The Study of Children in Religions

A Methods Handbook

Susan B. Ridgely

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780814776469
• eBook ISBN: 9780814777473
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Research in religious studies has traditionally focused on adult subjects since working with children presents significantly more challenges to the researcher, such as getting the research protocol passed by the Internal Review Board, obtaining permission from parents and schools, and figuring out how to make sense of young worldviews. The Study of Children in Religions provides scholars with a comprehensive source to assist them in addressing many of the issues that often stop researchers from pursuing projects involving children.

This handbook offers a broad range of methodological and conceptual models for scholars interested in conducting work with children. It not only illuminates some of the legal and ethical issues involved in working with youth and provides guidance in getting IRB approval, but also presents specific case studies from scholars who have engaged in child-centered research and here offer the fruits of their experience. Cases include those that use interviews and drawings to work with children in contemporary settings, as well as more historically focused endeavors to use material culture—such as Sunday school projects or religious board games—to study children’s religious lives in past eras.

The Study of Children in Religions offers concrete help to those who wish to conduct research on children and religion but are unsure of how to get started or how to frame their research.

IV
Using Adult-Generated Material about Children
Sources and Methods for Accessing
Children’s Voices from the Past and Today

12
The Battle for the Toy Box
Marketing and Play in the Development of Children’s Religious Identities

REBECCA SACHS NORRIS

“Will you join ’The Battle for the Toy Box’?” asks the poster in large letters across the top. The seriousness of this battle is shown through the image of muscular Samson and Goliath action figures locked in combat and the accompanying text: “one2believe, a faith based toy company, has been given an opportunity to spread the word of God to children throughout America… . one2believe is in a Battle for the Toy Box. Which side are you on?” (“Battle for the Toybox” 2007: 190).

What’s going on here? Aren’t toys supposed to be fun?

Playthings are indeed fun, but they are not merely fun, especially today, when marketing research and media promotion are so thoroughly embedded in the materials—television, movies, and computers as well as toys—that children are exposed to on a daily basis. For those doing research with children, it is important to consider the cultural contexts and multiple subtexts of ordinary items found in children’s daily lives. Seemingly innocent or harmless items such as toys are potentially formative influences, their influence being shaped by diverse motivations such as parental needs and wishes, socioeconomic factors, neuroscientific research, profitability, and the intentional or unintentional impact of graphic images. In light of these types of factors, children’s needs or wishes may seem to have become distant, dim, and distorted, or even to have disappeared.

The Battle Is Joined

While toys may not commonly be regarded as battle weapons, as in the scenario above, they are implements in parental struggles to prepare their children for what parents want and expect them to become. Playthings are supposed to do this by instilling values and developing social, mental, and physical skills. Buying toys with these anticipated results also reassures parents about their parenting abilities and helps them feel better about themselves. Although material about toys, especially educational toys, seems to be child-oriented, it is largely the parents’ hopes and fears that are being addressed. Moreover, marketing plays a strong part in creating these items, bringing into question who really benefits from them. Religious games and toys, which are directed toward parental moral and religious concerns, are a growing segment of the educational toy industry.

Contemporary religious games and toys are fascinating, perplexing, and often contradictory. Although they abound online, many people are unaware that they exist. As well, on first sight many adults are not sure what to make of the games. Are they serious or satire? Are they for children or adults? While there are satirical games, most current religious games are not satirical. Games such as Missionary Conquest, Episcopopoly, BuddhaWheel, The Hajj Fun Game, or Kosherland, and toys that include a variety of talking Bible dolls (Christian) as well as Razanne and Fulla (Muslim), and Gali Girls (Jewish) bring together religion, commerce, play, and politics. Just as play is used in kindergartens, elementary schools, and religious schools as a fun way to attract children to the learning tasks at hand, these games call on the intrinsic appeal games have for children. Most are colorful; many include humor (not always successfully) or attempt to be contemporary and relevant. They are intended as educational tools, meant to instill morals as well as implant knowledge, to be one more element in a child’s spiritual formation.

As religious studies scholar Susan B. Ridgely notes (2005), most studies of children’s religiosity and spirituality are from the adult perspective. Books on children’s spiritual formation present what adults need to do to develop and form children’s religious identities. As adults, can we ever know children’s inner spiritual lives? We are limited by having to comprehend children’s worlds through the lens of our adult experience and understanding. Knowing children’s play lives is much more difficult, because one of the difficulties of researching children’s play is that when it is supervised, it changes.

