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Unlike many other pagan groups, Numenists have always raised our children as Numenists. For us, it was the only thing to do. Everyone around us raised their children in their religion, so of course we raised our children in our religion.
We took a few hints from our Jewish neighbors, who understood both the importance of raising one’s children in one’s religion and being a minority religion that sometimes faced bigotry, harassment, misunderstandings, and even persecution. Persecution was never something we expected to face. After all, we live in the US. But bigotry, harassment, and misunderstandings we accepted as potential problems in raising our children up in our own beliefs.
Paganism, when it became more numerous and visible, was clearly an adult oriented religion. Children were few and far between – an oddity in a religion that was presumably fertility-based, and definitely sexually focused. When children did begin to make appearances at Gathers and Pagan events, they were either left to their own devices while the parents did Paganish things, or they were herded into Children’s Enclaves and given children’s things to do – much of which wasn’t very Pagan but was very reminiscent of fairs and kindergarten.
Even now, more than 40 years after Paganism gained a strong foothold in the US, many parents still hesitate to raise their children as Pagans. Those parents who do choose to raise their children as Pagans seem to feel they must cluster together, and to hide what they are doing from the general public. Usually, they say it’s because they don’t want their children to face persecution. In reality, their children won’t be facing persecution (except for that one case where the divorce judge stipulated that the parents couldn’t expose their son to “non-mainstream religions” – that is the only clear-cut case of persecution in the US), what they’ll face is harassment, bigotry, misunderstanding, and bullying – all things many children face, and sadly, things an increasing number of children face not because of religion but because of a lack of manners and standards in the schools and in society at large.
Raising your child in your religion doesn't force the child to adhere to it for life.
Small children are confused by too many choices, and are comforted by modeling themselves after their parents - and that includes religious behavior.
Teens are different. They've pretty much already been raised, if parents did things mostly right (hey, we all make mistakes, maybe some day I'll tell you a few of mine), and they will explore other religions then. If their parents gave them a decent (or even superficial) grounding in their religious beliefs, then the teen has a starting point and a base for comparisons for their explorations and they are less likely to flounder or be sucked in by cons - and religious cons do exist out there for all religions.
If the parents are serious about their religous beliefs, and they bar their child from learning about it, the message they send is that their child isn't important or good enough to share that part of their lives. When the child is old enough to realize other children are being raised in their parents' religion, but they aren't, how do you suppose this will make them feel? Worse yet, they'll learn about your religion filtered through the mouths of children who not only know next to nothing about it, but will pass on their parents' misconceptions. Would you like your children to believe you eat babies at Christmas and are luring other children to evil, or are saving you up for a virgin sacrifice to Satan? That's just a few of the things some of Chantria's friends used to believe of her and us.
There's nothing wrong with "being pagan by default", no more than "being Baptist by default" or "being Jewish by default" or even "being atheist by default", if that's how the parents and family are.
"The religion of the parents" means exactly that - to whatever degree the parents adhere to their religion, whether that's a different religion for each parent or if the parents change religions as the children age.
Parents are under no obligation to raise their child in every religion that exists either within their extended family or within the community or the world - that's something most children will explore when they are teens or decide for themselves when they are adults.
The parents' only real obligation is to raise their children. Religion is but one component of all the things a parent needs to impart to their children.
If the parents adhere to any religion at all, it just makes sense to be aware that children will model on that religion whether the parents consciously choose to share it or not. It makes sense, then, to deliberately include your child in your religion (whatever it is) so the child gets the information from a (presumably) trusted source, and not from taunts and horror stories on the playground.
There are many excellent methods for dealing with the various problems children will face when raised among a disparate group of other children. The nursery rhyme so many parents quote to their children to assuage hurt feelings is a lie, and not one we have ever pushed on our children. Words do hurt, and they can cause pain that lasts years beyond when the memory of a broken arm fades away. Words lacerate in areas harder to reach and heal, and the echo of those words haunts us for decades.
