Other blog closed

Just wanted to mention that for a number of reasons I've stopped blogging at daddychip, and have closed the blog, removing it from public viewing. If you're a regular reader and want access to the archives, drop me a line daddychip [at] gmail.com

Mother Talk Blog Book Tour Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion

A few months ago, in a post entitled "Kids vs. Religion," I argued that kids don't need religion. Then a few weeks ago I was asked to take part in the Mother Talk blog book tour on the book Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion, edited by Dale McGowan. The book looked interesting so I agreed.

The book has its good points, and the pieces in the anthology are all very readable. There are some useful suggestions, and a few thought-provoking pieces. But I have to say that overall, I was disappointed. And since the other reviews of the book on the blog book tour have all been pretty much positive, let me express some of the problems I had with the book.

First, on a positive note, a few of the chapters directly illustrate why it's so important for a strict separation between church and state, and for active acceptance of all beliefs and disbeliefs. Most striking to me in this regard was the piece by Margaret Downey on the experiences of her child in different Boy Scout troops, where he was bullied into declaring a religion for his family. When the family refused, he was expelled from troops less tolerant than the one he'd belonged to in New Jersey. This has certainly clarified for me why the Boy Scouts should not be receiving any kind of government assistance, including the use of public school facilities.

The book seems however to have several themes that strike me as problematic.

One of them is the strong fear expressed by a number of authors that children of nonbelievers will be "indoctrinated" into believing in God. This fear seems to be misplaced.

My wife and I are not believers, though we were both raised in religious traditions -- her family was Episcopalian, mine was Catholic. As I blogged before, for various reasons when the kids were little we nevertheless started going to the local Catholic church and sending them to Sunday school. Yet despite this, and although we did not present ourselves to them as nonbelievers, both of my kids have ended up as nonbelievers. The best indoctrination efforts of the Catholic church -- in my case seven years of Catholic school plus several more of religious ed -- failed to indoctrinate me or my children.

My point is I don't think it is quite so easy to indoctrinate children into beliefs contrary to their parents' belief systems. The fear that children are so easily indoctrinated by outside forces seems overplayed. Even my mom, a very religious Catholic, sent two of my siblings off to Baptist summer day camp, secure in the knowledge that any "indoctrination" they received wouldn't really have much effect. And it didn't.

In my own case, not only did my Catholic schooling not produce a believer; my nonbelief was absolutely not the result of indoctrination -- where I grew up, there was no such thing as an atheist or even an agnostic. I just never believed all the stuff I was taught.

A second problem I see with the overall approach of the book is the degree to which the church model seems to be the one being emulated. Nontheistic congregations such as some Unitarian Univeralist (UU) churches are held up as a model. On the one hand, this is understandable. Church-going is one form of American sociability. Yet on the other hand, this seems forced.

Plenty of Americans, even religious ones, get along just fine without attending church services. At least 40 percent of Americans – including many believers -- never attend church, or go only once a year. In other developed countries, the figures for church attendance are drastically lower.

Given these numbers, it is clear that one can live a full life with social connections and have nothing to do with a church. So I am not sure why nontheistic writers feel the need to emulate Christianity by focusing on weekly services, especially since doing so reinforces the claim of religionists that religious communities are vital to being a full human being. This seems like a message we wouldn't want to send our children.

As I've written before, I do believe that for cultural reasons alone our kids need to be familiar with religion and religious texts, and even be comfortable in church services. And it's probably best to learn about religions from their believers; this is a problem I had with the UU Sunday school that my children briefly attended, where other religions were explained and described in ways that I can only describe as unintentionally condescending. This isn't addressed by the authors, many of whom would probably see believers providing information about their religions as endangering their children.

Finally, there seems to be a need among a number of the authors to establish a "free-thinking" identity. Again, this is perhaps an understandable reaction in a society where religious identity is often foregrounded. But it also seems, ironically, to put way too much emphasis on God, to define oneself with reference to a deity -- in this case denying that deity -- thereby reinforcing a theistic frameing.

And one small additional point: the label "free-thinking" is so reminiscent of the all-too-many holier-than-thou (so to speak) upper middle class liberals who populate the region where I live, who, whether they realize it or not, exude a class-based elitism or snobbery.

