Humanists Take on the World

36 Secular Parenting

• Dustin Williams, Lauren Studley • Episode 36

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We talk about secular parenting

 

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- Humanists Take on the World episode 36- Secular parenting.(upbeat music)- Welcome to that episode of Humanists Take on the World? I am Dustin and joining me is Lauren.- Hello.- It is amazing how two whole months got biased.- Well, to be fair, it's the beginning of summer and it's been crazy.- Yeah.- It's always crazy, summer.- Yeah.- Everybody's been enjoying their summer or winter, depending on where you are.- Because we do have listeners in the, well, at least I think we still have some listeners in the Southern half of the world.- Yay, hemisphere's.- I know at one point, per capita, most, that we were most popular in New Zealand.- No. That's right, we wanted to go visit.- That was a long, long time ago though. So. - A long, long time ago.- I don't know what that would look like now, but yeah, so parenting from a secular perspective. I heard about it on podcasts mostly in the past with the main idea being your kids will figure it out, expose them to a lot of ideas and let them come to their own conclusions.- And try to model good behavior as best as you can.- Yeah, and teach them critical thinking, but don't indoctrinate your children.- We, wonderful ideology.- It is.- That's what we were gonna do.- That's what we were gonna do?- That's what we've basically been trying to do until it came to a head about a month ago.(laughs)- Yeah, I wouldn't say it came to a head. It was just delightful conversation that we had to have because certain imagery does not flow with our point of view in life. It's like, yeah, about the angels in heaven. Or we need to talk about that. So. (laughs)- In particular, it was Kylie talking about our late Chihuahua Rocco being in the clouds.- Yes. - Looking down on us from the clouds. And then I'm driving and be like, wait, what? Okay, okay, yeah, you've seen the loony tunes, cartoons where we go up to heaven or something, we got little harps, angel wings, that kind of thing. So it's not like imagery that she's completely unfamiliar with. She's, and I'm sure kids at school talked about it. Their school, their class went through a shockingly horrific passing of one of their classmates this spring. So other points of view of what happens when someone dies was discussed.- Yeah. - Not by the school, but kids in the class.- Certain kids in the class. We heard stuff at the funeral that we explained or that's what people believe. So, you know, no real surprise there. And she did what most people do. And why many people stay with religion is they, she found an image that was particularly comforting. And that is that once somebody dies, they look after you for, you know, from above or I'm like, well, as I'm driving, try not to, you know, get too flustered. Like, oh, you know, Rocco's in the ground. She's like, I know, but I think he's up in the clouds. I'm like, yeah, some people believe that. I'm like, try not to be like to, I don't know, forward with my own opinions on it. So I got home and discussed it with Dustin. And we were like, well, yeah, that's, you know, we got to let her discover her own beliefs. And then there was this pause and we looked at each other and we're like, nah.(laughing)- So I was able to watch cartoons like that as a kid. And not conclude that the family dog that got ran over by a car when I was three popcorn was in the clouds looking down on me because I was being raised in the Adventist church, which believes that the dead are dead. There's no immaterial soul. And until the resurrection, people are dead and humans can't become angels.- Yeah.- So.- Rather secular view until you add through throwing that resurrection part.- So I was like, okay, that makes sense to you.- I'd been getting taught that consistently. So I knew what I believed or what I'd been taught and I was able to evaluate things like Looney Tunes car tunes as, aha, that's funny. Not how it works. Just like how almost everything in Looney Tunes is, aha, that's funny, that's not how it works.- Exactly, well, I would just want to look where I lead coyote and physics, okay, that's funny.- Yeah.- Bo, she kept doubling down on it. So no, no, I think Rocco's in the sky, okay. So we had the discussion with Dustin like, well, we haven't been able to take her to any of the other religious institutions in town. Like I had this jury, I grew up at Booth, Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship and they did a rotation of teaching about different religions and classes for like Quonquot Sunday School that taught us Buddhism was Hinduism. They even had people from different churches come and visit temples and provide services that were more in line with their beliefs so that we were exposed to that. Do I remember any of that? No, I just know that I was exposed to that stuff growing up from a very young age. I went to UU every Sunday, most Sundays from as far as back as I can remember up until basically I was 13 or 14 years old. So I had a lot of, you know, education there. Kylie hadn't had any of that. We had to do a very quick 30 second cliff notes of what religion was walking into a funeral.