Jun 20, 2026 · 53 min · 9 segments
The answer is Sunday Ethical Education for Kids! Learn all about in this month's podcast episode.
So one of the various purposes of a religious community is to participate in the raising of children, to help there be a village, to help us be villagers, and to help young people grow up connected to community and with a clear sense of at least what their parents' values are.
One of the things that we know about children is that when you tell them what your values are, they take that in, they understand that.
They might grow up to have different values than their parents, but if you communicate clearly, your children understand what your values are.
Here at WES, we call our Sunday morning programming for kids Sunday Ethical Education for Kids, or SEEK.
I really like that it's called SEEK here at WES and in ethical culture in general, because I feel like that really points to that we aren't saying here is all the information you'll ever need.
Let's dump it into your empty brains.
But we're saying, this is going to be a lifelong process of seeking out information, of seeking out connection, of being together in different ways.
And so we try to set our kids up to have The ability to be in relationship with people, with each other, with adults, with people of different ages.
And we try to foster connection between people of different generations.
That's one of those other special things about a religious community.
We live in a society that is increasingly age-tracked, where if you don't intentionally make friends with people who are Not your age and not related to you.
It's very easy to wind up only knowing people who kind of fit in a narrow range of ages around your own age.
I even see this a lot when I see people on the internet, like on Reddit, saying, oh, where can I go to make friends who are very specific age range? And while it makes sense to want to be around people who are in a similar life stage to you, if you never spend time with people who aren't, it's very hard to imagine what your life could be in the future or to keep up with what is going on with people who are younger than you.
So...
We're actually at a really interesting place in the history of, I'm going to say Sikh, but I'm also going to mean kind of all sorts of Sunday school and religious exploration or education programs, because almost nothing works like it used to.
In UU land, people started writing about the death of Sunday school, gosh, at least a decade before the pandemic.
And COVID and the closures of our congregations that happened along with that led to, across the board, really dramatic drops in how many young people are engaged at the congregational level, much less at our national levels.
This year at the all-virtual General Assembly of the UUA, there were six youth signed up.
In 2019, which was the last fully in-person pre-pandemic General Assembly, there were more like 200.
The numbers between 2019 and now have been less drastic.
There were about 100 in some of the 2020-2021 era numbers.
But since then, it has been just a decline.
Now, I think there are fewer people in general at an all-virtual conference, but six is a really, that's a rough number.
And I know that in ethical culture, we've had the YES program, Young Ethical Youth.
So one of the various purposes of a religious community is to participate in the raising of children, to help there be a village, to help us be villagers, and to help young people grow up connected to community and with a clear sense of at least what their parents' values are.
One of the things that we know about children is that when you tell them what your values are, they take that in, they understand that.
They might grow up to have different values than their parents, but if you communicate clearly, your children understand what your values are.
Here at WES, we call our Sunday morning programming for kids Sunday Ethical Education for Kids, or SEEK.
I really like that it's called SEEK here at WES and in ethical culture in general, because I feel like that really points to that we aren't saying here is all the information you'll ever need.
Let's dump it into your empty brains.
But we're saying, this is going to be a lifelong process of seeking out information, of seeking out connection, of being together in different ways.
And so we try to set our kids up to have The ability to be in relationship with people, with each other, with adults, with people of different ages.
And we try to foster connection between people of different generations.
That's one of those other special things about a religious community.
We live in a society that is increasingly age-tracked, where if you don't intentionally make friends with people who are Not your age and not related to you.
It's very easy to wind up only knowing people who kind of fit in a narrow range of ages around your own age.
I even see this a lot when I see people on the internet, like on Reddit, saying, oh, where can I go to make friends who are very specific age range? And while it makes sense to want to be around people who are in a similar life stage to you, if you never spend time with people who aren't, it's very hard to imagine what your life could be in the future or to keep up with what is going on with people who are younger than you.
So...
We're actually at a really interesting place in the history of, I'm going to say Sikh, but I'm also going to mean kind of all sorts of Sunday school and religious exploration or education programs, because almost nothing works like it used to.
In UU land, people started writing about the death of Sunday school, gosh, at least a decade before the pandemic.
And COVID and the closures of our congregations that happened along with that led to, across the board, really dramatic drops in how many young people are engaged at the congregational level, much less at our national levels.
This year at the all-virtual General Assembly of the UUA, there were six youth signed up.
In 2019, which was the last fully in-person pre-pandemic General Assembly, there were more like 200.
The numbers between 2019 and now have been less drastic.
There were about 100 in some of the 2020-2021 era numbers.
But since then, it has been just a decline.
Now, I think there are fewer people in general at an all-virtual conference, but six is a really, that's a rough number.
And I know that in ethical culture, we've had the YES program, Young Ethical Youth.
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