I came across an old Unitarian Universalist curriculum pamphlet the other day, A Guide to the Study of Jesus To Be Used with “Who Do Men [sic] Say That I Am?” by Susanna Wilder Heinz, published by Beacon Press in 1966. Ms. Heinz writes:

The study of the life and teachings of Jesus is best left for the adolescent years…. This is not to say that we should remain completely silent about Jesus until a child reaches his [sic] teens. To do so is to permit the teaching about Jesus to be done by default. If we remain silent, the neighbor’s children won’t! It is with dismay that some parents who follow the laissez faire method of ‘let him make up his own mind when he is old enough,’ discover that they no longer have a child grown into a liberal religious adult, but a child grown into his neighbor’s religion.

Seems to me this remains good advice today, nearly four decades later.