- Yep.- What does a church, why is it look like this and who is that and what's going on?- And throughout the funeral having to explain things very much in the context, trying to be respectful for anybody who might be overhearing, (laughs) being very matter of fact explanatory.- Yeah.- And just like I've generally done when talking about various religious groups on the podcast, when I get into explanatory mode, I get into matter of fact explanation of what those beliefs are.- And there's enough people out there who don't take their kids to church that that would not have been surprising to just about anybody. Oh, that's cute. Kids, person I'm in a church. Oh, this is so sad. What a terrible reason to have to go to church. I was like, okay, but we've done our best with the growing, you know, these ideologies of when you're early parent or even pre-parent, trying to imagine how are you gonna raise your kid? You can expose them to all these religions, they'll come to their own ideas, maybe experiment a little bit when they're older, maybe piss you right off, but you know they'll come right background, just like every Christian parent believes, and everything will be hunky-dory. But she's, we didn't take into the account how other kids at school are gonna talk and make her feel about certain things. So, and since we have not done any of those, well, we've done quite a bit of education on other religions, but not quite like I had imagined. So I felt we were very under-prepared for dealing with this very traumatizing event that was thrown into our lives and how she could react to that. Well, and that was a big event in her class right before the end of the school year. It was right before her birthdays. Oh yeah, yeah. That funeral was the same weekend as her birthdays, so it was right after we did the last episode. Yeah. And... We weren't even gonna go. I was not comfortable going. Yeah, so she had that. Yes, to go, and I thought that was respectful and I could do that. And that was about three to half months after Rocco died. Which was about three months after the life celebration for her grandmother, which was about three or four months after her passing. So it's not like Kylie is not familiar. If all the kids in her class, she was probably the most familiar. Yeah, with this concept. Other kids have definitely had parents and grandparents pass away, of course, not parents, sorry. Grandparents and other family members, et cetera, pass away. But I felt like Kylie definitely had a firm grasp on it. Well, and Kylie had a firm grasp that her grandma was going to die for about 20 months before she did. Yeah. So nearly half of her life at this point, she's been familiar with in processing the concept of death. And we let popular culture and her classmates teach her what that means. Not, I mean, I'm going to give us some more credit than that. She's latching on to a comforting idea. I wouldn't say is what it isn't, you know, what taught her about it. We talked about it a lot. We discussed it a ton. We kind of, but when you're talking about death being, you know, as a thing that is final, the way we talked about it was just that she was going to die and that that was, and then that she did die. And then that's to her ashes were in the urn. Her ashes, yes. It would be eventually in the ground. And that was what it kept coming back to is that the Rocco was cremated and put in the ground. And I don't know, the comforting mythos to go on that one to, you know, help little kids or whoever grieve is they go into the ground and become part of the soil which nurtures new plants, which then propagate more new life. It's like, there you go. The cycle of life continues when we, you know, bury our dead in the ground. But we didn't specifically address that, you know, there is no separate soul because we didn't think that was a thing we needed to address. And loony tunes and other cartoons have done a really good job of presenting that concept to her of an immaterial soul that lives on when you die.- Yeah. And for, and good, she needs to be familiar with that because then she's not, some kids aren't telling her at school about how they think little, you know, her little classmates in heaven. And she's like, "Woo, what's that?" Now, okay, she gets it. And that's good. She knew enough to get it. And yeah, it's, and with her class, there was a fair degree of diversity. There was at least one Hindu and one Muslim kid in the class or more accurately, one kid from a Muslim family and one kid from a Hindu family. And several kids from various Christian nomination families, but there were a few who were quite vocal that the classmate was in heaven.