Family: When parents and teens clash over religion

Hallo Guys!!

I read this article and found it interesting and useful. Wanna share it to all of you. Please your opinion in the comment box.

============================================

When parents and teensclash over religion
Don't let arguments aboutfaith break the family bond
By Victoria Clayton
Contributor MSNBC
Updated: 5:32 p.m. ET April 4, 2005

Question:
We have a very large family (six children) and our oldest son, who is 16, recently said he doesn’t want to go to church anymore. He’s mentioned that he doesn’t agree with our church’s view that gay marriage should be prohibited. Our faith is very important to us. Should we insist he attend church with the rest of the family or allow him to stay home?

Answer:
It’s understandable that you want your children in church. There’s great data to suggest that when adolescents are involved in positive activities they’re more likely to associate with positive peers and less likely to get in trouble, says James F. Alexander, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah and co-creator of the Functional Family Therapy treatment program. But there’s a big catch.

“The research is also pretty clear that family bonding is even more important,” explains Alexander. What this means for you is that no matter how you handle this situation or any other you don’t want to jeopardize your relationship with your son or in any way splinter your family. If you do, you can expect more trouble (e.g. your son lying and avoiding you). Instead, you want to foster the feeling of a team trying to figure it out, not you against your son.

How do you do this? “For starters, rather than insist your son goes to church and [thus] creating a crisis. It’s better to approach it as a process,” says Alexander. “Have a discussion about why your son doesn’t want to go and then say, ‘Okay, you’re on record as not wanting to go any longer. But I want you to give me a month.’” Ask him to attend as usual for the month and during that time keep talking about the aspects of church that your son finds unpleasant.

You may discover the reasons he doesn’t like church are petty: he doesn’t want to get up early on weekends, he doesn’t want to dress up or he thinks some fellow church members are annoying. If this is the case, work out compromises. Perhaps he stays in youth group but doesn’t have to attend church services — or he attends a later service and wears whatever he wants. Then again, you may discover, as many parents have, that there are real and very serious reasons why your son finds himself incompatible with church life.

“Sometimes this is a bigger thing,” says Cheryl Giles, a professor of the practice in pastoral care and counseling at Harvard Divinity School and a psychologist who works with child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center. For example, he may be trying to come out as gay. “If that’s the case, it could be very difficult to do that in some religious environments,” says Giles. “If you can’t figure out how to talk this out, go to someone who can help. Your son needs a safe and impartial person to talk to about what’s possibly behind his decision to take a church hiatus.”

You may also find it helps to open up dialogue if you both read up on adolescent spiritual issues. Giles recommends "Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers" by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist-Denton.

But, if your son ends up not attending church activities, he should know it isn’t good enough just to stay home in bed. “You should ask him how he’s planning to replace his church activities. Is he going to read a book for an hour or write in a journal? Ideally, you want to have an activity in place that contributes to his growth as a person,” says Giles.

Bottom line, though, is that your son must know that your relationship with him is more important than whether he goes to church. “I’d assume too that for most parents [who are Christian] a son or daughter’s relationship with God is also more important than face time in church,” says Alexander.

Lastly, be prepared to go through this with several of your children. The degree to which each of your kids remains religious is likely to change with adolescence and even differ among the children as they become adults.

In fact, researchers now believe that, like other personality traits, there’s a strong genetic component to “religiousness.” A study recently published in the Journal of Personality found that environmental factors such as parenting and family life influence a child's religiousness, but the effects decline with the transition into adulthood. The University of Minnesota study followed 169 pairs of adult male identical twins and 104 sets of fraternal twins. The identical twins remained similar in their religiousness but the fraternal twins (who share many but not all of the same genes) became more dissimilar as they grew into adulthood.

So, despite being raised in the same environment, there’s really no telling what will happen with each of your six children.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7349996/