Content uploaded by Daniel G. Scott
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Daniel G. Scott on Jul 28, 2014
Content may be subject to copyright.
Spirituality in Child and Youth Care:
Considering Spiritual Development
and “Relational Consciousness”
Daniel G. Scott
School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria
ABSTRACT: In response to the identification of spiritual development as part of chil-
dren’s lives in both the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1991)
and the Association for Child and Youth Care Practice’s document: Competencies for
Professional Child and Youth Work Practitioners (Mattingly & Stuart, 2001), this paper
considers a theoretical model of children’s spirituality, “relational consciousness,” as
proposed by Hay and Nye (1998). The paper encourages the introduction of a framework
for understanding and exploring spiritual development in child and youth care research
and practice that respects the cultural and social diversity of both religious and nonrelig-
ious settings and the lifespan developmental processes of children.
KEY WORDS: children’s spirituality; spiritual development.
Both the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1991)
and the Association for Child and Youth Care Practice’s document: Com-
petencies for Professional Child and Youth Work Practitioners (Mat-
tingly & Stuart, 2001) indicate that spiritual development is a factor
in children’s lives. The significance of spiritual development for the
theory and practice of child and youth care professionals and educators
has not been extensively explored. This paper is an attempt to contrib-
ute to a conversation on spirituality in the lives of children and youth.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)
(1991) accepts spiritual development as a category of human develop-
ment and health worthy of rights protection. Article 27 recognizes “the
right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child’s
physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development” (p. 14). Arti-
cle 17 identifies the right of “access to information and material from
a diversity of national and international sources, especially those aimed
Correspondence should be directed to Daniel G. Scott, School of Child and Youth
Care, University of Victoria, P. O. Box 1700, Stn. CSC, Victoria, BC V8W 2Y2; e-mail:
dgscott@uvic.ca.
Child & Youth Care Forum, 32(2), April 2003 2003 Human Sciences Press, Inc. 117
Child & Youth Care Forum118
at the promotion of his or her social, spiritual and moral well-being
and physical and mental health” (p. 8). Article 32 claims children have
the right “to be protected from economic exploitation” (p. 16) or any
work that is hazardous or may interfere with their health or their
development, including spiritual development. Spirituality is seen in
these articles as a distinct aspect of human experience that is not
contained by categories of moral or mental or social development.
It is worth noting that the UNCRC protects religion under a different
set of articles and the implications for work in spirituality are signifi-
cant. Article 14 notes “the right of the child to freedom of thought,
conscience and religion” (p. 7) and, in subsection 3, the “freedom to
manifest one’s religion or beliefs” are only limited by the need to protect
others’ freedoms and rights; both amplifications of the general state-
ment of Article 2. Article 29 (d) encourages “a spirit of understanding,
peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples,
ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin”
(p. 15) and Article 30 clarifies minority “ethnic, religious or linguistic”
minority rights so that members of those minorities can “enjoy his or
her own culture, to profess and practise his or her own religion, or to
use his or her own language” (p. 16). Religion is identified as a matter
of mind, belief and practise, part of cultural expression associated with
minority rights and human equality. Spirituality is identified as an
aspect of human development and overall human health.
The Convention’s (UNCRC’s) differentiation of spiritual development
and religion is marked by the two sets of articles that treat them
as separate concerns, and acknowledges a number of questions that
differentiate these concerns: If spirituality is not merely a matter of
culture or religion, belief or practise then what exactly is it? As a form
of human development how is it different than physical, mental, social,
and moral development? How do children experience the spiritual and
how is it different across ages and developmental levels in different
social and cultural settings? Is there common human developmental
spiritual experience that can be recognized as normative or natural?
The Competencies document (Mattingly & Stuart, 2001) also identi-
fies spiritual development as an aspect of children’s lives. In listing
competencies for child and youth care licensing criteria they include
spiritual development in the foundational knowledge required for a
child and youth care worker in the area of applied human development
(p. 12). The kind of knowledge this might entail is neither described
nor clarified. However, during the time when the document was being
circulated for comments, one of the appendices, Issues for Discussion
(p. 28), has as its first question: “How do we meet spiritual needs?” That
question remains unanswered. This paper attempts to address that
question by bringing some of the approaches being suggested by the
Daniel G. Scott 119
literature in the field of children’s spirituality to the discourse within
child and youth care in order to further a consideration of spiritual
needs and spiritual development in children’s lives.
