I have a five-year old daughter and I've been fully inactive for about 3 years. So she got a limited degree of JW exposure as an infant. Most of my immediate family are still Witnesses, but we don't have dealings with them on any regular basis. So imagine my surprise a couple of months ago when she brings up Jehovah during a lunch conversation.
As far as I can tell she has no concept of God, or Jehovah as a spiritual entity or what that would entail. She thought Jehovah was a person, or a person in a story (???). She's kind of hard to understand sometimes. Anyway, I found it amusing, but I had no qualms telling her that I thought Jehovah was part of an ugly story. That he doesn't exist. (Guess that makes me a true apostate, eh?) That the people that talk about Jehovah don't like birthdays or Christmas. That was about the extent of the conversation.
I wonder if you other exJW parents have experiences with young children and exiting the Witnesses. Do you fear, as I do, that our JW relatives will try to indoctrinate them behind our backs? I have told my parents straight-out on a couple of occasions that I don't want them to talk JW stuff to my children. Of course, that is probably of limited effect or they will rationalize ignoring my directives once the kids are old enough to start thinking for themselves.
I have thought long and hard about the supposed "spiritual need" that many people talk about. Do you think it's an actual innate need like the JWs teach? Cause if so, it is futile, even unwise to not give our kids some sense of spiritual direction. There must be a good strategy for immunizing them against the dub bullshit that they will inevitably be exposed to. One of the options that my wife and I discussed briefly was to associate loosely with a church, particularly the Unitarian-Universalists, whose teachings are diametrically opposed to JWs.