Because so many of us Unitarian Universalist parents come from other religious traditions or were raised unchurched, it’s often much easier for us to definitively state what we do not believe than what we do believe. Even parents who were raised as Unitarian Universalists may struggle with this if their own parents neglected to pass on their beliefs and their faith in those terms.

However, expressing our theological beliefs to our children by explaining what we don’t believe is a bit like ordering a meal off of a restaurant menu by telling the waiter what you don’t want to have. After wading through an hour of rejecting meatloaf, chicken pot pie, and roast beef, your waiter is still bound to be rather confused about your meal preference. On the other hand, stating emphatically that you are a vegetarian and therefore need to select from the few meatless dishes on the restaurant’s menu at least narrows down the possibilities considerably.

Children can also be confused by this mish-mash of do-not-believes, and they can even start tuning out if this diatribe continues very long. Young children who are concrete thinkers are particularly sensitive to the difference between beliefs expressed in negative terms or positive terms. In fact, if the only information they receive on this topic is what a parent doesn’t believe, then they may have to fill in the blanks themselves.

There are relatively few sources of information as misinformed (or as confident) as those young children who invent their own answers to the big questions in life. But if their parents have not supplied those answers in terms they can understand, what choice do they have?

I remember very clearly one of the first theological conversations my son and I had, even though it has been several years now. As part of our bedtime ritual, I read him a story and then it was “cuddle time.” He told me one of the children in his preschool class had told him God was mad and sent a tornado to knock over someone’s house. This was alarming to him, and rightly so. Whenever children internalize the concept of an all-knowing, all-powerful God who can be extremely vengeful when wronged, this can be horribly frightening—even without wielding tornadoes.

That night I hugged him tightly and told him that I didn’t believe in a God that would hurt people in that way. I assumed that my statement would be reassuring to him and that the issue was all settled. However, a few days later, a thunderstorm hit our area and my son was terrified. It took me awhile to realize that the matter was indeed not settled. My rebuffing his concerns with a simple “I don’t believe that” statement clearly was not sufficient. In this case, he needed to know what I DID believe.

When it was cuddle time again, I brought up the subject myself. I told him that if I believed God would punish people that way, I would be very afraid, too. Then I told him some of what I do believe, and how and why I came to believe these things about God. During the next few weeks we explored weather conditions that could produce tornadoes and how we might protect ourselves should one threaten us.

He’s older now, and still terribly afraid of tornadoes. But he is no longer fearful of a vengeful deity in the sky who might send one to destroy our house as punishment.