On Sunday, after attending the Provo City Center temple dedication with my husband, my ten-year-old son walked into the room where I was and announced, “That was the worst thing ever!”

I was both angry and hurt by his reaction—how dare he be bored by something meaningful to me!–though I shouldn’t have been either. Probably we could have better prepared him for the dedication: we explained what it would be, but we could have spent more time talking about the significance of temples. But much of his reaction stemmed from the fact that he’s an individual soul with tastes and interests and beliefs that are not always mine.

For the past few months we’ve struggled on and off on Sundays—inevitably it starts when he has to get dressed for church. “Why do we have to go to church? Can’t I stay home? It’s so boring!” Sometimes, when he’s particularly worked up, he’ll ask, “How do you know if it’s true at all?” Sometimes we answer patiently and carefully. Sometimes, when our patience is wearing thin, we simply insist that he comes. Mostly, our answers boil down to: this is something important to us that we want to share with the whole family. For now, we’re asking you to trust us. Someday, you’ll have your own answer.

Of course I hope that someday his answer will be that he needs to go to church because he can find God there, but I know that’s not always the case. (I did, however, hope we had a few more years before he started this. He’s only ten!)

As members of the church, we celebrate agency. We honor Mother Eve for making a choice that enabled each of us a life of agency. Our eleventh article of faith reads, “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.” Of course, this includes the reverse: that everyone has the privilege of not worshipping God.

As an adult, I find it relatively easy to respect this right in others, even if it sometimes makes me sad. But I struggle as a parent to respect this right in my children.

In particular, I struggle to know how much latitude to give my kids. To some extent, a child’s agency is limited by their parents: obviously, I’m not going to let my kid do something harmful just because he thinks he should. (Just yesterday I confiscated one of my husband’s more vicious pocket knives from my oldest, who’d borrowed it without asking). In Proverbs, we’re taught to “train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Part of that training, clearly, is in teaching the principles of the gospel. But I also think part of that training involves helping children learn to appreciate their agency. This transfer of agency is gradual: my kids choose their own clothes, make their own lunches, do their own homework. My oldest child chose to be baptized; my second will do so in the next couple months. But this particular choice stymies me. How long do I continue to insist he comes with us and hope he has a change of heart? At what point do I have to accept his own agency?

I recently read an article whose title promised advice on what to do if your child didn’t want to go to church. I clicked on the title, hoping for advice. What I got instead was a rigid insistence that you ought to make your child go to church no matter what—just as you would not let your child play on the freeway, you should not let your child do something equally perilous to his or her immortal soul.

But I can’t help thinking it’s not that easy. As an English professor, when I used to assign personal narrative essays to freshmen, I’d occasionally get a heart-breaking essay from a kid whose parents kicked him or her out of the house for failing to conform to family expectations. One student explained he wasn’t bad—he didn’t do drugs or sleep around—he just didn’t want to go to church. I don’t want that to be my son. Given the choice, I’d choose my son every time.

I have good friends, some of the best people I know, whose children refuse to go to church, or who have chosen another set of beliefs. This is part of the bitter fruit of Eve’s glorious choice: We get to choose—but so do our children. And their choices may not always be ours.

What I really want to know, from the brilliant Segullah hive mind, is this: how do you negotiate the tricky question of agency with your children? (If any of you have tips on church attendance, in particular, I’d love to hear them).