Chaya Kulkarni, the director of Infant Mental Health Promotion (IMP) at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, asserts that children get much more out of toys and that it is “far more meaningful” when a parent participates in the play as well (“Do ’Educational Toys’ Really Teach?” 2009), but these interactions are not that simple, since children don’t like adult interference in play,¹ to the extent that they may even change their activities when observed (Kline 1993: 190). Children’s play cannot be completely isolated from parents; for one thing, it is inevitable that younger children play in the presence of parents.

Adult influence on children’s play is not limited to personal interaction during the play event either, since even when children are older, parents still buy toys for them. However, even though parents buy them, there may a gap between the intended use and the way children actually use a toy. For example, subversion is a natural accompaniment to children’s play; notable are the ways in which Barbie is often treated—drowned, decapitated, or mutilated. There is some “play” in the way educational toys are used as well: “children in effect refuse to use the smart toys provided with their implied conceptual enrichments, and instead use them in terms of their own preexisting more simplified play predilections” (Sutton-Smith 2004: ix). It is reasonable to assume that religious toys are just as likely to fall prey to children’s own interpretations and usages as other toys, regardless of the motivations behind parents’ efforts. There are a number of essential factors to keep in mind when researching children’s play or toys; one is the impossibility of separating the worlds of children and adults. It is difficult, or perhaps even impossible, to isolate children from adults or adult influence when doing research. One can never see how children play when separate from adults, as the act of observation changes the observed. This is not to say that there is some platonic ideal, a “pure” play that we can strive to observe, however. It is simply that these relationships must be taken into consideration.

Another aspect is motivational complexity, whether within an individual parent, between parents, or among parents and educators, and perhaps even including the researcher. Competing formative influences—education, marketing, science, and mass culture, for example—are also evident and advance their own agendas. While my focus on the religious category may provide a more direct avenue to analyzing competing motives, these forces exist in the larger world of toys and play as well, and need to be made visible by the researcher. This may be difficult, since our own cultural beliefs and perspectives can correspond so fundamentally with those of the people we are studying that they are difficult to discern. For example, who would question that we should teach children morals or that educational toys are useful? But deeper investigation shows us that we need to question who is shaping those moral lessons, and how the concept of educational toys developed.

Educational Toys and Play

The impulse to use toys as moral regulators is not new. The kindergarten movement, for example, led to “a consumer market for children’s products” through pressure from manufacturers to have educational toys in schools to ensure “normal child development” (Dehli 1994: 209). It became imperative as well for middle-class parents, especially mothers, to have the proper toys and books available at home, creating a market for educational toys. Current parental concerns about children’s play include social development as well as athletic skills, education, and brain training.

But Americans are confused. We bemoan the loss of unstructured and outdoor play time for children, but we spend vast amounts of money buying educational toys to make sure our children’s play is productive. Educational toys help resolve our American ambivalence—the contradiction between negative Puritan views of play and the belief that play is a healthy pastime (Elkind 2007: 34). Our ambivalence is evident also in the complementary yet contradictory emphasis in articles on toys and play—one side emphasizes the importance of educational play and toys (make that play time useful!) and the other insists we should be having as much fun as possible (Bado-Fralick and Norris 2010: 119-21). Play is seen as a crucial element in social development, a therapeutic tool, a pedagogical method, and a necessary part of childhood.²

These perspectives, inevitably, are adult views—what grownups think play and toys should be. Discussions of the importance of choosing the right toys took place throughout the last century, for example, in The Wise Choice of Toys, originally published in 1934 (Kawin 1938). In the article “Toys as Learning Materials for Preschool Children,” education is foremost; the word “fun” is used only once in the whole article, and this viewpoint is evident in its focus on play as “the children’s workshop” (the title of one of the sections).

