More than just child’s play: symbolic expressions of illness and spirit

While spiritual well-being is integral to health, little is known about the spiritual lives of children in the context of illness. Because the spiritual is often a hidden domain of life, exploration of the topic can be challenging, especially when dealing with children. Language is not always sufficient for describing such deeply held experiences, even for adults. Therefore, finding creative ways to elicit experiences of the spiritual is important when attempting to gain a more robust understanding of this phenomenon. Drawing from a larger study that used hermeneutic phenomenology to explore spirituality among ill children, this paper provides an interpretation of ill children’s play experiences and describes how these experiences provide a means of uncovering the spiritual in children’s everyday lives as they cope with life-threatening illness. Findings also provide insight into how play can be used in the promotion of spiritual well-being.