The first thing we propose is for the parents to learn how to hold a confrontation, how to be verbally defensive, how to be parentally assertive. Parents must first know their rights and the laws of the city in which they live. At least one of the parents needs to be active in the school if the child(ren) attend a public school – as a volunteer, as a PTSA member, as an advocate, on the school board, or highly visible. The parent, at the very least, needs to know the name of the principal, the secretaries at the school, the school counselor, and the child(ren)’s teachers. It also helps to know the names of their classmates.
One method we used to good effect has now been barred to modern parents – the class treats. There may still be a few schools which allow parents to bring snacks and treats for a class, but even there, they may be limited in what they can provide. We brought cupcakes, sweet rolls, cookies, and juice to share. Nowadays, perhaps they’ll still allow the juice, but the treats would have to be vastly different: ants onna log [1], perhaps? For those schools that disallow all snacks and treats, I suppose coordinating with the teacher to provide a lesson-oriented fun activity might be a good substitute.
The second thing we propose is for the family to be involved in community activities – neighborhood clean-ups, block parties, neighborhood association, neighborhood park play supervisor, 4th of July activities, city anniversary activities, city counsel meetings, and other local community events. For many, simply being present at the event is sufficient. Others may require a bit more commitment.
You see, raising one’s children in a minority religion isn’t limited to just the family – it extends to the community, too. If nothing else, it helps put faces to people, takes them out of the realm of the unknown. It’s much harder to cast someone as the devil when they’ve painted little kids’ faces with butterflies at the Peach Festival, or won a blue ribbon for that apple pie at the county fair, or helped raise funds to replace the children’s play equipment at the elementary school, or spent hours helping Tommy learn to read. And parents are less likely to shrug it off when Billy bullies Sunshine if Sunshine and her parents are known to them. And police are more likely to be helpful in cases of vandalism if they’ve seen the family helping out at the 4th of July parade and fireworks.
Other, lesser things would be paying utility bills on time, keeping the yard clean and mowed (this seems to be a really sore spot with many cities), and obeying noise ordinances and parking restrictions in neighborhoods (my neighborhood doesn’t allow any street parking between 7:00 a.m. and 3 p.m.).
With these ducks in a row, the rest is really quite easy, and fun.
When the religious activity is age-appropriate, let the child observe or participate. In Numenism, our celebrations and ceremonies are quite child-friendly. It wasn’t intentional, but we’ve used it to good advantage.
We don’t celebrate the same seasons most Pagans do, so our holy days are out of kilter with the rest of the Pagan scene, but how we do them can still be applied to most other Pagans.
Storytelling: Every celebration should have a story to accompany it. Children love stories, so this should always be a part of any celebration children attend. Be dramatic, play it up, use props and sound effects. It’s easy to make felt story boards, and lots of hobby shops carry felt cut outs in many shapes. A pair of scissors and some felt will remedy any gaps.
Nature Walks: Even in cities, there’s an abundance of wildlife. Walk around your neighborhood and get to know it well. Collect pine cones and acorns and sweet gum balls that fall into the street. You may find maple seeds, too, and dandelions are always fun. Few people object to others collecting dandelion puffs or flowers.
Make ‘n’ Takes: Children love to make things. Scraps of paper and yarn, glue, feathers, natural materials collected on nature walks, and other such things can be used for children to make things that relate to the story of a religious celebration.
Food: Children can help make, and certainly will love eating, special foods for celebrations. If you don’t have special ritual or celebration foods, it’s the setting and context that’s important.
Things: Children are enamored of things. We don’t use wands or athames in our rituals, but we can sometimes create really elaborate altars, so our children have always built altars. We also have shrines, and the children are encouraged to leave offerings at them, to create songs and dances and such for the shrine inhabitants. The internet is filled with wonderful coloring pages, so if you’ve a good printer and a connection, you can download and put together nice coloring books. There are some really good coloring books for sale as well, and I highly recommend supporting your fellow Pagans by buying the books.
