In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Lara Corbell has homeschooled her daughters, a seventh grader and a fifth grader, for two years. She left her job as a merchandiser for Hallmark to teach her kids because her younger daughter was performing poorly in public school. The family doesn’t attend church, although they celebrate a secular version of Christmas and Easter. The kids like the gifts and Easter baskets, Corbell said, but “we had issues with lying about Santa.” Corbell stopped attending church when she was five after she told her dad she “didn’t like it,” and services are largely foreign to her girls.

“I was thinking I’d just plug these words into Google and get some resources but every single thing I would delve into would have some religion in it. It was so frustrating,” Corbell, 45, said of her first foray into homeschooling. “It’s not about being anti-religion. It's just that you want to teach kids your own belief system. I just wanted unbiased resources.”

Now, Corbell runs SecularHomeSchoolFamilies.com, where she vets hundreds of secular-friendly curricula and parenting guides and lists Facebook groups across the country for parents and kids to join. In the Chapel Hill-Durham-Raleigh area, she’s part of a group with 900 members.

From San Diego, Blair Lee runs SEA (Secular, Eclectic, Academic) Homeschoolers, a Facebook group of nearly 5,000 members across the country. She homeschools her 16-year-old son, who says he leans toward Buddhism and Baha’ism and has authored chemistry and biology lesson plans under a series called R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey. “For homeschoolers, sometimes we beat ourselves up about the differences between us—who is atheist, who is secular, who is religious but interested in teaching real science to their kids,” she said. “The truth is, our differences are our strength.”

There are those like Mollie Yoshimoto, the 35-year-old mother of 7-year-old Jake, who she homeschools in Hesperia, California. Yoshimoto didn’t grow up with religion and never embraced or rejected it. She wants her son to make his own choices. “I don't want to indoctrinate my kid on whether religion is this way or that way. Being around religious people is not a big deal, I just don't want it to be the only thing,” she said.

According to the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, a Purcellville, Virginia-based Christian group that has frequently brought lawsuits against state and federal schooling authorities on behalf of homeschoolers, about 25 percent of homeschooling families are secular, while roughly two-thirds are Christian. That group of atheist, agnostic, and non-religious homeschoolers is bound to grow as more people identify as non-religious. It’s hard to say exactly how many American kids identify as secular and how many of them are homeschooled, since surveys typically focus on adults over the age of 18. But “while we don't have data on the religious experiences of adolescents directly, we have asked questions about the type and frequency of religious practices Americans participated in during childhood,” said Dan Cox, the director of research at the Public Religion Research Institute, in an email. “We’ve found that younger adults today are far less likely to have participated regularly in religious activities when they were growing up than previous generations.”

Sometimes, those non-religious kids even reshape their families. Smith, the mom in Long Beach, grew up in a secular Jewish home and sent her kids to the Jewish Community Center for preschool. When her sons both became atheists, she became one, too. “I’m happier with atheist children. As time goes by, it makes more sense to me,” she said. Still, there are little artifacts of faith in her family’s house. A menorah sits next to a bookshelf in the living room, otherwise crowded with Aiden's figure-skating trophies. Each year, the family celebrates Hanukkah to honor their Jewish cultural background. Aiden’s dad and Smith’s husband, Kemal, is a Turkish-born Shiite Muslim, yet like his wife, he isn’t religious. The family also celebrates a holiday from his upbringing: Şeker Bayramı, the festival after the fasting month of Ramadan that's more commonly known as Eid al-Fitr. The kids mostly like it because they get free candy, Smith said.