- Yeah, because they had had discussions with their parents and they were all dealing with this same thing together and that makes sense. Which, like I said, is actually really good'cause she needs that exposure. She's not at the point now where she's gonna have to defend her own beliefs.- Right. We settle in for another, I got, I cross your fingers another year or two, but we'll see. I remember getting hit with that one at least by second grade, but we'll see. It's just funny because we've done a podcast about atheism for years. We, I'm, you know, we're pretty firm in our belief systems and knew what we were gonna do as parents. And then it's just kind of really easy to let these things slip by and then lo and behold something happens and you're like, oh, I am not propped for this at all. Dang.- Yeah.- Or maybe we were and we're just not giving ourselves enough credit as parents tend to do.- Well, we were definitely prepared for it. We just hadn't really addressed it head on. It's, when it comes to topics around religion, it, in age appropriate ways, it is simpler to talk about positive beliefs than negative beliefs, especially, you know, when she was three or four and her brain was in fantasy world most of the time.- Yeah.- The concept of real versus not real didn't exist. That's getting a lot, that's, that is there now, for sure. But that is, it is harder to talk about. It's, it turns out it's actually not that hard. You just need to do it. You just have to do it. And like Michael with it, I, I want Kylie to be a, to not be converted into any religion, she'd be able to defend herself in discussions with religious people that she encounters throughout her life, and to be respectful of people's beliefs. You didn't know about them to be respectful of them, to a certain extent.- Yeah, and yeah, and we do quite a bit of learning about other holidays and all sorts of stuff. Like that, that's a really, you know, mythology, you start with the easy one, Greek mythology, stuff that's not really around anymore, and you know, tied in with modern stuff. So, you know, I think we've done a good job of that. It's only, but we'll, we'll see, we'll see how it goes. You say not can, you know, you don't want her to ever be converted into a religion. There are many people who come home say, oh, guess what, I'm a, I'm a so and so now. And you did, one look at them and you're like, all right, what's the boy's name? Or what's the girl's name?'Cause it's like nine times out at 10. It's good because they want to go to church with somebody.- My niece did that. - Yep.- She went to a Baptist church for a year with a boyfriend. They broke up. - Yep.- She went back to being an atheist.- It's just, yeah. And that's totally to be expected. I do not know how well we will handle that when it happens, but, oh boy. We'll get there.(laughing) Like it was funny, man, it was probably about a year ago. I was in the living room. I had already done my part of the bedtime routine with Kylie. Lauren was in there with Kylie. And I'm overhearing Kylie getting very passionate about the goddess and how she couldn't talk to anybody who didn't believe, or if somebody told her they didn't believe in the goddess, she just wouldn't, she'd stop talking to them.(laughing)- Yeah. - So adamant.- Yes, little mother earth figure. And it was like, okay, that's understandable. From a six-year-old point of view, makes total sense. We kind of have come to that conclusion about believing in a sun god, or goddess. It's like that makes sense. Just wait until you hear about all the other stuff that's going on. Now you're gonna be like, but when I made up at when I was five, I made more sense, but yeah, okay, that's true. You haven't had hundreds of thousands of years to develop dogma.- Yep. - That's where it starts to get murky. And trying to figure out, wait, what am I supposed to do now, depending on what church you are visiting? I am not ready to expose Kylie to all that quite yet. It's one thing to sneak in the back and sit in the back and observe a service, but I'm not expecting her to know what to do if she ever goes to a Catholic service or a Baptist service or a wedding at a Protestant church versus a Muslim church versus, I mean, who knows?- Muslims have mosques.- Mosques, they have services at the mosque.- Yes. - So, there you go.- But they're not churches.