In article .com,
wrote:

Would you have a problem with your child being friends with an atheist,
or being friends with a child who's parents are atheists?

The reason I ask is that I am an atheist and I have a daughter who is
almost two and I live in a very religious area. Now that my daughter is
not really a baby anymore I am starting to think about these issues and
wondering if she is going to have trouble having friends.


I consider myself to be religious, but probably not in the way you are
concerned about.

When my kids were small, we lived in an area in Massachusetts that was
overwhelmingly Catholic. Ours is a minority faith that does not require
a belief in God. I did not run into many problems on my kids' behalf --
there were only a few people who kept their kids away from my "heathen"
children. (One of them being my brother, but he's a pretty extreme
case.) It was my experience that most of the folks who really want to
isolate their children from children of other faiths (or no faith) do so
in such a way that it didn't really affect my kids.

I find religious discussions fascinating, and don't avoid the topic (nor
do I bring it up at inappropriate times). I find that many deeply
religious people were willing to discuss their religion with me provided
I was the one asking questions of them -- and a few were even interested
in my beliefs. I don't think there were families that began to avoid us
when they discovered that we were not Christian, or that my beliefs
about the divine put me in the "atheist" category as far as they were
concerned. (It isn't a term I use for myself.)

As an aside, it was helpful for my kids to belong to a faith community
(Unitarian Universalist) where they were exposed to adults with all
kinds of beliefs about God, including atheists, agnostics, theists,
pantheists, polytheists, and just about any other "god" language one
could imagine. I think it gave them a strong foundation for when they
WERE approaced by those who believed my kids and I are going to hell.
I'm not sure it would have been as important here in California, but by
the time we moved here we had other reasons for wanting to continue to
belong to a UU community. So if you live somewhere where your beliefs
put you in a distinct minority, you might look around for others of a
like mind (or whose larger group includes at least some of a like mind)
to give your kids a "safe haven", and a place to discuss how to handle
"those" conversations, which will most likely come up as your kids get
older.

--
Children won't care how much you know until they know how much you care