WTP – beautiful posts, and beautifully phrased! Shkoyach!
I would like to add something that I think people should be careful about:
One has to think carefully about how to present things. There can be groups or individuals who call themselves “Orthodox” but have attitudes that are more problematic than Secular precisely because they consider themselves and their hashkafos to be Orthodox, and the parents may not want their children to consider those hashkafos to be legitimate.
It is unlikely that the children will become Reform in any case. What usually happens (from what I’ve seen in my work with kids-at-risk) is that they become less Frum or not-Frum but their hashkafos are still intact and they still view the Chareidi way as the right way, and their aspiration is to eventually go back to becoming Chareidi again, once they have worked out their psychological issues. And often, they do come back.
And even if they never end up going back to keeping everything, it is worse to be an apikorus than to not keep Mitzvos.
On the other hand, there may be hashkafos that they consider to be “less legitimate” than their own, but not completely illegitimate, and they should make sure that their kids realize that those hashkafos are not like Reform and not “off-the-map”.
I’m deliberately not getting into examples, and I’m not saying it’s always clear which hashkafos belong in which category. The point is that it’s not black-and-white (in either direction). The fact that a group calls itself Orthodox doesn’t necessarily mean that it is legitimate. And one has to think carefully about how to present these things to his children.
If it’s not clearly wrong, you shouldn’t teach your children that it’s clearly wrong, but if it’s not clearly right, you can’t teach them that it’s okay, even if it is called Orthodox.