When Lumen Gentium (11) describes the family as “the domestic church,” it isn’t presenting a choice. The family is a domestic church, whether parents acknowledge it or not. And so they have an obligation to be careful and intentional about what they pass on to their children. Because they’re going to pass on something. And what children seem to be inheriting today is a lot of angst.
A recent Pew Research Center study reports that what parents want above all for their children is financial independence and a satisfying job. Graduating from college came in a distant third, and getting married and having children of their own pulled up the rear for a marginal few. Being moral, finding meaning in life, or practicing a religion did not appear on the list of priorities. With such external and materialistic aspirations for their children, it’s not surprising (though it’s a sad irony) that these same parents reported they are most worried about their children’s mental health. It’s also no wonder, at least according to a 2024 Surgeon General’s report, that parental anxiety is at a breaking point.
To alleviate all this stress, psychologist Darby Saxbe writes that “parents should ignore their children more often.” That makes for a snappy lead, but what Saxbe means is not so much that parents should ignore their children as decenter them. She argues that today’s frantic, child-centered style of helicopter parenting is “based on assumptions about what our children need to thrive that are not supported by evidence from . . . most of human history.”
Until the last few decades, parents practiced what Saxbe calls “mindful underparenting,” which allows children to “spend lots of time with their parents” but usually not as the parents’ primary focus. “Sometimes bored, sometimes engaged, these kids spend much of their time observing adults doing adult things.” Saxbe explains that “your average benign-neglect day care is probably closer” to the average historical childhood experience than today’s overstimulated boy or girl at the center of attention. “Benign neglect” doesn’t sound great, but Saxbe argues that mindful underparenting respects a person’s unique developmental capacity to learn through observation how to enter adult life.
Institutions, programs, and activities can genuinely support what parents value but “almost never do they surpass or override” the parents themselves.
In other words, this is very bad news for parents who tell their children, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Children develop as they absorb the practices and beliefs of the people they love and trust the most. This is what Saxbe suggests, and it’s also what Catholic sociologist Christian Smith concluded after years of studying how parents pass on religion to their children.
“The good news,” Smith writes, “is that among all possible influences, parents exert far and away the greatest influence on their children’s religious outcomes.” Smith recognizes that this “good news” might be surprising and a little stressful: “Stated differently, the bad news is that nearly all human responsibility for the religious trajectories of children’s lives falls on their parents’ shoulders.”
I grew up in a Christian home and have always been grateful to my parents for the everyday cadence of faith that characterized my childhood (Mom’s strategy to wake me up for school was often to burst into my room, turn the lights on, and declare, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!”). But I also naively assumed that just as important as my parents’ faith in my own formation were things like my Christian elementary education, my years of Sunday school attendance, or my involvement with a vibrant youth group. My adolescent and teen years were very pious and very peer-focused, with a healthy dollop of hip, college-aged mentors.
But none of those things, Smith finds, come close to the influence of parents. Institutions, programs, and activities can genuinely support what parents value but “almost never do they surpass or override” the parents themselves. It turns out that what mattered wasn’t so much that I was doing any of those things as much as that it was my parents who supported and arranged for them.
Smith knows that nothing is guaranteed. Children are the ones who will finally be responsible for their most important life choices. They aren’t Play-Doh. “But setting aside exceptional cases,” he writes, “what is nearly guaranteed is that American parents who are not especially committed, attentive, and intentional in passing on their faith will produce children who are less religious than they are, if they are religious at all.”
So what can parents do if they want to pass on their faith? They can practice a form of religious mindful underparenting. Or, as Smith explains, parents can “be themselves: believe and practice their own religion genuinely and faithfully.” This really is all parents can do, Smith concludes, and much of his advice has to do with how parents can effectively welcome their children into their own practice—how to “tote them along,” in Saxbe’s words.
This is easy to see in trivial things. Rabid Red Sox fans don’t raise their children to have an open mind about the Yankees (nor should they). And so long as the child doesn’t grow up to hate baseball, he will almost certainly be a Red Sox fan himself as an adult and then probably pass that love onto his children. (I confess I was five years old when I watched my dad’s agony as Mookie Wilson’s dribble of a hit went through Bill Buckner’s legs at first base, costing the Red Sox game six of the 1986 World Series. I remember how sad I was to see Dad’s pain and how much I wanted the Red Sox to win game seven. I loved my dad and wanted him to be happy. And then eventually I discovered that his love of the Red Sox had become mine).
For more important things like career choices, parents again exert tremendous influence. For a good chunk of my childhood, I wanted to be a lawyer because Dad was a lawyer (and because we watched a lot of Perry Mason). But while Dad was very good at what he did, he went through stretches where it was clear he didn’t love it. So when he would say, “Kids, don’t become a lawyer,” the counsel stuck. Meanwhile, as long as I can remember, Dad loved school. He especially loved colleges and universities and never missed a chance to drive through a nice campus, however out of the way it was on a typical road trip. He relished his own experience at Dartmouth and would often talk about his professors, his senior thesis on F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his frequent shenanigans. While Dad would discourage me from following in his lawyer footsteps, it’s clear to me that his love of higher education had a hand in the career I chose.
St. Augustine cautions us to be careful about the things we love because our love is like a weight. “Wherever I go,” he confesses, “my love is what brings me there” (Confessions, 13.9). Ideologically neutral parenting is a myth because none of us can be neutral about the things that matter most in life. Love is like cholesterol. It’s in us whether we like it or not, and if we don’t pay attention to it, it can lead us in deadly directions.
What Smith’s and Saxbe’s research indicates is that children are drawn into the gravitational force of what their parents love. Children love what their parents love because they love and trust their parents. But this also means that the gravitational force of what their parents love becomes a weight for the children as well. As they enter adulthood, they may find that weight cumbersome and choose to cast it off. But they may find it light, “authentic and life-giving,” as Smith writes, and when that is the case, “they just may be attracted to something similar.”