- No, I meant to say services. But yeah, the secular parenting has a lot of ideals, I think, and not a whole lot of real world application. I love the idea of taking Kylie to all these different places and teaching her about all these different cultures and how they can positively interact with respect and love knowing that in a couple of years here, we're gonna have to teach her about the negatives and how to defend herself against that. I say a couple of years. It's gonna be a lot sooner than that. It just is.'Cause I remember having to deal with that in first second grade. The first kid that tells you you're going to hell and I can't be your friend is heartbreaking. Kylie's sweet. She'll bounce back, but how is the question? Never mind questions about where does life begin. Who's the first person? That was a recent one. It's like, who boy? Well, what do you mean by person? And that was started the whole... I believe we start with Australopithecus, see? I started with Adam, the idea of Adam, the idea of... I started with asking her what she thought a person was. Exactly. And then tearing it apart. I heard, and I work for a particular organization that has reflections at the starts of lots of meetings and sometimes those are religious and often they aren't. One of the most recent ones was amazing. And it was something to the effect of the first person was the first hominin who helped somebody else on a hunting trip with a broken leg, get back to camp and feed that person until he recovered. That at that point, we became people. Our ancestors became people. And so I told Kylie about that'cause I think that is a really good way of looking at it. I hated that answer, by the way. And I think she did too. That wasn't what she was asking. That is a good answer. So when did the animal become a part, when did we become self-aware enough? And that kind of thing, that's a different question than what was the first person? It was who was the first person, it was the question. Yeah. If she'd said what was the first person, then that would have been a different answer. You wouldn't have known to ask that. She wanted to know who, so... Showing her a line, he showed her a picture of all these reconstructed faces of fossils all the way back from... I don't even know the very first one. But there was probably about 10 of them. Their faces as they progressively got more and more human looking. So she pointed back to like one before and like the neanderthal. And it was the nose. I think it's the nose. I think it was how more reactive she thought looked human. And I'm like, there you go. You can argue that that was the first person'cause by then there were bipedal, bigger brains were starting to get the... There was some form of medicine. Some... Yeah, stuff like that. It was like, oh, that makes sense. Well, what about this one? And she's like, well, no, I'm like, well, why not? They were bipedal in the big brains for their size. So what is the difference? If you're just looking at a picture, that's not the full picture, you know? And then he brought up this humanity idea, this feeling, not only emphasizing, emphasizing, emphasizing, wow, words. Not only caring about your fellow people and your tribe, but actually putting in the effort and sacrifices to make sure that they survive during hardship, which is what this podcast is basically all about. That is a very good description for the first human in a humanist worldview. Whether or not that was a satisfactory answer, I'm still unclear on that. She seemed to be pretty much done with the conversation at that point. Yeah, and it will come up again. It's one that, I know she's absorbing this stuff. It's one that will need to come up again because, you know, who's the first of any species? It's so fuzzy. Mm-hmm. Who is the first homosapian? I have a name for it. We do have a name for it. We call them atoms or eaves. Well, and I did tell Kylie about the mitochondrial eve and the Y chromosome atom. She told our six year old about the mitochondrial eve, which most adults don't have a firm concept of. And I figure it out. I explain to her that that is the person from whom all current living humans, the woman that all living humans are descended from and that there was a Y chromosome atom who all living humans are also descended from and they were many thousands of years apart. Yeah, it wasn't the perfect partner there that created all of humanity. That would be quite a genetic bottleneck, which we've had several. So that would explain a lot. But it was just, it was a really interesting question. It was very thoughtful. And as per usual, I think we, our explanations went way over her head, but she surprises us all the time by coming back and quoting that stuff back at us sometimes months, sometimes years later. So. Oh, yeah. It was probably two or three weeks after,'cause that conversation was about two or three weeks after this other one. It was about two or three weeks after when we sat Kylie down and told her our beliefs about gods in the afterlife and whatnot. Where she, Lauren was running some errand. I worked from home, so I was at my desk working, Kylie, comes up to me and comments how it's kind of amazing that we don't believe in gods, but have a bunch of books about gods. Smart girl, very observant. She has several on her bookshelf. Yeah. Some of them are Greek mythology. The one in particular she was thinking about, which is literally something about gods written by a previous guest on the podcast. Hey. We should really get back on. So it was, yeah, she knows that one and that's one that talks about different gods and I explained to her that it's important to know