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I don’t see our family life as “losing” religion.Let’s face it, EVERY gay man has fallen in love with some straight married man. As long as they’re not picketing military funerals, I’ll beįine with whatever they chose. My children may find their own ways to organized religion, or stick with the pleasant acceptance of its absence that their father and I enjoy. Important that teenagers embrace the community their parents have chosen for them than that they find some community themselves, and as they grow up, what matters most is that we as parents embrace the communitiesĪnd identities that become a part of our children. One unsought result of a family identity based in part on shared religion is that throughout history, families have struggled to accept the children who don’t remain within the religious fold. With it, just as they rolled with my passion for theater and forensic debate. One was a religious group that probably wasn’t what my parents would have chosen - but they rolled Way into several close-knit groups of teenagers like the one Ozment visits in the Unitarian church.
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As important as the family identity is, we need to leave room for the identities - religious or otherwise - that we don’t “give.” As a teenager, I found my own Parents need to release our grip on the vertical and recognize that finding or embracing those horizontal identities is crucial One message of “Far From the Tree” is that every child is alien in some way. Those things that have worked for other families in other times. What matters is to find and strengthen those things that are important to your family rather than regretting
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There are many ways to deepen a vertical connection. It can be found in stories of family history and family resilience shared aroundĪ dinner table, or in a sport, a hometown or a cause. That connection, though, can be found in different places. Religion are failing to “give” their children that identity is a need to shore up the vertical - a fear that without a shared religion, a child will fail to feel a connection to her family and “Parents,” Solomon writes, “are constantly struggling with children who are alien to them in some profound way.” One thing I see in the fear that parents who don’t practice an organized Italian heritage is a vertical trait in my family being gay is horizontal in his. In Andrew Solomon’s book “Far From the Tree,” he highlights the distinction between vertical identity, which travels down from parent to child, and horizontal identity, which is specific to an individual Glosses over the difficulty that compromise would present for families like hers, and mine, where the very roots of those beliefs are in conflict with one partner or the other’s cultural identity.) (Though Ozment mentions families who choose to attend churches or synagogues for community’s sake, while glossing over any differences of belief, she also Way to the community they need, religious or not. Of this hugging, grounded, happy group of young people, she sputters excuses.Īsked the same question, I’d have a different answer: because there’s no one religious community that everyone in our family will feel welcome in, and we have faith that our children will find their own
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Ozment’s reporting takes her to a Unitarian youth group, where one of the teenagers asks her, “Why haven’t you given your kids religion?” Caught up in the moment, and an appreciation There’s nothing wrong with raising children outside of a religious tradition, and that upbringingĭoesn’t preclude them from being part of a community or later finding a community of their own. But it’s a rueful acceptance - and that rue is unnecessary. Through explorations of secular humanism and Unitarian Universalists to an ultimate acceptance that while she and her husband may have been successfully raised in their respective religions, their children didn’t In “Losing Our Religion,” Ozment (raised Protestant, but with a husband raised Jewish) traces her journey So I worry: Am I depriving my children of an experience that will help shape their identities in a positive way and anchor them throughout their lives? Participation in a religious community has been correlated with everything from self-esteem and overall hopefulness to the avoidance For Katherine Ozment, writing for Boston magazine, it also meant soul searching because, as she writes:Īs ambivalent as I am about organized religion, I recognize there is something to it. Outside of the community provided by a church or synagogue. That has meant an increase in parents raising their children The fastest-growing religious affiliation in the United States is no religion at all.