I told my little girl about angels yesterday...

[vorlon13]

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

[J a c k]

My eleven year old has been taught that one day we all die and we all rot. I've never taught him Santa stuff or anything fantasy. He's fine. Some truths have to sink in and in time you get used to it. He comes home from school and tells me about the crazy things other kids believe in and he feels sorry for them. If one day he begins to believe in fantasy, I tried. He can believe whatever he wants.

But! I know how to parent my son to the best of my possibilities. I have no idea how to parent other people's kids. I can't pretend to know what's best for them.

[Little lunch]

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I love that Snoop Dogg song.

[Neo-Scholastic]

To the OP, I'm glad you were able to put your child's mind to rest.

As for the general issue, I like an approach that goes something like this: "Well, some people think it's the end, but some people think it's like a really long sleep and you wake up latter, some people think you have a soul that goes to heaven and stays there happy forever, and some people think you change bodies and could even come back as a horse or a dolphin. The truth is nobody really knows for sure."

[Edwardo Piet]

My eleven year old has been taught that one day we all die and we all rot. I've never taught him Santa stuff or anything fantasy. He's fine. Some truths have to sink in and in time you get used to it. He comes home from school and tells me about the crazy things other kids believe in and he feels sorry for them. If one day he begins to believe in fantasy, I tried. He can believe whatever he wants.

But! I know how to parent my son to the best of my possibilities. I have no idea how to parent other people's kids. I can't pretend to know what's best for them.

You rock. I neither expect to have nor currently expect to ever wish to have a child one day... but, I may change my mind one day and if I ever did have a kid I decided long ago that I'd teach them exactly the same way as that (for me anything else would be unthinkable)

[Jehanne]

To the OP, I'm glad you were able to put your child's mind to rest.

As for the general issue, I like an approach that goes something like this: "Well, some people think it's the end, but some people think it's like a really long sleep and you wake up latter, some people think you have a soul that goes to heaven and stays there happy forever, and some people think you change bodies and could even come back as a horse or a dolphin. The truth is nobody really knows for sure."

No one really knows if fairies exist, either, or if there is a race of talking donkeys living on a planet in orbit about Alpha Centauri who recite Shakespeare to each other (which, they captured from our radio transmissions.)

Putting little children's minds at rest is, IMO, a good thing.  Like Santa Claus, they will outgrow it; it's different than indoctrinating them into religion, which is something that my spouse and I have not done.  Even the Jesuits used to say, "Give me the child and I'll show you the man..."

As for survival of consciousness after death, I am quite generous as compared to some, and would give a probability of 25%, with a 75% chance of annihilation.  Life-after-death does not, however, necessarily entail eternal life, and for that, I would give a 20% chance.

[Aroura]

It was very hard for me to tell my kid the truth and not a fairy tale, when she cried at night and first began to fear death. There was no instant fix. She still talks to me about it sometimes, but with more acceptance than she did when she was 5 or 6.

I'm not criticizing, this is not easy for anyone. We all have to choose how to handle it. Personally, I'm still upset I was told there was an afterlife as a child, as it becomes harder to accept the possible lack of it later. I honestly think that learning fear of death at age 20 instead of 5 contributed greatly to my anxiety disorder. The tools to cope weren't there. So I'm trying to give my daughter the truth and the coping tools together early in her life. Just my personal experience.

[c172]

I don't have kids and don't want kids, but parenting and schoolteaching are two very interesting things for me to observe. 

I am the biological son of a mall Santa. I was never taught to believe in Santa or any of that. My biological father had a stroke, with severe mental impairment, when I was 6, and died when I was 14. I don't remember those extremely early years, so I'm not sure how he handled the God question. As far as God, my then widowed mother hired a babysitter at one point (a family) that took me to church at a YMCA. 

Then, I started coming home eventually with "some weird ideas". The next sitter was a Unitarian Universalist, and I took to that really, really well, but then abandoned it in my mid-20's due to my own political journey, plus, well, atheism. 

If I were to have kids, I'd want to be as brutally honest as I could about the facts of life, starting with never imbuing him/her/them with belief in God, Jesus, Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and whatever else. But I would need a whole heck of a lot of help with this from my wife. And that scares me, because marriage scares me.

[Jehanne]

This has been a good thread and I have enjoyed hearing everyone's perspectives!  I guess that we are all different.

I have a 20-year old daughter in college; she has never given me any inclination of being upset over us duping her and her oldest brother into believing in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, etc.  She did, however, get upset with me with respect to my being upset over the data usage on our cell phone family plan, at least until I switched to "unlimited" (Verizon), which has turned out to be a real rip-off.

[Secular Elf]

Not having any kids of my own, all I can say is that, if I did have any, I would want to be honest with them about the subject of death and religious beliefs. Having learned about child cognition from a college text book, children start to learn concepts around age seven. As far as angels are concerned, I would take the comparative mythology route when they are age appropriate. In studying ancient history I have noticed all the winged divine beings depicted in the various cultures of the ancient Middle East and the Greco-Roman world. There is no doubt there was a lot of cultural borrowing going on with the concept. The Early Christians depicted angels as youthful men, minus the wings. I would explain that to them.