Whether the child’s place of business is a classroom, a remodeled home, an architecturally planned preschool educational facility, or a church basement, there is agreement that it should be not only attractive and inviting but should encourage exploration. The arrangement should be made with the child’s point of view in mind and should be responsive to him. (Zimmerman and Calovini 1971: 642)

While this attitude claims to keep the child’s perspective foremost, the adult’s view of what the child needs is still central. “A good toy is attractive and inviting, well constructed and durable, safe, nontoxic, challenging, and fun. It also stimulates a child’s curiosity and imagination, and lets him discover that which it was expected he would learn” (Zimmerman and Calovini 1971: 644; emphasis mine).³

The idea that children need to have the correct toys in order to develop properly is now well embedded in American and British cultures. Assumptions about the value and uses of educational playthings abound, assumptions that appear to be so natural that it can be difficult for the researcher to identify them as culturally specific and historically distinct ideas, for example, that educational toys are valuable assets to parents and educators. But according to education professor Linda Cameron, all toys can teach something; an educational toy is simply one that is defined by the manufacturers that way (“Do ’Educational Toys’ Really Teach?” 2009). As researchers, we need to be aware of and question our own cultural beliefs—a difficult task. Essentially we are doing fieldwork on ourselves.

Game-Playing Modes

As I have noted, the focus of educational toys is on adult expectations for children. Similarly, religious toys aim at shaping children’s religious identity according to adult views of religiosity. Games try to do this through a number of devices, including emphasizing knowledge, moral conduct cards, and spiritual game rewards. For example, most of the Muslim games, as well as some Christian and Jewish ones, are Trivial Pursuit–type games, which require knowledge of ritual, religious history, and so on, for a player to move forward in the game. The Hajj Fun Game asks questions of varying levels of difficulty, e.g., “Where is the birthplace of the prophet Mohammad located?” or “What is Rukn Aswad?” Moral conduct cards are common in many games, the level of the ethical issue being based to some extent on the recommended age for the game. For example a card in the Armor of God game (Christian, ages five to nine) states, “You are tempted to lie about the lamp you broke, but you tell the truth instead.” In some games, moral conduct cards will move you forward or back; in this game, having told the truth, the player gets a spiritual reward: the Belt of Truth, one of the Armor of God playing pieces needed to win. Event cards may also have moral implications; picking up the wrong Career Event card in the Vatican game will land you in the Cesspool of Sin. Another approach altogether is that used in more evangelical games like Salvation Challenge, “which imparts clear judgments about proper Christian behavior. This game bestows greater rewards to those who jump up, put their hands in the air, and loudly proclaim ’Jesus, Save Me!’ when they land on the cross than to those players who merely say it” (Bado-Fralick and Norris 2010: 4). While there are similar motives to these games, the methodologies are different.

Religious games employ imagery as well, in order to appeal to children; the style of imagery also varies. Karma Chakra, a Buddhist game, is almost completely abstract, with intensive thought put into each color and element (Ghartsang 2007), while the BuddhaWheel board is the Buddhist Wheel of Life. Muslim game boards may have images of mosques, but for the most part they are simple and abstract, probably because of Islamic restrictions on sacred images. Judaism has similar restrictions, but many of the Jewish games, such as Kosherland, Let My People Go, or Exodus, are freer in their expression—with bright colors, nasty pharaohs, and even a “wheel of plagues” in the Exodus game.

Christian boards display the most variety, in part because there are more Christian games in general, a natural result of the history of Christianity and commerce in the United States, as well as the Christian call to spread the gospel in any way possible (Bado-Fralick and Norris 2010: 70-78). The design of Vatican: The Board Game is largely symbolic, with different sections of the board representing through color and geometry steps on the way to becoming pope. The Journeys of Paul game board is a map of the Mediterranean around the time of Paul, with cartoon-style realism used on the event cards. Bibleland uses children’s cartoon images to represent Adam, Eve, the serpent, and even the crucified and resurrected Christ. In these images it is hard to imagine Christ suffering very much on the cross, since he is so cute and chubby-cheeked.

Shaping Religious Identity

While these games are intended to teach particular religious concepts through their playing cards or game strategies, children also learn from the images themselves. Stephen Kline, a professor of communications, notes that children are not able to work with abstrac...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title Page
• CopyRight Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. A CHILDIST APPROACH TO THEORY AND HISTORY
• II. USING ETHNOGRAPHY TO TALK WITH CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN
• III. STUDYING CHILDREN IN SCHOOLS
• IV. USING ADULT-GENERATED MATERIAL ABOUT CHILDREN: SOURCES AND METHODS FOR ACCESSING CHILDREN’S VOICES FROM THE PAST AND TODAY
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• Index