Spirituality and Child and Youth Care Consciousness
Although spiritual development and spiritual need have not been
central to understanding in child and youth care, there have been
attempts to explore the spiritual lives of children and their expressions
of spirituality. Interested researchers have included personal inter-
views (Coles, 1990; Bosacki, 2001; Bosacki & Ota, 2000; Hay & Nye,
1998; Kujawa-Holbrook, 2001) and the gathering of retrospective sto-
ries (Robinson, 1983) in their work on children’s spirituality. Current
research is taking a variety of forms (see The International Journal
of Children’s Spirituality for examples) and is beginning to provide
theoretical assumptions and frameworks. However, the separation of
religion and spirituality acknowledged in UNCRC remains problematic
in research on children’s spiritual lives. A tension has emerged with
regard to the use of religious language and vocabulary on the part of
both the researchers and the children. The challenge of delineating
spirituality as something separate from and different than religion is
quite apparent and as Hay and Nye (1998) point out:
Knowledge about religion and the ability to use religious language is not
the whole story when we are thinking about spirituality. It is important
not to get caught into the assumption that spirituality can only be recog-
nized in the use of a specialized religious language. I have spoken about
the difficulty with almost all research on children’s spiritual life, up to
the very recent past, in that it has been focused on God-talk rather than
spirituality. I have also presented a notion of spirituality as something
biologically built into the human species, an holistic awareness of reality
which is potentially to be found in every human being. (p. 57)
In the absence of a ready non-religious vocabulary for expressing
spiritual experience, both researchers’ questions and children’s responses
are shaped by the language that is available to express the ideas being
explored. This language is based on the religious language of the domi-
nant culture in which a child lives, regardless of children’s identification
as religious or non-religious. Such use of language could be seen as an
indication that religious language is adequate, or even necessary, or,
as Hay is suggesting, that there is a deficit and a need to explore spiritual
experience through metaphors and language that might liberate the
expression of the spiritual from religious language. Children are thus
caught in a theoretical and cultural deficit demonstrated by the absence
of alternate language forms. They do not have access to a vocabulary
Child & Youth Care Forum120
or concepts that would allow them to speak openly of their experiences
if they are not locating them in religious contexts.
One interpretative framework for understanding children’s spiritual
experience that is receiving general acceptance is that proposed by Hay
and Nye (1998). They suggest that children have a spiritual inclination
that is expressed as “relational consciousness”: an intentional and natu-
ral process of relating to the world, to all things animate and inanimate,
to others, including a Divine Other, and to the self (pp. 119–124). Hay
and Nye’s framework of understanding is being cited frequently in the
literature on children’s spirituality and education and may be useful
to the child and youth care discourse as well. If child and youth care
workers are to speak of children’s spirituality without depending on
specialized religious language, it would help to identify and link chil-
dren’s spiritual experiences to existing developmental understanding.
In this way, children’s spirituality could be seen, acknowledged and
expressed as it changes through life-span processes. Part of this work
will be to develop concepts and a related vocabulary that helps identify
spiritual experiences as they are felt, sensed and expressed by children
and youth. This, in turn, will provide a means to explore and compare
how spirituality takes shape in and is expressed by children as they
change and develop throughout their lives. Will children and youth
have different experiences and expressions of spirituality at different
stages in life-span development?
‘Relational Consciousness’ and Development
Offered here is a summary of Hay and Nye’s (1998) relational con-
sciousness model of children’s spirituality as an orientation to relational
consciousness. Their approach is based on interviews with school chil-
dren (under the age of ten) in the United Kingdom (UK) and is therefore
situated in a specific educational setting and cultural context. Like all
aspects of human development, the ecological location is influential
and important. Because the conversation in the UK grows out of a man-
dated need to provide religious education in government school settings
(from the 1944 and 1988 School Acts; for a summary see Eaude, 2001),
there has been an on-going discussion, intensified since 1988, that has
led to the development of Hay and Nye’s construct. Their model uses
three sensitivities: awareness-sensing, mystery-sensing and value-sens-
ing, to describe their view of a child’s spiritual capabilities. They propose
that these terms describe a natural spiritual capacity in children that
is expressed in children’s views of the world as revealed in their way
of talking about such experiences during the interviews. I will look at
Daniel G. Scott 121
each of these sensitivities and raise questions about their place in light
of developmental understanding.
