Forming Resilient Children

The Role of Spiritual Formation for Healthy Development

Holly Catterton Allen

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781514001721
• eBook ISBN: 9781514001738
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology

Many children today are growing up in the midst of adversity, whether brought on by family difficulties or larger societal crises. All children need to be able to deal with stress, cope with challenges, and persevere through disappointments. While we cannot protect children from all hardships, we can promote healthy development that fosters resilience.

In this interdisciplinary work, Holly Catterton Allen builds a bridge between resilience studies and children's spiritual formation. Because children are spiritual beings, those who work with them can cultivate spiritual practices that are essential to their thriving in challenging times.

This book equips educators, counselors, children's ministers, and parents with ways of developing children's spirituality to foster the resilience needed to face the ordinary hardships of childhood and to persevere when facing trauma. It offers particular insight into the spiritual experiences of children who have been hurt by life through chronic illness, disability, abuse, or disasters, with resources for healing and hope.

CHAPTER ONE

What Is Children’s Spirituality?

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

IN THE SUMMER OF 2019, our three-month-old grandson, Roham, experienced a seizure in his sleep that caused him to vomit, then aspirate the vomitus into his lungs, prompting a critical medical crisis. After repeatedly performing interventions to address the problems that were threatening his life—a racing heart, plummeting blood pressure, low oxygen levels, precipitous carbon dioxide levels, and undulating body temperature—doctors eventually stabilized him and sedated him as they inserted the ventilator tube to help him breathe.

This previously vibrant, active infant remained eerily still—passive, immobile, unconscious—for five days. When the danger finally receded, the doctors began to remove the tubes. As they brought him out of sedation, Roham was desperately unhappy, attempting to cry (though he had lost his voice), nurse (though his throat was too sore to swallow), and sleep (though he was too utterly wretched to do so) for a day and a half—that felt like an eternity. He did nothing but sit upright on his mother’s lap for thirty-six hours straight. He sat facing forward (to accommodate the monitoring wires attached to his chest), peering out solemnly in desperation. He refused to be put down. Nor did he smile or engage in any other way.

His only comfort appeared to be gripping one of his mother’s fingers in each of his tiny hands while sitting in her warm lap. Roham was navigating not only a physical crisis, but a spiritual crisis as well—as we shall see.

INITIAL INTEREST IN CHILDREN’S SPIRITUALITY

Something happened in the 1990s that dramatically altered my understanding of faith development in children. With a master’s degree in educational psychology from the University of Iowa, fifteen years as a professor of teacher education at two Christian universities, and a couple of decades of teaching Sunday school and leading children’s church following an educational model, I was confident that I understood the basic principles of Christian education. Then something happened that radically reoriented my thinking about children and faith.

For four years in the midnineties my family was part of a church plant that met each Sunday evening in cross-generational home gatherings. Every week we participated in these small groups—eating, praying, listening, laughing, sharing, and hoping—with all ages participating together. During this time, I began to experience something I had not seen in my years teaching Sunday school and leading children’s church: the children in these all-age small groups began to pray with and for their parents and other adults; they began to minister to each other and to adults as well. My understanding of Christian education for both children and adults began to change, and ultimately, my new understandings led me to embrace a career shift.

In 1999 my family and I left West Texas for California, where I pursued doctoral work with one burning question in mind: What might explain the profound effects I and my family had observed and experienced in those intergenerational small groups? My hope was to understand the impact of intergenerational Christian experiences on children (and adults); however, before I could delve into that central question, I needed to understand the nature of the change I had witnessed.

Just one year earlier, Catherine Stonehouse’s Joining Children on the Spiritual Journey was published.1 Her book first gave me language for my task: the basic construct I was exploring was “spirituality.” Thus I began a twenty-year (and ongoing) quest to define and describe—that is, to understand—children’s spirituality.

The premise of this book is that resilience in children is interconnected with spirituality. To unpack this premise, we’ll first need a rich understanding of spirituality, beginning with the idea that spirituality is an innate universal human quality. From this vantage point, I’ll establish a working definition of children’s spirituality.

