Reply to DD 15 just won’t listen to reason!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We go to church every Sunday. As a family. Non-negotiable, sorry. That’s how it’s always been. When my DD 15 moves out of the house she can skip church if she’d like, she can join a monastery for all I care, but right now she lives with us and every Sunday you better believe she will be at church with us. End of discussion!

But she won’t listen to reason. She’s insisting that she’s an “atheist” and that somehow means she should be exempt from the family rule. Not how it works! She says that church makes her uncomfortable and has said that she has issues with “religion being homophobic.” Well our church isn’t, the minister’s daughter is married to a woman! But I can’t persuade her. It’s always a fight, every single week, and I’m just exhausted. How do I make my daughter understand why this is required?[/quote]

This is a tough one OP. We've had a similar rule and age 14-15 is where we've run into problems.

Does she have friends at church? Is there a youth group or Sunday school class for teens? This helps a lot. I've agreed to let mine skip church services if they go to Youth group, sunday school or something else instead.

[/quote]

Does her dad attend church with the family?

Supposedly, Dad in the home attending church regularly is the strongest indicator of whether teens, boys and girls both, attend church.

**********

An argument that got all my kids through that tern hump was that I posed this 2 part question to them, followed by my answer after they gave their answer.

The first question was, what happens if atheism is correct, and you still participate in our family's faith traditions without a fight?  I let them answer, then say that if atheism is correct, you don't lose anything by attending.  What you receive is a nice weekly tradition of a couple of hours spending time with our family, some really nice holiday traditions, a moral code that is just, kind, and reasonable, and a stronger grasp than most of your peers of world history, modern western law, and current events, through your understanding of Christianity and the Bible.

After they have a second to digest that, I then ask the second half of the question which is what if the atheists are wrong and I am correct?  For this question, I don't say anything else and let them stew on it.  4 kids and that question tends to move them to silence, with wheels turning in their brains.

That combination of questions makes them stop and think in a way that transcends tiktok, social media, and their peers.

4/4 and after those 2 questions, I have never again gotten pushback from my teens about attending church with the family.
[/quote]

Wow.

We are a family that attends church, including the majority of our teens, but if those questions worked you have done a terrible job raising children who think.

1).  This kid isn’t, for whatever reason, experiencing church as a “nice weekly tradition”, or their moral code as “just, kind, and reasonable.”  There are plenty of churches out there whose moral codes aren’t (note: I don’t even have to name my political opinion here, every Christian has heard things proclaimed in the name of Christ that they don’t believe or find reasonable) OP claims that her church isn’t homophobic based on the pastor’s daughter, when we know the homophonic people can have LGBTQ relatives.

2) The Bible is clear that the path to Jesus is belief, not attending church.  So if someone attends church and doesn’t believe then they will have the same experience and they didn’t attend church.

What has worked for us in adolescence is exploring with our kids what is important to them, and looking for a church that takes an active stance on those issues.  We did change churches, to one that takes a strong pro LGBT stance.  We also talked about other ways we can show our values.  Our kids do a lot of service, most of it unconnected to church.

Did it work perfectly?  No.  Sometimes our kids choose to sleep through church, or to schedule things during church.  But being crystal clear that their faith journey is their own, and that our love and acceptance have nothing to do with where they are on that journey, and avoiding power struggles and physical abuse, has worked for us in that we have kids who feel respected, and who in turn respect our beliefs.  [/quote]yes, of course, all these things.

But OP needs a rudimentary starting point.

FWIW, my kids all continue to attend church, including the young adults, with zero prompting.  Several have had high school friends who have converted or reverted based on their examples and ability to explain faith to kids raised with no faith in a way that makes sense.  We have had high school and college acquaintances ask to attend church with us.

If you are a church going Christian family in the DC area, then you are very much a minority and your kids are absolutely surrounded by peers who are atheist, evangelical atheist, agnostic, raised without religion, Christmas/Easter and cultural "christians" who place religion below sports, dance competitions, sleeping in and trips to starbucks, and former religious who actively rejected faith.

Social media is loaded with immense pressure to reject both faith and family.

My kids know theology, our faith, the Bible and faith traditions.  They are very well informed.

But when that whisper of atheism from their friends and social media creep in, you have to fight false emotiinally driven claims of "logic" that OPs daughter is espousing, with basic, rudimentary logic, to open the ears and heart that are currently slamming shut.

Right now, OP is just trying to get her foot in the door.

[/quote]

Non religious person here and you just reminded me why I love this area so much![/quote]

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