The first thing a parent raising children in the tradition needs to know — said plainly, by someone who has been doing it for fifteen years and has made most of the available mistakes — is that the children will be fine. The anxiety that drives most of the questions parents ask about this subject is the anxiety that the child will be made to feel weird at school, alienated from their peers, or burdened with an identity they did not ask for. The anxiety is reasonable and almost entirely misplaced. Children whose parents practice the tradition with confidence and without apology grow up taking it for granted, in much the same way that children of practising Catholics or Muslims or Jews take their parents’ tradition for granted. The element that makes the difference is the parents’ confidence, not the tradition’s content.
This essay offers brief, practical guidance for parents at three stages: the early years (birth to seven), the middle childhood years (seven to twelve), and the adolescent years (twelve to eighteen). It is written from the perspective of a Yorùbá-Nigerian mother raising children in the United States; the specifics will vary for parents in other situations, but the principles apply broadly.
## The Early Years (Birth to Seven)
In the early years, the work is simply *normalisation*. The child should grow up with the morning practice as a feature of the household — the candle, the water, the brief greetings — in the same way they grow up with breakfast and bedtime stories. The Òrìṣà should be referred to by name in ordinary household conversation. The shrine area, if you have one, should be a place the child knows and respects without being either afraid of it or alienated from it.
A small piece of practical advice: let the child help with the simple physical tasks — pouring out the previous day’s water onto the houseplant, refilling the glass, lighting the candle (with appropriate supervision). Children who participate in the practice from before they remember not participating do not later experience the tradition as something imposed on them.
Avoid, in the early years, anything that might be frightening — graphic discussions of difficult ritual material, exposure to ceremonies that include elements small children do not need to see. The tradition has a deep architecture; very little of that architecture is appropriate for the under-seven mind. Keep the early exposure simple, warm, and ordinary.
## The Middle Years (Seven to Twelve)
The middle years are when children begin to notice that not everyone they know practises what their family practises. This is the age at which the school-friend’s-house question begins to come up, and the answer to it matters.
The right response, in our family’s experience, has been simple acknowledgment without dramatisation. “Different families practise different traditions” is a sentence the children grow up hearing in many contexts; “we practise our family’s tradition, and your friends’ families practise theirs” extends the same logic to religion. The children very quickly learn to talk about their practice in age-appropriate ways with friends who ask, and to not talk about it with friends who do not ask, in the same way that any child learns the basic social calibration of what to share with whom.
This is also the age at which children can begin to ask substantive questions and deserve substantive answers. “Who is Òrìṣà?” “Why do we have the shrine?” “Why does Aunty Adérónké wear the white beads?” These questions deserve real answers, calibrated to what the child can absorb at their age, not deflected and not over-elaborated. A short, true answer that the child can understand is the goal; if the child has follow-up questions, answer those. The conversation, over years, builds the child’s working knowledge of the tradition without any single conversation being heavy.
A second practical recommendation: in the middle years, take the child to an Òrìṣà Spiritual Assembly chapter meeting if there is one in your area, and to the annual gathering if you can. Children of Olórìṣà parents who have grown up around other Olórìṣà children — even if those children live in different cities and only see each other once or twice a year — develop a sense of being part of a wider community that the school environment alone cannot provide.
## The Adolescent Years (Twelve to Eighteen)
The adolescent years are when the question of *the child’s own relationship to the tradition* becomes live. Up to this point, the child has been participating in the family’s practice; in adolescence, they begin to ask whether they want it as their own.
This is, in our family’s experience, the moment that most rewards parental restraint. The temptation is to push — to insist that the child continue to participate, to express anxiety about the possibility that they might step away, to make the practice a site of conflict in the broader struggle of adolescent autonomy. Every parent I know who has yielded to that temptation has regretted it. The temptation should be resisted.
What works, instead, is to step back. Continue your own practice with the same regularity. Continue to invite the adolescent to participate in family rituals and chapter events. Be available to answer questions when they come. Do not require, do not police, do not catastrophise. The adolescent who is given the space to consider the tradition on their own terms almost always returns to it as their own choice, sometimes after a period of distance, in young adulthood. The adolescent who is forced to perform participation through the teen years is the one who is most likely to walk away permanently in their twenties.
A second guidance for the adolescent years: introduce the child, by this stage, to a senior practitioner who is not their parent. The relationship between an adolescent and a non-parent senior — a trusted *bàbá* or *ìyá* of the chapter, a family friend who is a serious practitioner, a Babaláwo who can answer the kinds of questions a teenager will not ask their mother — is one of the most valuable things you can give them. The tradition has, for many centuries, transmitted across generations through such relationships precisely because adolescents need adult mentors who are not their parents.
## What I Wish I Had Known Earlier
The single piece of guidance I wish someone had given me when my first child was born: do not over-think it. The tradition is robust. Children are robust. Your job as a parent is to live the tradition openly and warmly in the household; the tradition will do most of the rest of the work itself.
The children grow into Olórìṣà the way the children of any practising tradition grow into their tradition — slowly, gradually, with periods of question and periods of return, with the lifelong relationship to the tradition being something they will work out themselves, in their own time, in ways their parents will not always be able to anticipate.
Do the morning practice. Greet the Òrìṣà. Take the children to chapter. Be patient. The road is long, and the children are walking their part of it under your eye whether you intervene constantly or step back and let them walk.
Step back. Let them walk. They will be fine.