Games: We have lots of games we play with our children. We designed Story Cards that hold the elements of our beliefs in picture form, and let the children use them to create stories. We let them play with the felt story board. We have special games to enhance their spiritual connections and to develop their senses and skills of observation. We have chant games and cooperation games and solitary games.
Pretends: Children of all ages like to play dress-up, so we have a box of dress up things they can wear to pretend to be assorted numena and divinities, to re-enact the religious stories they hear at our celebrations, and to re-enact the fairytales that most appeal to them. We’ve written plays for the stories of our religion, and encourage the children to learn them and enact them upon stages – the park has a lovely amphitheater we use for this at times, and other times, we use the patio of the Community Center or a living room. Role playing games are also a hit, and we've designed many campaigns that fit both our beliefs and their desire to play.
Collecting: Some children are really big on collecting things: coins, stamps, bugs, leaves, rocks, whatever. We like to relate what they collect with our beliefs where possible, so in their collection books, they add religious oriented poems and brief stories that tie in with whatever they’ve collected.
Books: An amazing number of books are suitable for children to read. The list is far too long to post here. Read to them at bedtime. Let them read to themselves. Help them write their own books. Making a book is a simple thing, especially if you have a computer. You can use a Word document or Pagemaker or any other type of publishing software. If you have a digital camera or a scanner, the children can create their own art to go along with the stories. Print them out, sew them together, and set them inside pieces of cardboard that have been covered with wall paper scraps or Contact paper – and voila! A book your child wrote about your beliefs that they can read over and over again.
Journals: Along the lines of books, some children love the more personalized efforts of journals instead; places where they can keep memorabilia and notes about what they did and thought. They can tuck in photos, drawings, ticket stubs, feathers, ribbons, stickers, and other such things – a documentation of their life and their beliefs.
All of these things can be done with children and adults of any age, simply adjust the complexity level to the age of the participants.
Parents can collect chants, songs, poems, nursery rhymes, recipes, and such to use with their children.
And if there’s more than one Pagan family in the neighborhood, forming a SpiralScouts Circle is always an idea.
[1] cheese or peanut butter filled celery stalks with raisins sprinkled on
We took a few hints from our Jewish neighbors, who understood both the importance of raising one’s children in one’s religion and being a minority religion that sometimes faced bigotry, harassment, misunderstandings, and even persecution. Persecution was never something we expected to face. After all, we live in the US. But bigotry, harassment, and misunderstandings we accepted as potential problems in raising our children up in our own beliefs.
Paganism, when it became more numerous and visible, was clearly an adult oriented religion. Children were few and far between – an oddity in a religion that was presumably fertility-based, and definitely sexually focused. When children did begin to make appearances at Gathers and Pagan events, they were either left to their own devices while the parents did Paganish things, or they were herded into Children’s Enclaves and given children’s things to do – much of which wasn’t very Pagan but was very reminiscent of fairs and kindergarten.
Even now, more than 40 years after Paganism gained a strong foothold in the US, many parents still hesitate to raise their children as Pagans. Those parents who do choose to raise their children as Pagans seem to feel they must cluster together, and to hide what they are doing from the general public. Usually, they say it’s because they don’t want their children to face persecution. In reality, their children won’t be facing persecution (except for that one case where the divorce judge stipulated that the parents couldn’t expose their son to “non-mainstream religions” – that is the only clear-cut case of persecution in the US), what they’ll face is harassment, bigotry, misunderstanding, and bullying – all things many children face, and sadly, things an increasing number of children face not because of religion but because of a lack of manners and standards in the schools and in society at large.
Raising your child in your religion doesn't force the child to adhere to it for life.
Small children are confused by too many choices, and are comforted by modeling themselves after their parents - and that includes religious behavior.
Teens are different. They've pretty much already been raised, if parents did things mostly right (hey, we all make mistakes, maybe some day I'll tell you a few of mine), and they will explore other religions then. If their parents gave them a decent (or even superficial) grounding in their religious beliefs, then the teen has a starting point and a base for comparisons for their explorations and they are less likely to flounder or be sucked in by cons - and religious cons do exist out there for all religions.
