Happier children

"Both faith and fear may sail into your harbor, but allow only faith to drop anchor."--Author unknown
Children happier for being spiritual: study
By Shannon Proudfoot, Canwest News Service, April 6, 2010
Kathleen Ennis's son was three years old and leafing through a book in the back seat as she drove him home from swimming lessons when he suddenly piped up and asked who her mother and father were. They're his grandparents, she explained. And who are their parents, he wanted to know, and where are they?
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.
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.
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 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.