Talking about Death, Becoming Buddhist Families: A Case Study of Religious Parenting Education in Contemporary Taiwan

Abstract

Abstract Religious belief and practice affect how parents engage their children; the experience of parenting, in turn, can reshape religious ideas. Religious parenting resources serve to guide parents’ understanding of their relationship with their children and provide an important perspective on the family as a site of religious practice. Taking a special issue of a Taiwanese Buddhist journal as a case study to examine parenting strategies around the topic of death, I argue that conversations with their children about death provide parents an opportunity to re-write traditional scripts around death. Discussions around death also serve to re-orient the parent-child relationship to give greater weight to the child’s voice, and offer space for the parent to learn as well. These religious parenting materials provide new Buddhist perspectives on death and on how parents and children should relate.