Awareness-Sensing
The central concept of awareness-sensing credits children with a
sensitivity in perception based on being present in the here-and-now
with an ability to be attuned through a heightened sense of awareness
to an experience. They are able to be caught up in the flow of an
experience and can focus on a physical felt-sense of the experience that
renders it holistic, both grounded in the body and simultaneously tran-
scendent of the ordinary.
How then, is awareness-sensing particularly spiritual? What of the
qualities that Hay and Nye (1998) identify as markers of awareness-
sensing offer a distinct understanding of spiritual experience for chil-
dren? It is important to note that Hay feels that after the age of nine
or ten, children become much more reluctant to discuss and admit to
spiritual experience so that early years’ experiences are critical for
study. Recent research (summarized in Gopnik, Meltzoff & Kohl, 1999)
makes it clear that children’s perceptual skills, from a very early age,
give them the potential to be observant, aware and actively engaged
in the world around them to see how it works and what is going on in
it. They view the child as a scientist reaching temporary conclusions
about his/her assumptions through actions that test the world and its
nature as part of a learning process. How is awareness-sensing different
from the cognitive learning capacities of alertness and attention? Is
awareness sensing merely a spiritual re-definition of an existing abil-
ity? Or is the cognitive capacity part of an orientation that demonstrates
an alertness that includes a spiritual quality or ability? Is there some
aspect of awareness sensing that might distinguish it from the abilities
that Gopnik et al (1999) are identifying?
Hay and Nye (1998) are likely drawing on their knowledge of adult
and traditional spiritual disciplines and practices (Hadot, 1995; Jones
Wainwright, & Yarnold, 1986) in stressing the capacity of children to
be in the present moment as a spiritual quality. (Mindfulness, atten-
tiveness, and being in the present are some of the terms from differing
cultural traditions.) But what are they noticing in children? What
shapes a capacity for attention in the present in young children? It
may be that younger children have an advantage in that they do not
have an experiential base—in actual time lived—to provide them with
either a sense of past or future and so they are, of necessity, present-
oriented. That is to say, they do not have a significant reservoir of
personal experience to use to understand or reflect on what went before
nor a sense of what may come next based on past experience. Their
Child & Youth Care Forum122
being present is their particular reality. An awareness of time past
and time to come will develop and make living in the present more
difficult as they grow older. It is important here to pay attention to
the changes in children’s perceptions of time and their interest in both
the past and the shift at adolescence to an orientation to the future.
The fact that religious cultures have created adult disciplines to
recover this first form of the experience of living in time may suggest
that children are experiencing an aspect of spirituality that Hay and
Nye (1998) have identified as awareness-sensing. Why has the spiritual
discipline of mindfulness or being in the present become significant for
adults? Is it the pursuit of early life sensitivity or part of a cyclical
journey in life processes? The adult quest for this ability may provide
an important clue about the earliest forms of spiritual attention in
human life and a developmentally significant marker of a spiritual
capability.
Iamconcerned, however, about claiming awareness-sensing as par-
ticularly a spiritual quality if it has cognitive and perceptual elements.
The links to and the roles of other developmental capacities in aware-
ness sensing may be useful for helping us understand spiritual process
and development in children. Similarly, being caught up in an event
or moment and being able to be lost in experience as described by Hay
and Nye (1998) may have multiple interpretative possibilities. Some
children are, because of their abilities and interests, more adept at con-
centration, on being focused and lost in the flow. Some are more easily
distracted or have short attention spans. Individual children may have
differing senses of time and differing capabilities of being focused over
periods of time. And different cultures require and encourage different
skills and interests in how time is understood and engaged. There is
a danger, however, that Hay and Nye may be idealizing certain traits in
children based on identified adult (spiritual) traditions and experiences.
