Sep 15, 2014 | Direction
There are no definitive answers to difficult questions, but there are good ones. –Rabbi David Wolpe *
As a child’s brain continues to develop, cognitive powers of reasoning and critical thinking interact with their human spirit. Children now test assumptions and voice doubts. Their questions become more difficult to answer: What is religion? Why do some people pray?
If they ask these questions of us, we must address them. After all, who among us is satisfied to give children an intellectual, but not a moral or spiritual, education?
Design your own approach from these 5 principles:
Think before they ask
Make yourself aware of your own assumptions, just as you would when discussing anything else. For example, if they bring up purpose and meaning of life, what do you wish to convey to the child, that they are accidents or beings with purpose? That human beings are the supreme power or that there’s a higher power than humans? That a wrong act is okay if nobody ever knows about it?
Whatever your philosophy on matters like these, you owe children an honest and searching discussion– more likely to occur when you know your view of the universe.
Assume they know what they are looking for
Remember that an older child’s questions arise from already established beliefs collected in their earlier years. Studies continue to confirm that children by the age of 6 are guided by a conscience and have some developed concept of God. Ask them what they already think. They are looking to you to provide them with information that sheds more light on their core beliefs.
Help them know where to locate source material
Do an internet search for God and you will find 629,000,000 results. How does an adult even read all of it, much less evaluate it? This search proves to be a daunting task for children and adults alike.
Is it any surprise that almost all of us start looking for reliable sources of information within our own family traditions? What was your family’s source of information? Maybe you have not stopped to reflect on where your parents and caregivers acquired the knowledge they used to inform your early thought processes. How did they educate themselves in spiritual matters? What can you take from their model to use with the children in your life?
Introduce them to sacred writings
In addition to learning from the living community around them, children can study spiritual wisdom from the writings of the past. These texts can take children outside of themselves, their family system and their community of friends. They encounter words of God, acts of God, eternal questions, and laws or principles of life existing wholly apart from them. They face an objective standard in the sense that the texts exist on their own merit and they must evaluate that merit.
Find trustworthy people outside your family
The older children get, the more important influences from outside the family circle will become. 
Sometimes it’s just easier to talk to someone other than mom or dad. And sometimes mom or dad are quite glad to get some outside help with spiritual education. That’s when many begin to look for some kind of faith community.
Allow yourself to be open to the direction that spiritual exploration can take you. Once again, as so often, through teaching our children, we learn.
*Thanks to Rabbi Wolpe for sharpening my thinking on a couple of these principles.
Tweetable:
5 principles help parents design a response to an older child’s doubts and questions. Click to Tweet
Aug 18, 2014 | Direction
My interviews reveal that after, “Who is God?” the next most common question kids ask concerns how we know God is there. They ask, “Why can’t I see God?” “How do we know who God is if we can’t see him?” “Where is he and how can you prove it?”
Below is a possible response to that question in a child’s vocabulary.
Observe the results.
God is invisible. Gravity, oxygen, electricity, and love are also invisible. You know God is there the same way you know that any invisible thing is there: you observe the results of its presence. It’s like feeling the wind on your cheek. You can’t see the wind itself, but you can see its effects. It’s similar with electricity: unplug your refrigerator, full of food, come back in a week and open the door. You will smell what happens when invisible electricity is cut off!
Read firsthand reports.
Even if you are not able to observe results for yourself, you can test the presence of an invisible substance from reports of others who have firsthand knowledge. You can determine if they’re credible, like astronauts who have been to places where there is no oxygen. Those astronauts report that they were unable to breathe on the moon, yet they can breathe on Earth because of oxygen’s invisible presence.
Apply these tests yourself.
Apply these tests to prove to yourself that God is really there: First, observe for yourself the results of his presence. Perhaps you can think of a time when you were challenged by a big obstacle and you knew you needed someone to help you. God was willing to be that someone. You prayed to God and you did not feel alone. You observed that God was guiding you through the obstacles by supporting you. Second, test whether God is really there by reading and listening to reports of people who have firsthand knowledge of God.
With these two ideas, an adult can provide for a child’s spiritual needs with increased confidence.
Tweetable:
Finally, two concrete ways to help your child answer for herself, “How do I know God is there if I can’t see God? Click to Tweet
Aug 11, 2014 | Direction
How do we introduce God in our conversations with young children? How do we do that in a way that informs, yet leaves the door open to explore and journey and be curious as they grow up?
Here is a description of God that may prove useful, written in a child’s vocabulary.
This view is acknowledged in every area of the world from sub-Saharan Africa and tribes in the South Pacific to urban centers in Europe, farms in the Americas, and Middle Eastern deserts.
It is not the view of a particular religion, yet is found in the majority of world religions. It is mainstream.
Who is God?
God is a being. God does not have a body. God is invisible. People are beings too—human beings. God is a being who is greater than human beings. You can’t see God but you know He* is there. God has always been there.
God is love. All love comes from God.
