Dear Prudence,
Three months ago, my wife’s and my dreams came true when we adopted our 5-year-old son. He’s a great kid: smart, positive, thoughtful, and we love him unconditionally. We knew to expect certain challenges with adopting an older child, and we’ve tried to prepare for just about every possibility, but this particular scenario really has us stumped: My wife and I are not religious, and have made the decision to not try to force any religious (or non-religious belief) on our child, but try to stay open and honest so that he can draw his own conclusions. Our son was, at some point, brought up in a religious environment, and prays in the morning, and before he goes to bed. His praying is absolutely no problem to us, if it brings him fulfillment, that’s great. The problem is that he has recently asked us to join him in some of his prayers, and that’s just something we don’t do. What do we do? We want honesty to be a cornerstone of our family, and we want him to be able to embrace people’s differences in beliefs, but he’s only been with us three months and we don’t want him to feel ostracized, or hurt. We want him to know that we support him, but we also want to be open about our own lack of faith, but he’s 5 after all.