Oct 13, 2014 | Uncategorized
Guilt is generally a negative term. It’s a feeling heaped on us by others that makes us feel bad and decreases our emotional health. Some of us also heap guilt upon ourselves. It weighs us down.
Is there ever a place for guilt?
Is it ever helpful? I would say yes– and I might consider renaming it “conscience” or “healthy guilt” when it comes from the internal guidance system inside us as opposed to being heaped on us from others.
A working moral compass makes children stronger
As children get older, their conscience is what bothers them when they have done something wrong. Often it prompts them to right a wrong, make amends, or apologize… all of which promote personal and social health.
There’s a place for sadness over what we have done
When a criminal has been convicted, we watch to see if they feel remorse– sadness for what they have done. That is guilt… a healthy response to one’s own wrongdoing. When someone feels no guilt for obvious and severe wrongdoing, society considers them a sociopath.
How can we help children develop an internal moral compass– a conscience– but without the negative baggage that guilt brings? How can we help them not just have a change of actions, but a change of heart?
I welcome ideas from readers as I am thinking through this issue.
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Is there such a thing as healthy guilt? Is there ever a place for guilt in childhood? Click to Tweet
Oct 6, 2014 | Direction
Our rules for children are tools we use to protect them from the damage that results from violating natural law. Until they grow up to understand and incorporate moral laws into their own minds and hearts, they need our rules.
Children easily see how violations of the physical law of gravity will injure them if they’ve jumped off a wall that’s too high, but perhaps have a more difficult time seeing how breaking moral laws will weaken their reason and conscience. They need our help in forming their internal guidance system.
Adults understand the universal laws that govern life,
like the laws of justice or gravity or liberty–laws that are both natural and moral. We know that these laws are not arbitrary–violations of these principles bring destruction in their wake.
Isn’t that why we start with simple rules when children are young?
Your 3-year-old knows he must brush his teeth before bedtime each night and that is because you understand the law behind the rule (the second law of thermodynamics which states that things tend toward disorder). If your child doesn’t brush his teeth, they will decay. You insist on instilling this habit because you know what cavities can lead to, even though he does not.
As children mature we help them understand the reasons for the rules.
We communicate verbally and non-verbally that we are most concerned about how breaking moral laws degrades the mental faculties that recognize and respond to good.
At a time when the Buddha was teaching his son Rahula to live a life of integrity, the eight-year-old told a deliberate lie. Nearby was a bowl with very little water left in it. The Buddha asked, “Rahula, do you see the small quantity of water left in the bowl?” “Yes,” replied Rahula. “As little as this,” the Buddha said, “is the spiritual life of someone who is not ashamed at telling a deliberate lie.”
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Children need our help in forming their internal guidance system. Click to Tweet
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.
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5 principles help parents design a response to an older child’s doubts and questions. Click to Tweet
Jun 9, 2014 | Direction
A child’s need of direction for their human spirit includes acquiring basic ethics to guide the way they live. Part of the role of a caregiver is that of a teacher. We teach morals in the very same way we teach life skills.
If you are teaching a child to clean up the dishes, you don’t say, “How do you feel like this should be done? What seems right to you?”
You show them, you let them try it, you provide corrective feedback, you show them again, you let them try it again, and so on. It’s incredibly repetitive, they often don’t do a good job for quite a while, and it’s certainly more difficult than simply washing the dishes yourself. But that’s how people learn.
As caregivers, we provide children with modeling, direction, and feedback.
We demonstrate patience and a tolerance of mistakes during the learning process, and offer praise when the child makes a good effort or achieves a goal. This is the fun part of directing kids: seeing their excitement when they can show off a new skill, seeing their confidence increase as they say “I can do it!”
And we do it as life unfolds.
We teach right and wrong the very same way as we teach life skills. We keep living in the moment, focused on building character, on strengthening conscience–theirs and ours–as we walk with them through their daily life of schoolwork, recreation, relationships, and lessons.
Tweetables:
- A child’s need of direction for their human spirit includes basic ethics to guide the way they live. Click to Tweet
- We teach children right and wrong the very same way as we teach them life skills. Click to Tweet
May 19, 2014 | Uncategorized
I appreciate the man in Zeitlarn, Germany who wrote me earlier this month to tell me about a book summarizing the findings of an increasing number of studies in child psychology that support child-centered spirituality. One description in the book states:
“Scientific experiments conducted with children across the globe illustrate the ways human beings develop complex beliefs about God’s omniscience, the afterlife, and the immortality of deities. How the developing brain grapples with these and other questions leads children, across cultures, to naturally develop a belief in a divine power of remarkably consistent traits.”
Dr. Justin Barrett, in his book Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Re
ligious Beliefs, offers a compelling argument for the human instinct for religion. His research (and that of other scientists), supported by The John Templeton Foundation, shows how the science of childhood religiosity reveals across humanity a “natural religion,” the organization of the beliefs that humans gravitate to organically, and how it underlies all of the world’s major religions, uniting them under one common source.
Since my blog is in no way a scientific study, all the more reason to pass along scientific research to readers who may be interested. This blog is closer to a meditation on the ways in which infancy and childhood can be seen through a spiritual lens so that adults continue to address all the needs–physical, mental, emotional and spiritual–of the children they love.
Tweetables:
- Scientific research continues to validate child-centered spirituality – Click to Tweet
- The science of childhood religiosity reveals, across humanity, a “natural religion.” – Click to Tweet
