Parenting starts out with figuring out the buckle configuration of an infant car seat without an engineering degree and knowing how to change the diaper of a floppy, mushy little creature who has absolutely zero interest in contributing to his/her own personal hygiene. It continues with learning how to fall asleep at your work computer without drooling, snoring or otherwise drawing the attention and ire of your peers or employers after feeding and rocking the floppy, mushy creature six times between 9pm and 6am.

The skill set required for parents of young babies is generally limited to meeting their survival needs. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a time of major angst, confusion and a million questions – most of which are leveled at Google sometime between midnight and 3am EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. But most newborns aren’t asking questions like “what happens to your eyeballs when you’re dead?” Most newborns don’t require an explanation for why people go to war, what drugs are or how to recover from a broken heart.

New parents quickly learn that they better become equipped with increasingly sophisticated tools for parenting and educating their offspring – assuming they want to try to avoid visiting them in prison someday. Making one’s own decisions is one thing, but making decisions for another human being makes the decisions suddenly feel heavier. How do we anchor our children in a moral foundation? How do we insure they won’t go on knifing rampages at 15? How do we help them choose friends who will bring out the best in them? How can we help them stand up for their convictions? How do we prevent our kids from becoming bullies? It’s dizzying. This is when we (wisely) turn to books and the internet (I would suggest however that you remain skeptical of a medical article diagnosing your three-month-old daughter with testicular cancer).

Thankfully, there are many fabulous resources available both for parents and for kids to navigate this world without religious guidance. If you have kids in your life, check out some of these resources!