I have many friends who are raising children, and are of different faiths or choose not to belong to any religious organization, whether Christian, Jewish or other. Aristotle derived a system of ethics without reference to religion, but I doubt that most parents are reading from the Nichomachean ethics to their children at bedtime. But there are certainly many parents who managesuccessfully to bring up their children to be morally decent and spiritually reflective without recourse to a specific religious tradition. Spiritual inwardness can be developed by people who don't go to church or synagogue - even as some people who do go to church and synagogue may, in important ways, overlook the moral and spiritual significance and demands of the religious tradition they have embraced. In The Siritual Life of Children , I describe my own discovery of a powerful moral tradition in many agnostic and atheistic homes.
Children learn any kind of respect by seeing it lived out daily.
As a matter of fact, I remember taking walks with my father, and seeing him pick up pieces of trash left in the woods where we walked. My husband and I are expecting in a few weeks and we have been doing a lot of thinking about the moral education of our child, especially since viewing your interview with David Gergen. As a whole, I believe we are both morally intelligent people who practice our morality, but we are obviously not perfect. What do you think is the best method for explaining in an educational sense, our moral failings to a small child. She knows there was a better way to handle her desire to be undisturbed, but today, she just didn't use it.