SPIRITUALITY AS A UNIVERSAL HUMAN QUALITY

Researchers in the past two decades have been exploring the idea that spirituality is a universal human quality.2 For example, biologist Dean Hamer believes faith is hardwired into our genes, though he doesn’t mean by that statement that there is a particular gene that makes people believe in God. Rather he believes that human beings are predisposed to be spiritual, to seek a higher being.3

Before these more general studies on spirituality, Barbara Kimes Myers in the United States and David Hay in the United Kingdom conducted groundbreaking research in the area of children’s spirituality. Myers and Hay, both working from Christian worldviews, spent their long, successful careers speaking primarily into secular educational settings, along the way seeking ways for children’s spirituality to be fostered in these public education settings.

Myers’ greatest contribution has been in the area of preschool education. Myers explains spirituality as an inherent part of the condition of being human, noting that all human beings have spirit as a “life-giving force.”4

David Hay is well known for his now-classic book (with Rebecca Nye) The Spirit of the Child.5 Hay and Nye conducted exploratory research with children ages six to eleven in the British public school system in order to address two issues that trouble the study of children’s spirituality: (1) a lack of consensus on what spirituality is, and (2) a scarcity of specific details regarding the spiritual life of children.6 The foundational premise of their book is that every person possesses spiritual awareness.7

And Lisa Miller, who has spent much of her career as a psychologist and clinician researching spiritual psychology, agrees that children are born with a natural spirituality. She says it is foundational to who we are as human beings.8

Hamer, Myers, Hay, Nye, Miller, and many others argue that human beings, even before receiving any formal religious training, possess a spiritual awareness that can be cultivated—or hindered.

A WORKING DEFINITION OF CHILDREN’S SPIRITUALITY

Building directly on this idea that children are spiritual beings from birth, my desire is to construct a definition of children’s spirituality that will be suitable and beneficial to anyone who picks up this book. Those who live or work with children in Christian settings may desire a definition that encompasses an explicitly Christian perspective.9 However, for many believers working with children in government and other secular settings, a Christ-focused definition of children’s spirituality would be problematic. Nevertheless, these workers are aware that children, especially those navigating hard places, need every physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and spiritual resource available to help them survive and thrive. Nevertheless, these concerned teachers, social workers, and counselors therefore need a broad definition of children’s spirituality that will help children access those spiritual resources.

Definitions of spirituality abound. They sometimes refer ambiguously to some inner quality or to participation in a project greater than oneself.10 Other definitions include references to making meaning, being aware of mystery or wonder, or existential realities. Many definitions refer to the importance of relationality, in particular, relationships with self, with others, with the world, and with God (or a transcendent being).

A few definitions focus specifically on children, and these definitions tend to emphasize relationality. For example, Myers defines children’s spirituality as a web of meaning “connecting self, others, world, and cosmos.”11 And Hay and Nye define children’s spirituality as relational consciousness, which they describe as children’s understanding of how they relate to other people, to self, to things, and to God.12 Lisa Miller’s definition of spirituality initially focuses on the child-God relationship, but then she broadens it saying spirituality is experienced with one another, with a higher power, and within ourselves,13 thus aligning fairly closely with the relational definitions of Hay and Myers.

Three relationships, the person’s relationship with self, others, and God (or higher being), appear frequently in definitions of children’s spirituality14 as well as definitions of spirituality in general. For example, John Swinton, an expert on spirituality and mental health challenges, frames his definition of spirituality using the terms interpersonal, intrapersonal, and transpersonal which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Catherine Stonehouse
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Foundational Concepts in Children's Spirituality and Resilience
• Part Two: Families, Children's Spirituality, and Resilience
• Part Three: Churches, Children's Spirituality, and Resilience
• Part Four: Children's Spirituality, Resilience, and Adversity
• Part Five: In Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Also by the Author
• Notes
• Praise for Forming Resilient Children
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright