Reflections from an English Perspective on Nurturing Young Children’s Spiritual Growth and Implications for Religious Education

Abstract

I am honored to contribute to your discussions of “Whose Children are They?” My background is as an English man born in 1953, previously a teacher and headteacher in a Church of England elementary school and now an academic interested in young children’s spirituality—and associated ideas—for some 25 years. I am more of a generalist than a religious educator and not a member of a faith community. So, I may seem somewhat ill-equipped for the task, but sometimes an outsider can provide useful perspectives on familiar themes. This is a reflection on my journey and how this has altered, and hopefully enriched, my understanding of spirituality, of children, and of how their spiritual growth should be nurtured. I thank many colleagues, from backgrounds and disciplines different from my own, who have accompanied me, notably in the International Association of Children’s Spirituality. The context in which young children grow up is more complex and confusing than when I was a child. There has, for better or worse, been a decline in religious affiliation, at least in the UK, though religion remains a key element of many children’s identities. It is harder for children, especially for those from fragmented and disadvantaged communities, to have a sense of belonging. There are powerful pressures from media and advertising which contribute to individualism and narcissism. And there is less time and space for play, reflection, and the arts and humanities in a culture of immediacy and performativity. I started to consider young children’s spirituality in depth in the late 1990s as a result of puzzling over some of the more troubled children I taught, and what they seemed to lack. This and my doctoral research led me to see children’s spirituality as involving a search for identity, meaning, and purpose which can be “tethered” to religion or not; and for connectedness to other people, the world around, and (for some) a transcendent Being (or God), drawing on Hay and Nye’s work. A comment from a friend at that time has reverberated ever since—that these are existential questions and so why call them spiritual, with its connotations of religion? In Eaude (2019), I argued that there is much to learn about spirituality from religious traditions, but the latter do not have exclusive rights over what spirituality entails. The spiritual is only one of many interconnected dimensions of the whole child, albeit an important one, whatever the child’s background. This search is universal, but how it takes place is strongly influenced by culture. It involves trying to find answers to questions of which many may be difficult and