Spirituality in young children's temperament and self-control

Spirituality Children's Temperment

Research Synthesis

A Synthesis of the Research on Spirituality in Young Children's Temperament and Self-Control

Years ago, when school systems actually permitted religious instruction, children were able to tap into their own spiritual sides, and were able to process their feelings about their emotions and their concerns about the world against a more nuanced and detailed spiritual backdrop. This allowed them to have a clearer sense about moral values, feeling obedient vs. disobedient, engaging in respect, honesty, truth and communicating their feelings with compassion. By allowing students to have some sort of spiritual education, educators were ensuring that they would be able to more confidently shape these children into good people who were well-rounded and who had a clearer understanding of how to behave in the world, along with stronger values of what matters most to them. However, in a secular education system, much of this potential is lost.

The work of Roehlkeparta (2006) reports that the church congregation has an influence that is both direct and indirect upon the young person's development spirituality variously in their contact with the young person. Included in these contacts are religious education, service projects, youth groups and in contacts that also "extend to include the congregations engagement with families, intergenerational engagement and broader community involvement through the congregation public leadership, service, and action on behalf of children, adolescents and others in society." (Roehikepartain, 2006, p. 329). Although much of these speculation is theoretical, there have also been evidence based approaches that have reached many of the same conclusions.

One study examined the relationship between spirituality and happiness was assessed in 320 children aged 8 -- 12 from public and private (i.e., faith-based) schools (Holder, Coleman, & Wallace, 2010). The children rated their own levels of spirituality and happiness on well-designed questionnaires and the parents and teachers of these children also rated the children's temperament using the emotionality, activity, and sociability temperament survey. The study found that children who were more spiritual were happier. Spirituality accounted for between 3 and 26% of the unique variance in children's happiness depending on the measures. Temperament was also a predictor of happiness, but spirituality remained a significant predictor of happiness even after removing the variance associated with temperament.