God knows everything. He knows what will happen in the future. God knows what you are thinking. God knows all the facts about any subject you can imagine.
God is everywhere at once. He is not limited by time or space.
God does only what is right, good and just.
God has no beginning and he has no end.
God is pure. There is nothing evil about God.
God has unlimited power and authority.
God never changes. He is the same today as God has always been.
God is one-of-a-kind.
God makes himself known by displaying these qualities so that any child can recognize them. The human mind cannot understand God completely. God exceeds our brain’s capacity. But you can understand a lot about God.
*God is spirit, but I use the male pronoun because it is what I encounter most often when people talk about God.You may substitute the female pronoun if you wish.
Tweetables:
- God exceeds our brain’s capacity but we can understand a lot about God. Click to Tweet
- God makes himself known by displaying qualities in the world that any child can recognize. Click to Tweet
Aug 4, 2014 | Direction
When your child is a budding scientist, you scrub home experiments off your walls and ceiling. Your hard-earned money goes toward chemistry sets.
In addition to milk and eggs, your grocery cart contains oddball ingredients destined to bubble and overflow onto your bathroom floor.
You are scrambling to help them satisfy a deep passion for learning and unending curiosity.
Glen was one such child.
Fortunately his parents nurtured his scientific bent. The son of a deeply religious US Navy captain, Glen and his family were church members. Glen leaned toward science as a young man and went on to study nuclear physics at the university.
Science captivated his mind and soul.
“The nuclei were responding to our questions, speaking our mathematical language, completely understandable, telling us the nature of their binding forces,” he said. “It was as if they were saying to me, ‘Finally, someone has asked us. We have waited so many eons.'”
Glen recalled being “so spiritually elated after a day at the lab that I would go outdoors and just run as fast and as long as I could, in exultation and gratitude.”
Both mind and soul factored into an important career choice.
Years later, unwilling to aid in weapons development, Glen abandoned nuclear physics and moved into a teaching career, with Ethics as his area of specialization. He did not abandon his passion for intellectual study through observation and experimentation: “My way of thinking is incurably curious and integrative. I can’t teach Ethics without attention to numerous related disciplines.”
Children are going to experience the divine in different ways. Passionate scientific inquiry is one of them.
“be passionate in your work and in your searchings.” — ivan pavlov
Tweetables:
- Be passionate in your work and in your searchings –Ivan Pavlov Click to Tweet
- Children experience the divine in different ways; passionate scientific inquiry is one. Click to Tweet
Jul 21, 2014 | Direction
At some point, every child understands a moral directive and does the opposite. This is a defining moment in the child’s life. This is when they (subconsciously) ask us, So what? Why should I do the right thing? What difference does it make? We are keenly aware that we give the answer to these questions by what we do ourselves more than by what we tell them.
Reflect for a moment on why you do the right thing.
Why do you obey traffic laws? Why do you tell the truth? Why do you follow instructions from flight attendants? Why do you file your taxes with honesty?
to avoid unpleasant consequences?- it’s how I was raised
- I draw on spiritual strength
- it gets me more of what I want
- to get to heaven?
- because __ said so (the law, the boss, the church)
When we take time to reflect on the meaning of our choices, we become clear on the direction we are giving children.
Your internal motive for why you do what you do shapes, both directly and indirectly, the framework your child uses to answer, “So what? Why should I?” That message becomes part of their hard-wiring for years to come.
Tweetables:
- At some point, every child hears a moral directive and does the opposite, a defining moment in the child’s life. Click to Tweet
- When we reflect on the meaning of our choices, we become clear on the direction we are giving our kids. Click to Tweet
Jul 14, 2014 | Direction
Children look to us for direction. We adults generally respect each other by our mutual belief that we do the best we can to provide direction for our young. We understand the weight of the challenge.
Yet the children’s voices persist in their pleas for spiritual attention beyond a code of ethics:
- Someone looking in from the outside would say that I had a very good family. Every material need was provided, my mother was a stay-at-home mom and she cooked good meals, and watched out for our safety. Once in a while she read to me and my brother before bedtime. We had good camping vacations in the summer. But these things didn’t feed my lonely soul. (The exposure to nature during the camping trips did impress on me an appreciation of nature, which I almost worshiped in my high school years.)
- Nothing spiritual happened in my childhood—ever.
Children want guidance for what to do with their innate sense of God’s presence.
Very early on, while their purity is still unmarred, is the time to begin talking about God with children. They have automatic positive responsiveness. They sense that God exists in some form. The caregiver simply cooperates with that natural instinct to provide direction and interaction about God. It is never too early in a child’s life to engage spiritually. Yet if you miss the first windows, it’s never too late either.
What can we say about God that informs a child… yet also leaves them free to strengthen and refine their unique connection with God as they mature?
A large part of this blog’s purpose is to give you reasonable direction as you seek what is best for you in answering this– and other questions– where there is a lot at stake.
Tweetable:
What can we say about God that informs children, yet still frees them to refine their unique connection with the divine? Click to Tweet
