ABSTRACT
Unique Needs of Children Children are capable of spiritual awareness and spiritual soul-searching. As they struggle to figure out the world they confront, they also become aware of the complex, ironic, inconsistent, contradictory nature of human character, and they also begin to fathom faith and doubt (Coles, 1990). Children attempt to understand not only what is happening to them but why it happens. In doing this, they call upon the religious life they have experienced, the spiritual values they have received, and the other sources of potential explanation. Robert Coles, a well-respected researcher of the spiritual life of children, said that he first became aware of religious and spiritual reflection in children’s development when he was a young doctor working with children who had contracted polio. He observed their search for an explanation for why they had been so unfortunate as to be confined to an iron lung:
As I go over the interviews I’ve done with children, I find certain psychological themes recurring. I hear children talking about their desires, their ambitions, their hopes, and also their worries, their fears, their moments of deep and terrible despair-all connected in idiosyncratic ways, sometimes, with biological stories, or with religiously sanctioned notions of right and wrong, or with rituals such as prayer or meditation. Indeed, the entire range of children’s mental life can and does connect with their religious and spiritual thinking. Moral attitudes, including emotions such as shame and guilt, are a major psychological side of young spirituality. (Coles, 1990)
Accidents, illness, bad luck-such moments of danger and pain prompt reflection in children as well as adults. A boy’s vulnerability becomes an occasion for prayer and the scrutiny of the mind and soul. Religions are known, of course, for upholding various moral principles and standards. But less obvious are the strategies both boys and girls desire in order to accommodate a secular and familiar morality they hear espoused in churches, mosques, and synagogues. The task for these boys and girls is to weave together a particular version of a morality both personal and yet tied to a religious tradition, to ponder their moral successes and failures (the essence of the spiritual life), and consequently to reflect on their prospects as human beings who will someday die.
