Children in non-religious families are more generous than Christian and Muslim children.
Religious upbringings are making children selfish and mean according to an international study published today in Current Biology. Social Scientists from seven universities in the United States, China, Canada, Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and South Africa investigated the common notion that religious education is necessary to raise an altruistic child. They found the exact opposite. Spare religiosity and the rod, and love the child if you want your child to be kind and sensitive. Strict religiosity harms children because children respond to mean parents by becoming mean. The study found the older the children, the meaner they became, under a religious upbringing. The children of non-believers were kinder and more generous than Christian and Muslim children.
Muslim and Christian children are more punitive than non-religious children. The assertion of religious parents that a religious upbringing is making their children more sensitive than non-religious children is false.
The punitive teachings predominant in the Christian and Muslim religions correlated with punitive and insensitive attitudes in children bought up in religious families. Religious children weren't just found to be mean and insensitive towards other religious groups. They were mean and insensitive towards people in their own groups. This study shows, contrary to common American beliefs, that typical religious upbringings in the dominant Christian and Muslim religions are harming children. The sample size of Jewish and Buddhist children, and children brought up under other religions, were too small to reach any significant conclusions.
“Overall, our findings ... contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others,” said the authors of The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World, published this week in Current Biology.
“More generally, they call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that secularisation of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness – in fact, it will do just the opposite.”
Almost 1,200 children, aged between five and 12, in the US, Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey and South Africa participated in the study. Almost 24% were Christian, 43% Muslim, and 27.6% non-religious. The numbers of Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, agnostic and other children were too small to be statistically valid.