{"id":547,"date":"2004-09-02T09:23:33","date_gmt":"2004-09-02T17:23:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2004\/09\/02\/instilling-religious-values-in-children\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:20:29","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T00:20:29","slug":"instilling-religious-values-in-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2004\/09\/02\/instilling-religious-values-in-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Instilling Religious Values In Children"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>I&#8217;ve been watching a number of very religious parents attempting to instill proper religious attitudes in their children.  I know the parents&#8217; motives are sincere, but let&#8217;s get real.&nbsp; You can&#8217;t just tell children never to be angry and expect they will grow up to be loving persons. You can&#8217;t tell children they always have to share, to give up personal space and boundaries, to put everybody else&#8217;s needs before their own, and then expect them to grow up with wide-open hearts.&nbsp; It just won&#8217;t happen &#8212; not on the inside.<\/p>\n<p>You <b>can<\/b> teach children to behave somewhat ethically by grounding them in a lot of rules and regulations that control how they act in specific situations.&nbsp; Even when it comes about by suppressing all their inner nasty, wicked thoughts and resentments, children reared this way <em>do<\/em> end up functioning as responsible and socially moral adults.&nbsp;I just wish you could see the emotional junk buried beneath that outer shell of righteous goodness. <\/p>\n<p>It seems a lot more sane to acknowledge and accept honest feelings &#8212; then take a look afterward at options, at acceptable ways in which the child can respond.&nbsp; How wonderful if we could teach children to be personally responsible for their social interactions, and free them up so they could use religion as a source of comfort and inspiration.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;<a title=\"psychic, spiritual, mystic, intuitive experiences - Journal \" href=\"http:\/\/jneumann.squarespace.com\/\">The Skeptical Mystic<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I agree wholeheartedly, and I couldn&#8217;t have said it better.  (The author left a comment on a recent post, and I&#8217;m very excited to have found her blog.  It looks juicy!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been watching a number of very religious parents attempting to instill proper religious attitudes in their children. I know the parents&#8217; motives are sincere, but let&#8217;s get real.&nbsp; You can&#8217;t just tell children never to be angry and expect they will grow up to be loving persons. You can&#8217;t tell children they always have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,30,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities","category-quotes","category-social-science"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12853,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions\/12853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}