My concern is that they may be projecting adult experience and aware-
ness onto childhood and seeking to identify signs of adult perception/
sensitivities in childhood experience, blocking an accurate assessment
of childhood spirituality as it is occurring. At the same time, however,
it may be that these sensitivities do have spiritual significance for
children and the adult quest to regain these capacities may be an impor-
tant clue in understanding the nature and intensity of early life spiri-
tual experience. They may provide insight into how spirituality does
develop and change in the course of life-span development. Before de-
claring these capacities as common in children more research is needed
to discover if there are experiences and capacities particular to them.
I believe that it is critical to bear in mind cognitive, emotional and
social developmental factors in understanding the workings and devel-
opment of spiritual awareness and capacity. I am not arguing that such
Daniel G. Scott 123
awareness-sensing has no spiritual significance, but suggest caution
in claiming it as primarily spiritual. The ability to be attentive in the
present may be giving children access to insights and perceptions not
available to adults who do not have this capacity, or who may have
lost this ability due to cultural factors or developmental changes. How
does awareness-sensing link to spiritual formation and development?
How is it influenced by other development success and challenges? (See
Morris, 2001 for an exploration of the spiritual in autistic children.)
Mystery-Sensing
Hay and Nye (1998) claim that mystery-sensing, based on the ability
to be present, makes every moment rich in imagination and possibility.
Life is not already explained but is experienced as fresh and “therefore
mysterious” (p. 69). This leads to an intense interest and persistent
inquiry about the nature of things and the workings of the world. Again,
it is not clear what makes this capacity spiritual rather than the kind
of mental/cognitive curiosity that Gopnik et al. (1999) have claimed.
Being fascinated with the workings of life is part of developing thinking
and inquiry skills. A lived sense of mystery can contribute significantly
to the formation of imagination and curiosity. Children’s minds are
capable of flights of imagination and engagement. Levine (1999) sug-
gests that children’s ability to simultaneously practice concrete and
fanciful thinking is a spiritual capacity that permits concrete and tran-
scendent sensibility to co-exist for them.
Curiosity about the world and the unknown involves social, emotional
and cognitive capacities. There is a danger here that Hay and Nye (1998)
are conflating mystery with discovery and interest. A child is naturally
curious to discover and know the world in which he/she lives. Children
express a wide range of cognitive capacities from birth onward. Is there
a type of perception of “mystery” that indicates a spiritual capacity?
Is there an engagement with “mystery” that has a spiritual quality?
And what is meant by “mystery”? The unknown? The not-yet-known?
That which must remain unknown? Again, my concern is that there
may be a danger of reading adult sensibilities into a child’s experience
and claiming it as spiritual. The world is unknown and mysterious
when it is new. Does that freshness offer a relationship that has a spiri-
tual element? Is it about living in newness? Is the attention to, or
awareness of mystery about being alert and living in a state of amaze-
ment and wonder? How is mystery-sensing a specific spiritual quality?
It seems to me that there is a capacity for experience beyond-the-
self that includes some of the markers that Hay and Nye (1998) identi-
fy. A loss of ego boundaries that can occur in experiences of oneness
or moments identified as experiences of wonder or awe may indicate
Child & Youth Care Forum124
a spiritual relational moment. But what aspects of that experience
are spiritual? What role does the beyond-the-self experience play in
understanding and knowledge? How is the openness to the unknown
or to other (Other) a sign of spiritual sensitivity as well as cognitive
or social contextually formed awareness in children? Are children, in
the kind of experiences of oneness and immersion in life reported in
Robinson’s work (1983), demonstrating a capacity to go beyond them-
selves or be free to traverse personal boundaries? Is this a sign of
spirituality or a sign that the personal boundaries and borders of chil-
dren are porous and flexible, in a different social/emotional form, that
leaves them more accessible to beyond-the-self experiences? I am not
suggesting that they are not having these experiences but it seems
important to consider what their potential openness and porosity might
be opening them to sense or know.
There is much to clarify here in order to accurately locate children’s
perceptions in a holistic developmental perspective. What role do these
experiences have in shaping a child’s sense of self? Their sense of the
world? And their sense of borders and limits that will develop as they
mature?
Value-Sensing
For Hay and Nye (1998), value-sensing is based on children’s capacity
to experience a wide range of emotions and feelings from terror to
delight, from despair to hope. They claim that part of their ability to
delight and despair is based on a sense of ultimate goodness. Children
also experience moments of meaning-sensing which can include the
transcendent moments of unity or oneness that take them out of or
beyond the limits of their context (see above), which may provide them
with a sense of meaning that has a life-long sustaining potential.
