If your parents have faith but you don’t

[Inlawfaithquestions]

….how do you work out the boundaries of them talking to DC about it?

Background is that both me and DH were raised as strict evangelical Christians but have now left the church. Dh in particular feels a lot of animosity about it, and feels very strongly that he doesn’t want dc to be in church. I miss the social/community aspects and think it’s shame that they’ll miss out on that, but broadly I agree.

Dh parents are still passionate believers, and very worried about dc going to hell and not having a relationship with Jesus.

GP occasionally look after DC including a couple of overnights. Dc have told me that there are quite a lot spiritual discussions with GP whilst they were looking after them. For example, they’ve discussed death and heaven. They apparently do quite long prayer sessions at bed times and they’ve talked about their church and the childrens groups and asked Dc if they want to go.

They haven’t taken them to church, but they’ve only ever stayed Friday to Saturday night so there hasn’t been an opportunity.

Mostly I’m upset that they done all this without having a conversation with us to ask what we’re comfortable with. It all feels very ‘behind our backs’.

I don’t know if I’m being paranoid, but it feels like theyre having these conversations now to see if Dc tell us, and if they hadn’t they’d have taken them to church without asking us. Dc were quite upset when they spoke to us, as they felt like they shouldn’t be telling and didn’t want to get GP ‘in trouble’. I don’t think they were specifically told not to tell us though.

Has anyone got any experience of this dynamic, or advice on how to approach it?

I wouldn’t leave the kids with the grandparents if you can’t trust them.

@fink mentioned prayers before meals. We would never ask someone not to follow their own rituals in their own homes. We just explained to our child that is what some people do and they can participate or they can emulate mom and dad and sit quietly. When child got older we had more detailed discussions about the actual rituals, but always in our own home so we could speak freely without any risk of the followers not appreciating a dissection of their faith.

Since we know family will want to go to
church on Sunday morning and we don’t want our child to attend, we have never asked them to babysit at a time that would create a conflict.

I wouldn’t have a problem with them continuing with regular rituals while the children are there. The problem is that whatever they’re doing with the kids are not things they do when we’re staying there.

It feels like they don’t want us to be able to have a conversation with our kids about what they’re doing. They want to influence them without us being aware it’s happening.

It’s understandable that you’re coming from two different angles. If you’re not a believer it’s about tolerance and boundaries but if you are one it’s about saving your gc from eternal damnation. You have to understand that the stakes are very high, and very real for them - what you’re comfortable with doesn’t compete with the opportunity to save children from the fires of hell.

If you want them to have a relationship, you’re going to have to safeguard the dc, either by being there (which you’ve proposed) but also by being very open and calm with the dc do they can talk through what they’re hearing safely with you. They may even go through phases of wanting to be religious and I wouldn’t stress about it. The key thing is being able to safely ask questions, weigh up different ideas.

I teach my dc that stories have power and the narratives we construct about our lives are important. There can be great comfort in religious stories - the danger lies in treating them the same as facts, and in mistreating others for disagreeing with you (and that holds good across all religions and dogmatisms including politics)

I’ll just add that I’ve always taught my dc that they can tell me anything, and to be suspicious of any grown up who doesn’t want you to tell your mum about something.

It might be worth having a conversation with the gps about how encouraging children to keep secrets from their dps is exactly what groomers do. If beloved gps do this, it makes a child more susceptible to manipulation by people with evil intent.

Thanks for this. Totally agree, I’m very aware of high the stakes are for them I believed the same for a long time so I know how real the fear is. It’s one of the reasons I don’t want DC anywhere near it.

Thats a helpful way to think about stories. I’ve had some good chats with older DC about it, but youngest is too little for that at the mo.

Yes we talk about this too. Thanks goodness because that’s the reason they said something.

IL would definitely not understand this though. They very anti safeguarding generally and believe it leads to people being falsely accused/having their lives ruined etc. They would definitely think we were accusing them of abuse if we said that.

In that case it’s not a good way to handle it. It’s very hard dealing with such entrenched opinions. (my issue isn’t with religion but politics and I feel for you.)