Child Baptism in a Few Years

I don’t think your overthinking it, AmyJ. It looks like you got a great plan there. I don’t have any kids at the moment, so I know I don’t have the things you’re talking about. However, if I had them, I don’t know if I would be able to function like you mentioned with her kids. It might be a little too stressful for me. Anyway, I hope and pray it’ll work out for you and your family. Keep us all posted here.

Far be it for me to suggest baptizing children. I honestly don’t see much difference in baptizing infants who are incapable of consent and 8-year-olds, also not really capable of consent (especially considering lifelong consequences).

I agree.

I don’t know that you’re overthinking – it’s your family and you know your child better than anyone else.

I know that my mother and my father-in-law will bring up the importance of baptizing my daughter as part of how they view their lifelong legacy. They genuinely believe and want to secure their children and grandchildren to them. This may also be important to my sister-in-law.

My husband “assumes” that our youngest will get baptized at the correct time – and hasn’t given it much thought otherwise. I *think* it’s important to him from a father/priesthood administrator aspect too.

I feel that there are default assumptions at play – like I want my daughter to be baptized, so I will do all the prep-work (attendance and testimony-building and so forth). I am doing “character development” to teach our child how to be a good human to the best of my ability (but that doesn’t include a testimony).

I guess the other assumption is that it’s perfectly “fine” to show up to church just enough to get her baptized then we can vanish into the woodwork again (at least in our home branch). My honesty gets me in trouble here – I would rather avoid introducing her too much to the church then follow the social expectations here of pretending for a while for the legacy element.

Unless the policy has changed recently, children of record (and they don’t necessarily have to have been named/blessed to be so) are kept on the church records until they’re young adults.

I can live with this – but I don’t if the grandparents can.

I have been thinking of shipping the girls to their grandparents for 3 weeks (3 Sundays to meet the baptism attendance requirement (and do the missionary discussions I think) and then showing up with my husband for the actual baptism (but it would be out of state – so I don’t know what rules apply – including whether he could baptize her). It solves my problem of being involved, and the grandparents’ problem of the baptism happening – but puts a lot of work on my mom and doesn’t feel like it will properly meet people’s expectations. Her birthday is late August, so it actually works out.

Missionary discussions? Typically they only do those for kids that are nine years old or older. Also know that they typically use the event to work on the parents to be active members, which is understandable since from their perspective the newly baptized child will need reinforcement in the home.

If you do the baptism out of state and want to participate in the ordinance you’ll have to present a current temple recommend or a recommend to perform an ordinance that is issued by your bishop. Leadership roulette and all that but I think it’s mostly just a formality to prove that a person has the requisite priesthood to perform the ordinance.

Right. My husband will have to go back to church to get his renewed for that. That solves that problem:)

I won’t need a temple recommend to participate on any level:)

If you do the baptism out of state and want to participate in the ordinance you’ll have to present a current temple recommend or a recommend to perform an ordinance that is issued by your bishop. Leadership roulette and all that but I think it’s mostly just a formality to prove that a person has the requisite priesthood to perform the ordinance.

I did choose to have my son’s baptism out of state so that family could be present. Because I do not have a TR, I had to get the recommend to perform a live ordinance from my bishop.

I did choose for my father in-law to confirm and bestow the gift of the HG. I probably could have done this myself but for me the important part was that I perform the actual water baptism.

I tend to be a results oriented person. Therefore, I imagine what I want to have happen and then set about how to achieve it.

I am not reading here what it is that you want to have happen. It seems that you have extended family that would like to have your child baptized and you may be willing to help facilitate that in some ways but not in others.

Therefore, my fist question is what do you want to occur?

First Question: I would prefer that my child not get baptized at all until they were a teenager/adult and knew what they were signing up for.

Revised “Want”: I would rather not be expected to plan the baptism and get my child to church on Sundays. I will take the family capital hit from my in-laws and parents (I don’t see an honest way around it). This could be a fight with my husband as he expects me to plan everything and I don’t do it.

I do understand the tension of needing our kids to fulfill certain benchmarks for extended family. My own in-laws would be “very concerned” if my children did not receive the proper milestone ordinances. A bigger concern for DW and I is that our children might feel like they do not fit in at family gatherings if they do not have at least a fair degree of fluency in Mormon LDS culture. We do not want our children to feel ostracized our left out.

My husband and I don’t have the bigger concern that you and your wife do. One child can make herself at home anywhere, and the other child usually exhibits behaviors socially that are a bigger concern for us in social settings (like going to a church social and telling everyone she’s an agnostic NOTE: That hasn’t happened yet – but only because I pre-emptively changed the conversation topic when I sensed it was going that way).

First Question: I would prefer that my child not get baptized at all until they were a teenager/adult and knew what they were signing up for.

That’s typically a tough plan for more orthodox believers to accept. Usually the fear is that if the baptism is put off then it will never happen. There was a family in my ward that took that approach and the fears of leaders and extended family were realized, the kids never got baptized. I don’t see it as a big deal but I’m sure the more orthodox people connected to that family did.

I’ve got to think that if getting baptized at 18 years old instead of eight was the model then we’d see a similar rate of kids that don’t get baptized as the rate of kids that go inactive once they reach 18. Maybe a slightly higher rate of kids getting baptized just to appease people but then later going inactive all the same. I think even in that situation that leaders and family would say that it’s better for someone to get baptized and later go inactive than to never get baptized. Not my opinion, just the mindset you’re likely up against.

I do agree with others, at eight years old it’s more the parent’s decision, not the child’s, which really makes me wonder just how much “accounting” an eight year old is really doing.

Unfortunately that age is laid out in scripture, it would be interesting to see how much faith it would take on the part of current leaders to change the age. They seem fearful to go against scripture… aside from making the WoW a commandment.

Tangent to my tangent, this fear that an ordinance will never be done if it’s not done according to the plan that’s been laid out for people is very real. I’ve been to more than one LDS marriage outside the temple where the officiant explicitly issued a challenge to the newlyweds to be sealed in the temple in exactly one year because if they didn’t, “studies have shown that they’d never get sealed.” Right there in the middle of their wedding ceremony. It’s tone-deaf.

I may spin up a tread on this Fear Of Missing Out phenomenon.