Blended Parenting - teaching my 10 year old to be skeptical
My oldest is on the cusp of 10 and is being raised in a church household. We've gotten past the idea that telling me that his step mom and I are going to hell is rude and not nice but it took time. I have been trying to teach him what being a skeptic means, to be skeptical, without going in on him over church so we've been going over different debate fallacies like bandwagon/peer pressure, ad hominem, etc. with the goal of starting to debate each other this week on prepared topics. Tonight we're going to go over the structure of a debate and then have the debate itself. Nothing difficult. Should you be allowed to bring pets to school? Age applicable topics and then reverse them so that he debates it from both sides. Its been difficult to get him to focus because of his age but its slowly starting to stick.
Is there a better way? We teach respect in my house for all beliefs. Some of his beliefs because of the baptist church he is in (not baptism in particular but from what I can sense from this church) are just blatantly inflammatory. His mother would not be receptive. It was one of the failing points of our relationship. I started off going to church with her but it only took a little bit of travel in the military to understand how wrong religion is as a concept. At this point I am agnostic because not only do I not care, I don't know either way.