Atheist kids and teens having difficulty with believing peers

That's a tough one. We have a 4 year old and a 3 year old, so we thankfully haven't had to deal with this particular problem yet.

I guess teen pressure is going to be an issue on a number of topics, so obviously non-believers are not alone in this experience...although it does give another juicy target for kids who like to discriminate and separate people into groups and cliques.

The best defense against that kind of cruel behavior is probably a good self-esteem. We need to make sure our kids know we love them. We need to spend time with them and give them support, we need them to know that they are valuable, beautiful human beings...that they have boundaries but also their own agency.

We need to encourage and provide opportunities wherein they can be successful and gain confidence, and transfer that confidence to other areas of their lives.
whether it be sports or academics or school activities, or literature, or cinema. Help them find hobbies they will love that aren't completely tied to some type of group approval. Keep stressing to them that everyone feels, to some degree or another, this type of pressure during their teens.

We need them to know that sometimes (and especially in High School, it seems) people can be cruel and ignorant and intolerant. Learning how to cope with that must be one of the primary lessons of adolescence, and there may be no easy way to learn that lesson except by the pain of going through it.

If they are into books, they may like the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy, which combines youth interests, fantasy/science fiction adventure, with some critical commentary on dogma and religious institutions, without becoming overly critical of spirituality.

As a teen, I also read a lot of Robert Heinlein. Many of his views are ,umm, questionable, but he did a very good job in a few books about laying bare the nature of religious bigotry and the arbitrariness of religious belief.

The two books I would recommend of his are 'Job - A Comedy of Justice' and 'Stranger in a Strange Land.' Note: they do have explicit sexual content, so you will need to decide what your children are ready for. They are pretty racy, actually, so probably only appropriate for 17 and up.

I think we can take solace, in the end, that our kids learn these lessons early and it prepares them for the inevitable battles they will face as adults.

It's funny... I've been getting involved in facebook recently, and some old friends that I haven't seen in 20 years have brought up events from our time together in high school. A common thread was how traumatic or serious that a given event appeared to us then, and how silly and trivial it all seems now.

Since peer pressure is so common on a number of topics, it might also be worth checking out a few books that talk about dealing with pressure related to drug use or gang violence, etc. Maybe there are some common tools we can apply.