A university professor ended her week of instruction with reflection questions for her students: What was your significant learning this past week? What did you learn or what was reinforced about yourself?
Reflection didn’t happen.
She asked the students to get in small groups to discuss. “They got in their groups and just looked at one another with baffled looks on their faces while remaining silent. I tried rewording the questions and providing examples and still got blank looks when they returned to their group discussions,” explains Jackie Gerstein.
Without reflection, kids aren’t getting the meaning.
She continues, “I began to get frustrated by their lack of response until a major AHA struck me . . . They are products of a standardized system where they …finished one unit of information and were asked to quickly move on to the next unit. They were not given the time, skills, and opportunities to extract personalized meanings from their studies. Reflection was not part of their curriculum as it cannot be measured nor tested.” *
In Child-Centered Spirituality we observe the same thing happening.
Kids move from one activity to the next. Be one of those adults in their lives who offers them time to consider and express what they are learning or feeling. I was with a preteen girl and her grandmother this week. The girl planned for the three of us to have lunch and go to a movie. At lunch we laughed a lot and I when I looked back on our time together, I realized that we had touched on living in our families, how we’re experiencing God, and making smart choices. One open-ended reflection question can create an AHA moment for everyone at the table.
Try one of these reflection questions:
What are some things you got to do this week that other people might not be able or allowed to do?
What do you think are the most important qualities of a good (grandparent…parent…teacher…etc)?
Tweetable: Kids move from one activity to the next and few adults offer them time to consider and express what they are learning. Examples here of reflection questions. Click to Tweet
Within my family I’m a great-aunt, and to some of my friends, I’m “like-an-aunt” to their kids or grandchildren. I’m also “like-a-grandma” to two dear children. What spiritual impact can extended family have on kids?
Time well spent
We’re inching our way toward time well spent with the children we love. I find that kids appreciate one-on-one time most. Sherry Turkle, psychologist at MIT, says,”There’s a brand-new dynamic. Rather than compete with their siblings for their parents’ attention, children are up against iPhones and iPads, Siri and Alexa, Apple watches and computer screens.” Extended family can give children additional undivided attention outside of busy everyday family life. We listen and mirror back to a child what we hear, which helps them process and accept what they feel and think.
Discover life’s purpose
When’s the last time you pulled out your phone to do something and you get distracted, and 30 minutes later you find that you’ve done 10 other things except the thing that you pulled out the phone to do. There’s fragmentation and distraction.
For kids who do this, there’s something on a longer-term level to keep in view: that sense of what you’re about.
Extended family has the luxury of spending a child’s free time with them. As we have fun together without gadgets, we adults can create a shared narrative with a child, a shared truth or shared facts. All of these strengthen a child’s foundation upon which they discover their moral purpose. We’re empowering a child to become the person he or she wants to be.
Tweetable:Two more easy ways to empower children to become the person he or she wants to be. But first, put down those gadgets but not before you check this out! Click to Tweet
I could be in this video. One of my grandfathers had Tourette’s Syndrome, the other grandfather had an undiagnosed movement disorder manifesting in physical and vocal tics. The onset of my tics was somewhere around age 5 or 6.
Other children would pull away from me, stare at me, laugh at me.
My lonely heart provoked me to try suppressing “the jerks,” as I called the jerky, persistent tics. Each new elementary school I entered (and there were 5 of them) brought new resolve to ignore the urges, quiet the sounds and hide the tics, to no avail. Finally, when I was ten years old, something happened and I don’t know what it was, but I was able to resist the urges. At first, I resisted only at school but gave in to them at home. Then, even the urges quieted and the struggle faded into the background of my life.
Partly as a result of this experience, I am mindful of how adversity has a profound impact on our life purpose.
I experienced adversity through ridicule and shunning for five of my early years. Therefore, I (unconsciously) made it my mission to find as many ways to connect as a little girl ever could. And I succeeded. Years ago, I did a Strengthsfinder assessment and my Number One strength is Connectedness.
I find meaning in life by building bridges.
In Child-Centered Spirituality, Connectedness appears in my desire to guide adults as they assist children in integrating all the “parts” of themselves–spirit, body, mind, emotions. In order to do that I draw upon the wisdom of many because I need other people. There’s a lot I don’t know.
Connectedness shows up in Spiritual Direction appointments when people ask me to facilitate their connection with the divine. It’s there when I lead support groups that provide an environment for people to connect with each other for strength, hope and experience. And so on.
From this painful chapter of my young life flows a perspective that I can share with you for the children in your life.
Children have a limited vocabulary, but they feel and suffer just as adults do.
A child’s adversity possesses glorious purpose.
Difficulties in our earlier years often propel us to ultimately accomplish much good.
After a time of processing childhood adversity with a trusted person (counselor, mentor, relative), some adolescents experience a mid-course attitude correction that redirects them away from negative consequences and points them in positive directions.
Tweetable: Look here for a perspective of childhood adversity to share with the children in your life. Click to Tweet
We’re all raised in families, communities and even entire cultures that barrage us with messages about what they want from us. “Get married,” “Make money,” “Buy your own home.” We usually forget when and how we first received these messages about what we’re supposed to do with our lives, just as we forget when and how we learned to eat with a fork. —Barbara Sher
Think about the messages the children in your life are receiving.
Some kids are groomed from pre-Kindergarten to get into an Ivy League college. Their parents have decided that’s what success is– plus it gives them significant bragging rights to be used against other parents.
But Stanford last year accepted only 4% of its applicants. Most of those who applied met enough of the qualifications to think they had a chance at getting in, but the vast majority didn’t. What’s the result?
A setup for failure
96% of the kids who applied– primarily kids who are not used to failure– failed. What do they do then? We may have prepared them for the Ivy League, but we haven’t prepared them for failure. And failure is actually an important part of life.
Maybe this particular example doesn’t apply to you. You’ve never put such unrealistically high expectations on your daughter. You just want her to grow up, get married, have kids, and be happy.
But again– what if that’s your dream, not your daughter’s dream?
What if she would rather move to New York to be an actress than move to the suburbs to be a mom? How will you handle that?
Barbara Sher says, “Parents have their own dreams and it’s those dreams they’re pushing, not the child’s. In their heads, they have images of successful sons and daughters…children who are impressive—and secure.
“Very few parents have… the calmness of spirit to realize that the most practical thing any child can do is to find their own vision—and follow it.”
We need to disentangle our own goals– and our own identities– from those of the children in our lives. They are different people than we are and they are on a different journey than we have been on.
How okay is that with you?
Next week: Parents’ unfulfilled goals and a child’s future
Tweetable: A discussion here about the need to disentangle a child’s goals from our goals and identity for them. Click to Tweet
She asked the students to get in small groups to discuss. “They got in their groups and just looked at one another with baffled looks on their faces while remaining silent. I tried rewording the questions and providing examples and still got blank looks when they returned to their group discussions,” explains Jackie Gerstein.
I find meaning in life by building bridges.
We’re all raised in families, communities and even entire cultures that barrage us with messages about what 