Perhaps I am spoiled. I am raising my kids in a town in the Northeast USA where religion is not really an issue. Most of the people we know don't attend church, and many are probably nonbelievers. And none of it is a big deal. We don't discuss it, it's not part of our identities, it's just not really significant or relevant to our lives. Perhaps if one is living in a town surrounded by fundamentalists, where you are an embattled minority, this book will provide solace and even some ideas.

Overall though, I feel that unintentionally the book is reinforcing a religionist way of identifying and of seeing the world.

Cross posted at Daddy Dialectic

Kids vs. religion

Do kids need religion?

No.

It really isn't necessary or possible to force children to believe in "god," in either a general or particular way. Moreover, morality, ethics, and being a good person don't depend on religion or belief in god.

I myself was raised in a religious family. I went to church every Sunday from birth until I left home to go to college. I went to a religious elementary school, and went to religious education classes when I was in public middle and high school. I took courses in theology as an undergraduate at a religiously-based university.

But I never felt like I actually believed that any of the stories I was told were literally true. I could see that they were parables and lessons, that they were stories that made philosophical, ethical, and moral points -- not all of which were very moral or ethical (for example the numerous genocides commanded by the Yahweh).

As for the theology, I never actually believed that there is a "god" somewhere out there micromanaging or even watching over humanity, much less having "personal relationships" with individual humans.

But then came kids. My wife was raised in a different Christian faith tradition, but she feels much the same way as I do about religion. We talked a lot about what to do. We ended up having both kids baptized at the church I was raised in -- largely for the sake of my parents and grandparents. And it gave us an excuse to have the extended family get together.

When my daughter reached kindergarten age, we began going to church, and she went to Sunday school, as did my son when he reached that age. My daughter made her first penance and first communion. I think that we both felt it would be good to do this, despite our own non-belief.

But I found this position increasingly untenable. I didn't believe, I had never believed, yet I was asking my kids to go through the motions.

We tried other churches, but we didn't feel comfortable in them either, mainly because they were so religious and were talking about god all the time (of course, what did we expect?).

So we decided that it was best to be honest with ourselves and with our kids. We stopped going to church, and stopped trying to get our kids to go through the motions.

They had early on proclaimed their atheism -- I'd had to ask them not to argue with the Sunday school teachers about this -- which was one of the issues that led us to this decision.

Unfortunately, in this society, I need to add this: My kids are moral and ethical, they have very strong senses of right and wrong, and though they are not perfect, they are great kids and will be wonderful adults.

(Of course, the very fact that I feel like I have to say this indicates how our society views nonbelievers. If I was religious and a believer, I wouldn't even have to tell you about my kids' morality and ethics...)

Morality and ethics do not come out of religion. We all know people who are immoral and unethical who were also believers. And there are plenty of nonbelievers who are moral and ethical.

The sense of ethics, the belief that there are right and wrong ways to treat other people, comes, I believe, from how we see our parents and significant others act as we are growing up. Adults model behavior to kids, regardless of religious belief. As they grow up, children absorb the values of the people raising them. Kids learn by being told, and talked to, and having things explained to them: Why some things are right, and why some things are wrong; why some people do bad things; why others are selfless.

Kids also learn by watching what their parents and care givers do, how they act, how they live their lives, apart from the words.

But I also believe that there is an innate sense of morality and ethics. I know plenty of people whose parents were awful, yet who themselves turned out to be great people.

To me that indicates that there is some level of morality that is part of the package of being human. Perhaps these people also were lucky enough to have other adults in their lives who reinforced their inner moral senses.

Given this, I believe that morality and ethics don't come from believing in god, or from being attached to a particular religious community. Those values come from within, and they are reinforced by the way adults explain what's right and wrong, and how those adults themselves behave.

When I was talking to my 15-year old daughter CB about this, she said she thinks that nonbelievers are actually more moral: they do the right thing not because of a fear of punishment in the afterlife, but just because it's the right thing to do. I wouldn't say that all believers do the right thing only out of fear; but for those who do, I think CB's reasoning is right on target.

That said, I do believe it is important for my kids to be familiar with the various religious mythologies that are part of our cultural heritage. My kids know the Bible stories, are familiar with the Jesus stories, the saints and other aspects of Christian religious belief. They are also familiar with other religious traditions, as well as the basics of the mythologies of ancient Greece and Rome.

I see this knowledge as important for purely cultural reasons. You cannot understand a large part of European literature and art if you don't know the background stories coming out of Christianity and Judaism. You cannot understand the politics of large parts of the US if you don't have some basic knowledge of Christianity.

