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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This may be OT, but how do you teach your child WHAT a religion is in the first place? It seems awfully abstract for children who take everything literally. Like if they learn a creation story, isn't that going to conflict with scientific explanation later? What do you tell them, there are just two stories and some people believe one . . . ?[/quote]

[b]I think you have to get your head around your own idea of religion first[/b]. We teach (and were taught by our own parents) that there are many stories of different faiths (and even within a single faith, variations on a story) to explain the world, and different people believe different things to different degrees. You can believe in a story down to the specific details, or believe in a story [b]conceptually but not literally.[/b] (This actually prompted a great conversation with my then-5yo about the difference between a story that you know is not true and a lie.)

Obviously, though, this doesn't work with a more rigid faith.[/quote]

1) I'm not sure what that has to do with it. You can be really clear in your head about a lot of things and not really think it's developmentally appropriate to introduce to a child that young.
2) RE: conceptually and not literally, how exactly to you explain this idea to a preschooler? Not being skeptical, just want to know how you break it down.[/quote]

PP you were responding to. I just meant that you need to know what it is you believe and want to teach before you can teach it to your child (and specifically, you and your partner need to be on the same page). If you don't know that, you won't know if it's appropriate to introduce it. Some people are very clear on their beliefs, but especially wrt religion, many people aren't, because they're still processing it for themselves.

I was surprised that my kids got literal vs. conceptual as easily as they did, though I'm sure it varies by kid. Literal is pretty easy because kids this age are very literal themselves--telling things as they actually are in the world. For conceptual we just talk about things that are representative of what happened, but not what actually happened. Where the Wild Things Are is one of my favorites for that--kids relate to the book really well, and it's a perfect jumping off point for what's real and what may not have actually happened, but is still true as far as how we think or feel about things. You can find a ton of picture books that use somewhat fantastical stories to explain feelings or real-world events or other ideas. For preschool age, you can always start by just asking "do you think that's how it really happened?" (and if not) "why do you think the book tells it that way?" The creation story is a good entry to this if you want to start talking about religion, assuming you are a household that believes in science and has talked about that too. My older kid was interested in origin stories generally (started with superheroes initially) so it was interesting to him to read different creation stories and talk about whether he thought they were real (and if not, why you might tell a story that way). He also really liked space and dinosaurs at that age so had learned things about those too that provided good reference points.

But, again, you first need to know what it is you want your child to take away from a conversation like that. Particularly if you do believe in religious texts as literal truths, that's a really different dialogue.[/quote]

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