If the parents are serious about their religous beliefs, and they bar their child from learning about it, the message they send is that their child isn't important or good enough to share that part of their lives. When the child is old enough to realize other children are being raised in their parents' religion, but they aren't, how do you suppose this will make them feel? Worse yet, they'll learn about your religion filtered through the mouths of children who not only know next to nothing about it, but will pass on their parents' misconceptions. Would you like your children to believe you eat babies at Christmas and are luring other children to evil, or are saving you up for a virgin sacrifice to Satan? That's just a few of the things some of Chantria's friends used to believe of her and us.
There's nothing wrong with "being pagan by default", no more than "being Baptist by default" or "being Jewish by default" or even "being atheist by default", if that's how the parents and family are.
"The religion of the parents" means exactly that - to whatever degree the parents adhere to their religion, whether that's a different religion for each parent or if the parents change religions as the children age.
Parents are under no obligation to raise their child in every religion that exists either within their extended family or within the community or the world - that's something most children will explore when they are teens or decide for themselves when they are adults.
The parents' only real obligation is to raise their children. Religion is but one component of all the things a parent needs to impart to their children.
If the parents adhere to any religion at all, it just makes sense to be aware that children will model on that religion whether the parents consciously choose to share it or not. It makes sense, then, to deliberately include your child in your religion (whatever it is) so the child gets the information from a (presumably) trusted source, and not from taunts and horror stories on the playground.
There are many excellent methods for dealing with the various problems children will face when raised among a disparate group of other children. The nursery rhyme so many parents quote to their children to assuage hurt feelings is a lie, and not one we have ever pushed on our children. Words do hurt, and they can cause pain that lasts years beyond when the memory of a broken arm fades away. Words lacerate in areas harder to reach and heal, and the echo of those words haunts us for decades.
The first thing we propose is for the parents to learn how to hold a confrontation, how to be verbally defensive, how to be parentally assertive. Parents must first know their rights and the laws of the city in which they live. At least one of the parents needs to be active in the school if the child(ren) attend a public school – as a volunteer, as a PTSA member, as an advocate, on the school board, or highly visible. The parent, at the very least, needs to know the name of the principal, the secretaries at the school, the school counselor, and the child(ren)’s teachers. It also helps to know the names of their classmates.
One method we used to good effect has now been barred to modern parents – the class treats. There may still be a few schools which allow parents to bring snacks and treats for a class, but even there, they may be limited in what they can provide. We brought cupcakes, sweet rolls, cookies, and juice to share. Nowadays, perhaps they’ll still allow the juice, but the treats would have to be vastly different: ants onna log [1], perhaps? For those schools that disallow all snacks and treats, I suppose coordinating with the teacher to provide a lesson-oriented fun activity might be a good substitute.
The second thing we propose is for the family to be involved in community activities – neighborhood clean-ups, block parties, neighborhood association, neighborhood park play supervisor, 4th of July activities, city anniversary activities, city counsel meetings, and other local community events. For many, simply being present at the event is sufficient. Others may require a bit more commitment.
You see, raising one’s children in a minority religion isn’t limited to just the family – it extends to the community, too. If nothing else, it helps put faces to people, takes them out of the realm of the unknown. It’s much harder to cast someone as the devil when they’ve painted little kids’ faces with butterflies at the Peach Festival, or won a blue ribbon for that apple pie at the county fair, or helped raise funds to replace the children’s play equipment at the elementary school, or spent hours helping Tommy learn to read. And parents are less likely to shrug it off when Billy bullies Sunshine if Sunshine and her parents are known to them. And police are more likely to be helpful in cases of vandalism if they’ve seen the family helping out at the 4th of July parade and fireworks.
Other, lesser things would be paying utility bills on time, keeping the yard clean and mowed (this seems to be a really sore spot with many cities), and obeying noise ordinances and parking restrictions in neighborhoods (my neighborhood doesn’t allow any street parking between 7:00 a.m. and 3 p.m.).