But kids don't have to believe that the stories of Christianity are actually true, any more than they need to believe the ancient Roman or Greek myths.

Of course we're lucky to live in a community that is pretty progressive, which is not dominated by Christian fundamentalism, and in which my kids know other kids who are also not believers. But given the outright hostility to atheists in US society, I have also had to warn my kids to be careful, to not discuss their beliefs with people unless they know them.

While I have no problem with other people believing whatever they want to believe -- as long as they don't try to force it on me -- I also think it's important to recognize that kids don't need to have a belief in god, anymore than they need to believe in santa claus or the easter bunny. They need to have parents who instill in them their values, a sense of responsibility and empathy towards other human beings, and who walk the walk as well as they talk the talk.

So if you're feeling uncomfortable raising your kids in an atmosphere of religious belief, act on your own beliefs and instincts. Kids are just fine without god or religion.

Crossposted at Daddy Dialectic

Children and choice

Last week the website Momsrising.org flagged an article and discussion in the Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper about their "Motherhood Manifesto," which argues for, among other things, quality childcare, universal health insurance for children, and other public policies to support children and their parents.

The article attracted an interesting discussion at the paper's website, including criticisms of the notion that society should provide anything to parents and children. The argument was that having kids is a choice: "Why should I have to pay for your choice?"

The most common response, including the main response from MomsRising.org, was a kind of utilitarian logic, that kids are the future of our society, and these policies are "an investment" in the future:

Some Seattle PI readers are calling policies like healthcare for all kids, access to childcare, and paid family leave, "More special rights just for making a CHOICE...." The "choice" being to have children. This type of thinking glosses over an essential fact that children are an investment every society must make; otherwise there won't be a future at all for that society (we'd go extinct!).

But I don't think we should have to justify societal support for children by focusing on their future benefits to individuals or to society as a whole, because doing so opens up a bunch of questions along these lines: are those kids who are destined to go on to be more "productive" more worthy of support than others?

This kind of utilitarian calculation is a slippery slope, and ignores a much more basic and fundamental reason to support kids and their parents.

For me the more compelling argument is that children are human beings who did not themselves choose to come into this world. If we are a society that claims to be civilized, we owe these helpless humans some basic things.

We as a society don't say that disabled adults who are unable to contribute to the economy should just fend for themselves, and that if their families are unable or unwilling to do so, that's just tough luck.

So when it comes to children, I think the most convincing argument is just this: not that they are future economic producers, or that they are "the future of society," but that they are human beings, regardless of what their parents did or did not do, who their parents are, how "irresponsible" they are, which choices they made or did not make. These kids are not themselves responsible for their situation.

That's the most important reason to provide universal health care, quality day care, decent public education, and other "benefits" -- or rather, minimum basic standards -- to all children. That's why these things, far from being "benefits," should actually be seen as basic rights.

Looked at through this lense, those who are whining about "having to support other peoples' kids" should consider that this is about basic standards of decency: how a society treats its most vulnerable.

But even granted this, why should parents, people who "choose" to have children, get "benefits"?

Our society has decided that families are the main support group for children. Part of the way we assure these basic standards for children is therefore by providing support not just directly to the children, but to their families as well.

Through this lense, the question then becomes, what is the best way for us as a society to ensure basic standards of decency to all children? And part of the answer is to provide resources and support to their families.

I think that few people would whine and complain about the fact that parents of severely disabled adults are the beneficiaries of government programs to help them care for their adult child.

So I see it as a very sad commentary on the state of human decency in this country that anyone would be so grudging about providing minimum standards of decency to the most helpless members of our society, our children.

On Edit: A similar discussion is going on in reaction to two blog posts by Joan Blades of MomsRising.org over at the Huffington Post: Should Societies Support Mothers Raising Children, and Indiscriminate Breeders!?!.

Cross-posted at Daddy Dialectic

Raising kids and social change

A few posts back in a comment Justin questioned whether being home full time with our kids is actually "social change work"; he argued that it was not, and that raising our kids is not the most important job in the world. In his words it is "important but not revolutionary."

I have to say I disagree.

By revolution, I am assuming Jason means bringing about social change "from below," that is, building consciousness and support among real people. I think anyone talking about "revolution" in the US these days is probably actually referring to this form of change rather than the traditional meaning of the word, which involves actual violence.

