What can religious families do to foster deep religious life in children, and to help

their children mature into adults with deep religious life?

Well, some families turn to a wider community of religious congregations to help them.

Some families join congregations that appreciate the power of modernity and the holds

that modern ideas have on the young, and so make themselves into modern religious communities,

adapting to the beliefs and practices of modern life.

At the other extreme, other families will join communities who seek to isolate from the impulses

and ideas of modern life.

And not only religious congregations, but parents send their children to schools and summer

camps and youth groups, all locating themselves somewhere along this spectrum of embracing

or rejecting modern life.

But when it comes to generational transmission, a young social scientist has recently published

his empirical findings that point in a different direction altogether.

Jesse Smith of Penn State contends that more important than these communal environments is the particular family environment

in which children are raised, and moreover, the specific kind of religious family environment

correlates with the kind of religious person children grow into. He finds that families that

identified themselves as religiously conservative when the

studies' subjects were adolescents were better able to transmit that religious devotion over the

course of the next 10 years, by which time the adolescence had become young adults.

That's the good news of Smith's research, but there's also some not so good news.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. Smith's good news is that

self-identified conservative religious families transmit religious identification to their children,

...