I guess we're pretty lucky here in the UK in that religion doesn't tend to be a big part of life unless you want it to be (with some troubling exceptions, especially around schooling), so while we aren't actively trying to tell our kids nothing about religion, it's not something that would often come up naturally in our household or even amongst friends (I was surprised by my daughter's friend saying bedtime prayers - I'd had no idea whatsoever the parents were remotely religious).

I suppose that makes us more in the 'we'll talk about it if asked' party. Feels awkward to me to introduce the subject in our case unless we see interest being expressed, but I fully appreciate it's different for different countries, religious backgrounds, etc. I'm sure they'll have some probing questions at some point. I had a rather surreal 5-minute conversation with my 5-year-old about atomic structure and the behaviour of metals recently when I flippantly answered yet another 'why' question about electricity (I was a Chemistry student at university years ago). I couldn't believe the follow-up questions kept coming and then, just as I was starting to wonder if I had a genius kid, she got bored and wandered off without another word. I'm clearly not cut out to be a teacher!

I'm an atheist parent of two. My oldest is just over 5 and seemingly a firm believer in Santa. This is not something we've encourages as parents, but has just been picked up by her round and about school, nursery, her friends. She also seems to have a passing awareness of Jesus and links him to Christmas, though without any real baggage or understanding of what that all supposedly means.

In a perfect world (for me), she'd have belief in neither of those things, but we've not pushed directly to eradicate the beliefs. Instead, we tend to let her question and encourage that questioning. Example: "how does Santa get to all the children in the world?" - we'll ask her what she thinks and work it through with her. We don't suggest it's unlikely, but that it's a great question, and that it does seem like that would be hard, so let's think about it. Similarly, her nursery had a vicar appear and talk about Jesus around Easter time (I was LIVID about that and made enough of a fuss to force the nursery to invite representatives of a couple of other religions and the British Humanist Association follow that up, but that's besides the point). This was particularly annoying because we'd just about convinced her the concept of death was not something to be overly concerned about, and the vicar comes along and points out that Jesus will allow people never to die. So we talked to her about how different people believe different things, got the nursery to bring in some other perspectives, explained what her mum and dad believe and told her she could make up her own mind, and that it was always OK to change her mind about these things. She's almost never mentioned him since, and looked with a certain detached amusement at a friend who came for a sleepover and said her prayers before bedtime.

Sorry for the long post - long time lurker, I'm afraid, and not practiced at keeping it short and sweet. Just thought I'd add my two cents' worth, which is that we think it's not necessarily the right thing to do to force our beliefs on the kids either: the most important thing we can do as parents, we think, is to encourage questioning and making up our own minds about things. This sometimes leads to very difficult parenting around bedtime...