And it is exactly in this goal of bringing about social change "from below" where we as parents play a crucial role. There are two ways we do so, one direct, one indirect.

The direct way involves a number of discrete elements. The first is that by spending time with our kids we show them through our actions that we are commited to them, that they are important to us. This gives them the confidence and psychological health to act on their principles in the face of a society that is hostile to those principles and values.

If we let our kids be raised by societal norms, we are doing the opposite of progressive, positive activism. Raising progressive kids requires being very proactive, being very involved in our kids' lives, talking to them from the earliest days about the values that we believe are important, about the changes that need to happen in our society, and living those values.

For me, the foundation or prerequisite to doing that was to be an involved father. First and maybe most directly, in the area of gender relations: if we want to bring about change in that area, we have to not only talk the talk, but walk the walk.

As a guy, I can thinking of nothing more subversive of "traditional" conservative values than the fact that I chose to stay home full-time with my daughter for the first two years of her life; that I chose to downsize career ambitions to spend time with my kids and to be more involved in their lives than I could have if I had followed my earlier ambitions. I understand that in many ways my ability to do this is related to my class privilege and educational background. Nevertheless, I think that exactly because of those factors, and the resultant fact that I had many other options, it is important for me to take steps to undermine gender hierarchies in the eyes of my kids as well as in my wider community.

Apart from gender, it takes a lot of work to deconstruct or innoculate our kids against the insidious right-wing values that suffuse our culture and society. I'm proud that, for example, my kids actively question US nationalism, that they understand that poverty and injustices are not the fault of the victims but rather of the structure of our society and economy. Getting them to that point is important work. Without this kind of work, social change is much less likely to occur.

So while Justin feared that spending time in the nuclear family is a conservative value, in fact I'd argue that it's a key way to spread progressive values. One reason conservatives cocoon is to be sure that their children absorb their values. In that sense, by not seeing family as vitally important, progressives abandon a major area of work. But unlike for conservatives, whose focus is on a competitive, disempowering individualism, for progressives the family is just the start, it's the foundation of building a conception of solidarity, the only way that social change will come about.

Indirectly, family time is crucial because activists and others committed to progressive social change need a private life. Like all humans, we need love and affection, joy and enjoyment, in order to maintain energy, motivation, and perspective. Nothing energized me more to work for social change than the time I spent with my children: directly, because I realized they are going to be living in the world we create; and indirectly, because of the energy and strength I get from those relationships.

Raising our kids as progressives is a revolutionary act. Dads staying home full time, dads being very involved in their kids' lives, is a revolutionary act. It is the most important job, it is social change work. Unless we model our commitment to a better world, including in the very concrete context of our immediate families, our kids will be much less likely to internalize the kinds of values that will lead them, in turn, to push for progressive social change when they grow up.

As Steve Earl says, the revolution starts ... Now.

Cross posted at Daddy Dialectic

Guest blogger:Frilly dresses and gender

Jo(e) over at writing as jo(e) blogged a couple of days ago about little girls and frilly dresses. She also included a link to great video clip of "Peanut" perched inside her dad's car engine helping him do work on the engine.

A friend read the post and sent me their reaction. I asked if I could put it up on my blog, they said fine. So here's the post (you may want to head over to Jo(e)'s to read her post and the comments, and check out the video, first):

I had a slightly different reaction to that clip, although I liked it too.

I agree, girls get the message early that pleasing looks are a critical element of female value – and part of that message is instilled by the frills and dressing up stuff. It is commonly accepted that over-emphasis on appearance diminishes girls’ growth in other aspects of self, such as competence in math and science. This is a kind of gender oppression which negatively impacts women’s job skills and educational qualifications, thereby cheating them out of a fair share of resources and power in our culture. OK.

I used to think if we could get rid of the dresses and make up, it would solve the problem.

In recent years, I have a new focus for the problem of gender-identity oppression. Now, most girls and women flow fluidly between fancy dresses and jeans, and this flexibility carries over to other dimensions of identity. Recent data shows that girls are now achieving parity or exceeding male achievement in many areas of education (math, science, college, etc) - and they are doing all this with frills, fingernail polish, and makeup, as well as jeans!

So if women enter the job market as qualified as men, why do they still get lower job pay and advancement. One main reason is that women usually take on more child/home care than men. Rather than speculating why women take on more domestic responsibilities, the question to me is, “Why don’t men pick up more of these responsibilities?”

