What age to stop forcing teens to attend church?
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
Quoting myself here. Sometimes when I’m watching tv the videos from He gets us come up. They summarize how I feel about religion now. It’s not about going to church or the rituals or belonging to a specific religion. I am not affiliated with this group at all but just googled one. It’s just basically saying God and Jesus are everywhere and understand where we are at. https://youtu.be/YOcglZFlFM8 |
Anonymous
Why are you in this thread? OP is asking church attending families for balancing sports conflicts. This isnt the thread for religion bashing. |
Anonymous
It's not one or the other. Forcing kids to do something only you believe is strange |
Anonymous
All these so called christians are really just Christian nationalists, which are the same as MAGAs. |
Anonymous
I found the “persecution of Christian’s” thing to be both off topic and off outing too. OP - my suggestion is to drop the rope with DS and work with DH on coming to a common parenting view. This will continue to be an issue in your family over the next few years. May be about religion, or could very well be about something else. Point is that you should try to get on the same page as your DH about how to resolve how much choice/freedom to give your kid and what the signs of maturity are that will let you guys give him more of a voice. Goal obviously is to slowly substitute his judgement for yours over all aspects of his life over the next 5-10 years. |
Anonymous
|
OP here and my last update. Thank you everyone!
I was already feeling like sports was going to take priority for DC and we were already losing that fight with him. DH and I sat down with DC about a compromise on how to make Sunday services work and DC admitted that he needed a break from services beyond sports. We agreed to reevaluate Sunday services after his sports season is over. He still enjoys his evening youth group and agreed to continue for now. From this conversation, it was clear he's wrestling with some feelings of doubt and I think remaining good examples as a family without forcing is the best guide for him at the moment. Many more conversations to have, but I came out of this feeling like we were in a better place and that we can figure it out. |
Anonymous
| 15 |
Anonymous
| When you decide you prefer to let people be themselves and have a preference for world peace. |
Anonymous
|
We are Catholic and said kids should go through Confirmation and after that, it is up to them. As a sponsor, I had to attend a Confirmation 'retreat" last weekend. The speaker had some good messages but I had a hard time getting over her focus on sins and telling a room of 8th graders that maturation is a sin. She wasn't even an old speaker. Sorry to go off topic but I find the Catholic church harder to defend to my kids everyday.
Anyway, with our approach our older kid who is 16 no longer attends unless it is a family event. Our kid who is currently getting confirmed says he will definitely still attend but not miss travel tournaments for mass. Some our all day Sat and Sun. I would probably encourage my teens to attend more if we had a more liberal parish nearby or perhaps we need to find a different Christian religion. Our local Catholic churches have made a point to say that lgbtq people are "sinning" and any non-procreative sex is a sin. One is sending emails about the "evils" of yoga and meditation. I can't see how the church still exists in a few decades. |
Anonymous
| ^^ masturbation not maturation |
Anonymous
Try an Episcopal church, you might feel more comfortable there, and no chance they would be telling a confirmation class that masturbation is a sin. |
Anonymous
Using "immediately after confirmation" was the point where they get to decide seems to strange to me. Confirmation should be the point, and if they don't want to continue, there should be no pressure to go through the confirmation process. it's the very nature of the ceremony. I get that there may be consequences, if as adults, they return to the church, but it feels like they already have a built-in point in the process where we say "okay, you were baptized by your parents, put in CCD by your parents, brought every sunday to church by your parents, but now, we are going to confirm that you really want to do this going forward" That seems like the right place to let them stop, not right after! |
Anonymous
| Insisting kids attend church for any other reason than to be polite to grandparents on occasion, be at funerals, etc. is worthless. Do you really need to make the whole family pretend to believe in a cartoon man in the sky and beyond that nonsense, devote actual time to publicly acting out the pretending? Come on. Let it go. |
Anonymous
Yeah, I mean my five year old hates baths. Why would I ever bathe him? |
Anonymous
|
For us, as much as we hated it, we told her that not going to church was not usually an option but that we were making as exception in this case.
We made sure she understood how much it meant to us. We gave up what we loved for a season. Next season, she was ok with missing Sunday morning games. You may need to show you are willing to let go of your rigidness for the time being while showing your firmness in your belief |