mostly since she was able to avoid Santa and God topics entirely for the rest of the month. But it wasn’t that much of a surprise when she repeated a question from some narrow-minded adult or another: “If you don’t believe in God, how can you believe in anything?”
Truth be told, I don’t press upon my child a traditional higher-power ideal, or any sense of abstract “faith.” But to say that lack of belief in this one thing is to lack belief in “anything,” well, seems a bit hollow. I would never say that we’re atheist, or agnostic, or really anything. Shoot me: I’m an Aquarius and naturally resistant to any type of categorization, even the tapestry of Reconstructionist Judaism (which is probably a good fit for my family).
But yet belief is a critical piece in our family, especially when it comes to faith in parenting. Most of the research that can be found on parenting with faith points toward Christian or God-centered methodology that speaks to a certain audience. But in my definition of parenting with faith, I adopt a much more stringent and ardent zeal in tune with core-albeit select-Jewish values.
The American Heritage Dictionary notes that faith is, among other things, “Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.” Sometimes it’s good to suspend disbelief, as you do at the theatre, and reason with your child that “everything’s going to be okay.” But when we break it down in our house, we say “Everything’s going to be okay because we have the power to make it so.”
In a fascinating piece by Paul Graham (oddly enough, an essayist and IT-nerd) called “Lies We Tell Kids”, he notes “Telling a child they have a particular ethnic or religious identity is one of the stickiest things you can tell them.” Sure, we want all of our kids to grow up with a strong Jewish identity, but does this mean a required belief in God? And without that in place, can they, as H asked, believe in anything?
Raising a kid with the Jewish type of faith is ripe with the opportunity to open your child to an outstanding tableau of humanistic and soul-growing experiences. Parenting with that faith means teaching the importance of helping others, of being the best you possible so that you can bring justice to the world, and performing everyday tasks in a kind and planful way. It means establishing and practicing a deep and profound respect for our fellow planet-dwellers and all that they believe and represent. Our family is bursting with belief and faith, because we have the power to fill our souls with belief and faith.
The next winter, H proclaimed that she had made some decisions about what she chose to believe in. She knew in her heart, she confided, that there is a G-d. And a Santa. And that the latter provided much more in the way of gifts.
“And I know who I really believe in most, even more.” She declared in her typical matter-of-fact way.
I couldn’t wait to hear this.
“Me.”
Emilie Kuperman grew up in the sticks and is still pulling weeds out of her West Coast mop top. With a snarky look on life, her perspectives approach a harsh genius… kind of alike a train wreck that you can’t look away from. She will challenge you to a duel before she ever admits any imperfection, in her writing or otherwise.
Photo: Simon Eugster, Creative Commons License
I feel like I was reading the words of a kindred spirit – both mother (me) and child (mine)!
Did Ms. Kuperman also write the bio that accompanied her piece? If so, she got it wrong. “…her perspectives approach a harsh genius…” is incorrect. There’s no “approach” here.
Aw, I’m honored by the suggestion that I have achieved fully developed harsh genius status!
Thanks for reading, Lauren! I hope you’re a regular!
Great Blog topic. We just had the ever so deep conversation about believing in the tooth fairy. It’s amazing how a learned behavior which takes so long to accomplish can be taken away so quickly. You are born with no belief, someone shows you how to believe, that someone believes in you, you finally believe in yoursself…and then an obstacle,challenge or hardship arises and we start to loose belief. Our job as parents is to make sure that our children always believe in themselves and keep believing in others as well.(Even the tooth fairy). Hopefully your “H” and my “B” always stay true to their beliefs.
Thanks Stage Mom. It’s so true, how quickly belief can change. It’s surely challenging to manage the balance between keeping our kids in the coccoon of safe beliefs and letting them flail for themselves in what could easily feel like a tide of ebb and flow reality. The tooth fairy just made an appearance in our house, and her magic remains.
This type of (lack of) raising your kids with a sense of faith and borderline agnostic/atheistic belief system, unfortunately, lead raising a new generation of “non-Jewish Jews”. I grew up w/ two Jewish friends that were raised by “new agey, liberal, hippie” type mothers, and one of them is an ardent atheist, and the other is completely indifferent towards religion (and married a non-Jewish girl who is raising the kids Christian). Far be it from me to tell someone how to raise their child, but the more Jews exposed by Mom and Dad to this type of (lack of) belief system is not “good for the Jews”.
Thanks for your deep insight, Skeptical. You might be surprised to hear that I agree with you wholeheartedly. But just remember, hippies beget hippies. The parents of today are not the first generation raising children who are at risk of distancing themselves from the traditional Jewish community. In our case, H has a parent who grew up with no Jewish identity (from a hippie mom of her own) and the other parent who went to orthodox day school. The parent with no Jewish upbringing (moi) oddly enough went on to spend almost a decade fully immersed in the professional Jewish world, while the other parent keeps a distance. Perhaps it’s less the parenting of the young, but rather the engagement of the parents, since us Gen-Xers are the ones at the helm and oft-times desire something more than (or perhaps different from?) the traditionally accepted Jewish experience.
Thanks for your honest and self-reflecting insight, Emilie. I’m glad we have common ground and can agree (and have a civil discourse). I think you’re onto something when you say Gen-Xers desire something different than their parents. While there’s truth to that, I’d like to think your rebellious phase ends sometime in your 20′s (or when you become a parent). Unfortunately, to quote the prominent Jewish author/political commentator Dennis Prager (I might not have the quote 100% verbatim), “To secular Jews, their religion is liberalism, not Judaism.” That’s all too often true these days.