Answer? I believe that men learn early to devalue emotional expressiveness and social connectedness, so they leave the tasks that require these qualities to female partners who pay the price in their own careers.

To tie it all back to the frilly dress phenomenon, I think it is a natural human trait to enjoy elaborate, frilly, colorful things, including, on occasion, fancy clothing. I remember that my son wanted a pretty bathing suit like his sister’s when he was little – only to be crushed when he saw the “boy” style bathing trunks that I had purchased. He really wanted a bright purple one piece!

For me, the frilly dress problem isn’t about girls dressing up - it’s that we allow that privilege only to females. The prohibition of expressive clothing is just one more way to limit male emotional expression and connectedness.

Maybe the way to address gender inequities at the adult level is to encourage boys to broaden their forms of self-expression, including dress. Maybe then we’d raise men who were willing to invest more energy into relationships and child-rearing.

Like that Dad in the video clip.

Posted by Anonymous Guestblogger

Fear and 9/11

This is a repost from a year and a half ago, as apt as ever I believe...

Panthergirl just posted a great photo she took in New York City a couple of days after 9/11. It's a shot of an equestrian statue in Union Square that is covered with signs calling for peace: The Peace Shrine. (She's also posted an iMovie of other photos she took that same day, be sure to check them out).

My reaction to that particular photo is sadness and anger.

I lived in Manhattan for ten years. My daughter was born there. We loved living there, we loved New York. When I go back I feel like I'm returning home. When the attacks occurred on 9/11, my son BK, who was then 7, had a pair of Lego Twin Towers that he'd built the year before sitting on his bedstand (next to a Lego Citibank building). When I told him what had happened, he got tears in his eyes.

I also know that lots of people in this country hate New York City. I grew up with those people. For them -- usually conservatives and republicans -- New York represented everything they despised: immigrants, blacks, hispanics, liberals, crime, welfare, you name it. These people detested New York, they saw it as un-American, as not part of the US. Bashing and sneering at New York was a favorite pasttime of conservative politicians and pundits.

And then came 9/11.

People who only the day before had hated New York, who saw it as a pit of hell that deserved to rot, suddenly became self-appointed spokesmen for the city. They used the tragedy of New York and New Yorkers to stoke hatred, anger and fear in the US population. They used New York as a prop, as a stage set, to enact their own agenda of fear. They used New York's tragedy as an excuse to wage wars that killed innocent people, people with absolutely no connection whatsoever to the attacks of 9/11.

What was most striking about 9/11 was how different the reaction of New York was from much of the rest of the country. The picture over at Panthergirl's blog is an example. Yes, people were angry at the hijackers and bin Laden, and they wanted them brought to justice. They were appalled at the attack on the towers, they grieved for the dead and wounded. The many photos of missing loved ones plastered all over the city attested to that. They grieved for the towers themselves.

But they did not call for nuking all "Arabs." They did not call for lashing out in violence against the rest of the world. On the contrary, one of the slogans I'll always remember is "our grief is not a cry for war."

As soon as I heard about the attacks, I knew exactly what was going to happen. And it did happen.

Those who until yesterday had hated New York, and who on 9/11 suddenly became its self-appointed avengers, used New York's tragedy to ram their extremist agenda down our throats. They tried to coopt New York's tragedy, to use it as a stick with which to silence their opponents. All in the name of "keeping us safe." They hijacked New York's tragedy and have been using it ever since to get their extremist agenda through. And at the same time, they've been cutting every program that helps cities, including New York, that helps people who live in cities. Even "homeland security" funding has become yet another way to siphon money from liberal parts of the country into areas that supported Bush. Cities and urban populations are still the enemies of these conservatives.

That's why that photo made me angry. It reminded me of how the right has taken a tragedy that brought out the best in New Yorkers, and have manipulated it in order to bring out the worst in this country. And New Yorkers know this. That's why Bush received only 17% of the vote in Manhattan.

Although these people have used and stoked fear in order to try to manipulate us, the biggest fear that I have is the results of this cynical political strategy, and what it will mean for the kind of society our children will be living in when they grow up. That's why it's so important to explain this to our kids. It's never too early to let them know about the politics of fear, to try to innoculate them against the cynicism that uses human tragedy to impose extremist, anti-people policies on our entire society.

Update: And as we're seeing now, in the runup to this next election, the cynical manipulation of this tragedy by the republicans continues...