about other cultures and talk to her about, you know, some of the cultural differences and, yeah, we just even lunch. So how, like, different cultural positions can and religious backgrounds, even if people that were in her kindergarten class can affect things like food and knowing about them, knowing about their beliefs and religion can help you be a better friend. You know, knowing not to cook up bacon if your Muslim classmate is coming over. Yeah, and that helped simplify the whole discussion. Well, you know that there is, you have several classmates with food preferences, you know, what is so-and-so's? What does she, what does she like to eat? Oh, she's, you know, she doesn't eat meat. That's right, she's vegetarian. She's vegetarian for religious reasons. It's not because she's allergic to meat or anything. It's because they choose not to and there's a whole cultural background here that helps explain that. And so we did and she's like, okay, I think I'm starting to get it. I'm like, yeah, you wouldn't want to invite them over and then hand them a hamburger. She's like, oh, no, that would be bad. I'm like, yeah, that would be bad. Like real bad. So if you know these things and learn about them, and then you can be a friend to more people. Yay, inclusion versus exclusion. Yeah. Versus some people who would go out of their way to bake a hamburger and then proceed to get upset when the vegetarian says, no, thank you. That's not the world I want to, nah, we're done with that. I want to be nicer than that. So we're going to raise a kid to be nicer than that.'Cause if you want to offend, you could offend Hindus, Muslims, and Jews with a bacon cheeseburger. Yeah. Or, you know, vegans,'cause they're basically religion too. It was a joke in our family that, you know, I have a brother and he came home and said he wanted to go to church camp and we're like, my dad's like barely blinked an eye. He's like, yeah, whatever. Came home, said he wanted to be vegan. Dad nearly threw him out. Like cheese. The things we choose to care about, especially as parents and kids come home and start pushing buttons. I don't know how I'm going to react to certain things, but I hope to keep an open mind, even though I know realistically that as we age, our minds don't do that. So we'll just do our best.(laughing) And I would also say I've continued to be careful to not present things as this is what Kylie needs to believe, but what I believe. Yes, and the way she talks has shown that. But I can, like, we had that disc, we kind of looked at each other at one time and it's just like, is that worth the effort though? It would be so much easier to say, no, this is what you believe too. No, really, you don't really believe that. You believe this because it's easier. And that's why everybody does it'cause it's so much easier. Can you imagine if you can deeply devout Christian family and your kids questioning whether or not that's real? Well, until they're out of the house too bad, you're going to church and you're just going to live like this because that's what we believe and it's easier. And we're already having to deal with your school schedule, trying to remember your friend's phone numbers and arrange play dates and now you're into sports. So, you know, there's that mess, you know, it's just too much. So you pick and choose your battles and when it comes to religion, I think it's easier for most parents to just take that easy, no, just do what we do until you're out of the house. Okay, except we see what happens to people when it goes bad. So, you know, you get kids who start questioning things, differing from their parents 13, 14 years old and if they say something wrong, they end up getting kicked out or they end up having strange relationships that go sound like really toxic for years'cause they can't escape or they blame their parents for something terrible'cause they won't sit down and talk about it and instead they just ignore the problem at the dinner table and just keep hating each other for years. It's like, oh man. A lot of missteps to worry about. So, yay, that's fun. That's parenting for ya.- And of course, you know, our kid just finished kindergarten. If any of you more experienced parents want to send some feedback in, it'd be greatly appreciated.- Oh yeah, we were less than a month away before we're gonna have to start talking about the Pledge of Allegiance thing again.(laughing)- Shrug, whatever, we'll pick our battles and figure it out. But in Idaho, at least we don't have the tank and mammoths on every classroom.- Yet.- Yet, but we'll see.- All right, so if you want to send us some feedback, you can do so at htotw.com/contact or send us an email contact at htotw.com. Use the SpeakPie button or leave us a voice message at 208-996-8667. If you want to support the show, you can find out how at htotw.com/donate and thank you Sally for the donation. And until next time, remember not all those who wander are lost.(upbeat music)(upbeat music)[BLANK_AUDIO]