With these ducks in a row, the rest is really quite easy, and fun.
When the religious activity is age-appropriate, let the child observe or participate. In Numenism, our celebrations and ceremonies are quite child-friendly. It wasn’t intentional, but we’ve used it to good advantage.
We don’t celebrate the same seasons most Pagans do, so our holy days are out of kilter with the rest of the Pagan scene, but how we do them can still be applied to most other Pagans.
Storytelling: Every celebration should have a story to accompany it. Children love stories, so this should always be a part of any celebration children attend. Be dramatic, play it up, use props and sound effects. It’s easy to make felt story boards, and lots of hobby shops carry felt cut outs in many shapes. A pair of scissors and some felt will remedy any gaps.
Nature Walks: Even in cities, there’s an abundance of wildlife. Walk around your neighborhood and get to know it well. Collect pine cones and acorns and sweet gum balls that fall into the street. You may find maple seeds, too, and dandelions are always fun. Few people object to others collecting dandelion puffs or flowers.
Make ‘n’ Takes: Children love to make things. Scraps of paper and yarn, glue, feathers, natural materials collected on nature walks, and other such things can be used for children to make things that relate to the story of a religious celebration.
Food: Children can help make, and certainly will love eating, special foods for celebrations. If you don’t have special ritual or celebration foods, it’s the setting and context that’s important.
Things: Children are enamored of things. We don’t use wands or athames in our rituals, but we can sometimes create really elaborate altars, so our children have always built altars. We also have shrines, and the children are encouraged to leave offerings at them, to create songs and dances and such for the shrine inhabitants. The internet is filled with wonderful coloring pages, so if you’ve a good printer and a connection, you can download and put together nice coloring books. There are some really good coloring books for sale as well, and I highly recommend supporting your fellow Pagans by buying the books.
Games: We have lots of games we play with our children. We designed Story Cards that hold the elements of our beliefs in picture form, and let the children use them to create stories. We let them play with the felt story board. We have special games to enhance their spiritual connections and to develop their senses and skills of observation. We have chant games and cooperation games and solitary games.
Pretends: Children of all ages like to play dress-up, so we have a box of dress up things they can wear to pretend to be assorted numena and divinities, to re-enact the religious stories they hear at our celebrations, and to re-enact the fairytales that most appeal to them. We’ve written plays for the stories of our religion, and encourage the children to learn them and enact them upon stages – the park has a lovely amphitheater we use for this at times, and other times, we use the patio of the Community Center or a living room. Role playing games are also a hit, and we've designed many campaigns that fit both our beliefs and their desire to play.
Collecting: Some children are really big on collecting things: coins, stamps, bugs, leaves, rocks, whatever. We like to relate what they collect with our beliefs where possible, so in their collection books, they add religious oriented poems and brief stories that tie in with whatever they’ve collected.
Books: An amazing number of books are suitable for children to read. The list is far too long to post here. Read to them at bedtime. Let them read to themselves. Help them write their own books. Making a book is a simple thing, especially if you have a computer. You can use a Word document or Pagemaker or any other type of publishing software. If you have a digital camera or a scanner, the children can create their own art to go along with the stories. Print them out, sew them together, and set them inside pieces of cardboard that have been covered with wall paper scraps or Contact paper – and voila! A book your child wrote about your beliefs that they can read over and over again.
Journals: Along the lines of books, some children love the more personalized efforts of journals instead; places where they can keep memorabilia and notes about what they did and thought. They can tuck in photos, drawings, ticket stubs, feathers, ribbons, stickers, and other such things – a documentation of their life and their beliefs.
All of these things can be done with children and adults of any age, simply adjust the complexity level to the age of the participants.
Parents can collect chants, songs, poems, nursery rhymes, recipes, and such to use with their children.
And if there’s more than one Pagan family in the neighborhood, forming a SpiralScouts Circle is always an idea.
[1] cheese or peanut butter filled celery stalks with raisins sprinkled on
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