They are also in sequential monogamous relationships, with stepchildren, semi-attached children and children who are living with two adults, neither of whom are their natural parents.

In the United Kingdom, marriage breakdown over Christmas and New Year is fairly commonplace! So adults must be honest with their children.

It would help if they were prepared to talk to their children about their doubts as well as their faith, about the fact that we all worship the same God, about how many of us cannot quite conceptualize God, but know that there is a voice within us -- our conscience? -- that seems like the still small voice of God.

Children need to know that adults may have the strongest or weakest of faiths, but that they are still searching, and that there is within us all something that makes us realise that we are not just machines, or animals, but there is an awareness, a spirituality,
that can move us to great things -- at its best.

Speaking personally, my strongest awareness of a spiritual sense has always come when working with people who are dying, whose awareness of something within and beyond themselves, whatever their faith, has seemed pronounced and almost infectious.

As a congregational rabbi many years ago, when I visited hospices, I first became aware of that phenomenon. In more recent years, with my parents when they were dying, and others I knew less well, I was more aware of it again -- a sense that the people who are dying feel a presence within and beyond them, and that there is a yearning for a closeness to that presence that one rarely encounters with other people.

We cannot give our children certainties about so many things -- but we can give them the desire to search, to feel, to be aware, to learn, and, above all, to realize that people of all faiths, and sometimes of none, share these sensibilities.