| Are Spiritual Children Happier? |
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| Articles | Religion |
| Posted by Wakeup on Saturday, 26 June 2010 00:50 |
Ennis explained that their parents were her grandparents, and they had died. There were a few beats of silence before the little boy exclaimed, “Oh, they’re risen!” revealing an understanding of his family’s Catholic faith that caught his mother by surprise. That day a decade ago, Ennis discovered something as a parent that new Canadian studies have just revealed, much to the surprise of researchers: Children have an unexpectedly sophisticated grasp of spirituality, and they’re happier for it. “There had never been that language; that link had never been made for him,” Ennis, director of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, a children’s program in the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto, says of her son’s epiphany. Newly published research from the University of British Columbia finds that spirituality — a personal belief in a higher power — is strongly linked to the happiness of children ages eight to 12, but religiousness — practices such as attending church — is not. The original study was conducted with relatively affluent, predominantly Caucasian and Christian children in B.C., but it’s just been repeated with children in the very different milieu of New Delhi, and lead author Mark Holder, an associate professor of psychology at UBC’s Okanagan campus, says preliminary analysis shows the same surprising results. “I wasn’t even sure we could measure spirituality in kids,” he says. “I wasn’t sure when we gave them the questionnaires whether they’d be able to understand it (or) we’d end up with what we refer to as a ‘wash,’ which means we don’t find anything significant because children don’t get it and they just guess and respond randomly. The fact that we got such strong results indicates that they must somehow be understanding it.” What’s more, the studies showed varying effects for different aspects of spirituality, suggesting that children grasp their faith with a subtlety that may elude many adults, Holder says. The researchers measured the impact of spirituality and religiousness on happiness separately, asking the children questions such as: “How often do you go to a place of worship such as a church?” to assess their religiousness, and asking how strongly they agreed with statements such as: “I believe in a higher power who watches over me” to measure their spirituality. They got entirely different results for each — what children believe impacts their happiness; how often they go to church does not — which Holder says indicates children’s spirituality and religiousness can be separated, even though many adults have trouble with the concept. “We think it might be a component of whether it’s voluntary or not that’s important,” he says, adding that most 10-year-olds who attend worship services do so at their parents’ behest and not out of their own desire. Ennis works with children under age six in the Archdiocese of Toronto, and she says she’s constantly amazed by the spiritual and metaphorical links they’re able to build on their own. She starts talking about the Parable of the Good Shepherd who cares benevolently for his flock when the children are just three or four years old, she says, and almost immediately they grasp that they themselves are the sheep watched over by Jesus. “They’re beautiful and also profound, and theologically, they’re very sound,” she says of their revelations. She uses simple stories and few words to convey these religious lessons to the youngest parishioners, Ennis says, and the Biblical stories come to life with the help of figurines to act out the stories or tiny mustard seeds representing those to which God’s kingdom is compared. And she always knows when the children are enthralled because the wiggling and fidgeting stops, she says. Amy Crawford, program minister for children, young teens and youth with the United Church of Canada, says she believes that, rather than limiting spirituality, the developmental stage of childhood enhances it. Often when people talk about a spiritual experience, they’ll recall something from childhood, she says, but over time, society and even religious institutions themselves encourage people to suppress that youthful capacity for wonder. “Children are very familiar with mystery and with not knowing, which is a quality of spirituality,” she says. “Their days are filled with new discoveries and new insights. They’re open and they’re curious; they understand that we don’t always have words to describe what it is that we’re thinking and feeling.” For a long time, society failed to “honour and respect” the capabilities of children in this context, Crawford says, but she believes children experience the presence of a higher power in the same moments adults do — even if they don’t always know how to express it. There’s a societal distrust of institutions that’s seen more interest in personal spirituality even while formal religiousness has declined in recent years, she says, and that in turn has sparked greater interest in how children experience faith. “In the last five to 10 years, there’s been more research and more writing and a greater interest in the spirituality of children,” she says. “We’ve begun to understand and work from the perspective that there’s an innateness to spirituality, so it’s something that we’re born with and it may even be that children are more open, so they may even have a greater ability to be spiritual beings than adults do.” There’s been plenty of academic research on the relationship between adult spirituality and happiness, Holder says, and even some work on adolescents, but very little on the spiritual lives of children. Now that his studies have demonstrated that children understand these concepts, he’s hopeful more research on the topic will follow. The strong connection between spirituality and children’s happiness suggests real-world “interventions” that could boost well-being by tapping into these different aspects of faith, he says. Spirituality is a complex notion that researchers break up into four components, Holder says: personal meaning or finding value and meaning in one’s own life; communal meaning or a person’s relationship with the people around them; transcendence or belief in a higher power; and awe and appreciation of beauty and nature. In his study, children’s happiness was most strongly linked to the first two aspects, he says, suggesting that encouraging volunteering could increase happiness in children by helping them connect with others and find more personal meaning. “If it does work, it’s going to be a really easy intervention for schools or parents to do,” Holder says. Written by By Shannon Proudfoot Article taken from Canwest News Service
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