Parents who want to pass faith on to their children are facing an uphill battle. School, friends, media, and the internet tend to hinder rather than help religious formation. In a new report on faith and families developed in collaboration with the Institute for Family Studies and Communio, we examined which factors during childhood were most important for passing on faith into adulthood. Our results show that parents need to be active and intentional about keeping their children in the fold.The data indicate that one of the most important things parents can do to raise religious children is surprisingly simple: talk about faith at home.
Children from Christian households who had multiple faith conversations with their parents each week were twice as likely to be regular churchgoers, pray daily, and say religion was very important to them as adults. They were 20 percentage points more likely to identify as Christian and report a belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Regular religious discussion at home is one of the strongest factors we found in our analysis for keeping children in the faith.
This may sound obvious, but many well-intentioned parents find talking about faith with their children to be challenging. When days are organized around school, sports, activities, hobbies, or friends, it can be hard to see where faith fits. Religion gets compartmentalized into an ever-smaller space as everything else crowds it out.