In examining Hay and Nye’s (1998) notion of value-sensing, it is
important to ask what other developmental qualities need to be consid-
ered to understand value-sensing? Children can and do have an emo-
tional responsiveness to what is happening around them. They are
attuned to emotions and values and are as open to them as they are
to other details in their life-world. If we accept that, from an early
age, children have significant learning and interpretative capacities,
it seems realistic to also assume that they are attuned to what matters
to others in the context in which they live. They learn to read, assess
and respond to others based on their own perception of how things are
done and why. Their sensitivity to context provides an ability to sense
what is valued both implicitly and explicitly by the adults in their
lives. Occasionally, children are in contexts where their emotional,
psychological, spiritual, and physical survival depends on them being
Daniel G. Scott 125
able to read their context and understand its implications as they act.
They learn to anticipate adult responses and respond in ways to protect
themselves from anger, risk or danger. This collection of assessing and
interpreting skills is part of the work of sensing values and meaning
in contexts. It is not clear how this particular sensitivity is spiritual
rather than developmentally emotional, social or moral, nor is it clear
how a child who is not able to read social and emotional contexts
accurately might be considered spiritual. But it is important to note
that there are children who, very early in their lives, do not have the
capacity to sense values or understand the implications of their actions.
These children may have suffered damage pre-natally, or at birth or in
early life. The loss of perception is understandable as physical/chemical
difficulty or as social/emotional trauma. What then is the specific spiri-
tual nature of value-sensing? Can it be similarly affected?
Hay and Nye (1998) state that children have a sense of ultimate
goodness. I am uncomfortable with this claim as it assumes a pre-estab-
lished internal sense of value (like a conscience) that is outside of the
shaping of the human environment. Having a sensitivity to matters of
value and meaning seems a possible skill or ability. Having a pre-
determined qualitative value scale seems unlikely. Children, however,
may be pragmatic and may also be testing the world for values and
meaning, as well as for knowledge and emotions, from the beginning
of their lives. It is possible that they do have a capacity to assess what
is valued in their context and respond to what they see as being of
higher value. They may have a sensitivity to gradations in goodness,
but meaning and values are contextual. I think that their value-sensing
capacity is itself a significant factor in understanding their relational
attunement and is not dependent on any ultimate awareness. It may
be that Hay and Nye have noticed an important quality in children
that is part of their spirituality. That children are attuned to value
and meaning may itself be spiritual. That they learn and absorb values
so readily may also be significant in their spiritual development. Chil-
dren are already interpreting the world through a cultural lens when
they assess for meaning and value in their life world. They already
have a context and some sense of how their context works and perceives,
including, as they absorb language, the thinking patterns and ways of
that language. How are children meaning-seeking in ways that include
spiritual awareness or sensitivity?
The questions I am raising about children’s spiritual capacity and
the place of developmental knowledge in understanding spirituality
are attempts to locate children in both their human processes and their
cultural context. A key assumption about children’s experience, that
is in all three of the sensitivities that Hay and Nye (1998) are claiming,
is that spirituality includes a relational component that implies a con-
Child & Youth Care Forum126
nection beyond the self. Children are, through their awareness-sensitiv-
ity attuned to the world and life beyond themselves. Similarly, their
sensitivity to values, meaning and mystery includes a beyond-the-self
capacity for relationships and connection which is central to spiritu-
ality.
Beyond-The-Self Experience
Understanding spirituality in terms of an experience of beyond-the-
self is, however, already linked to specific cultural and historical tradi-
tions that are embedded in assumptions about the nature of spiritual
experience. How does culture present the world to a child? It may come
as material only. It may come as already spiritual. How alive is the
world for a child? Do rocks have spirits? Can animals communicate to
people? Are plants and trees only biological material or are they also
spiritual? These questions may be answered with quite different as-
sumptions depending on cultural location and traditions of belief. If
there are flexible ego boundaries, are there also flexible personal spiri-
tual boundaries that children may transcend more easily than older
people? Does this give children access to experiences of mystery and the
unknown/not known/not-to-be-known that have significant spiritual
qualities?
There is another consideration to be noted in assessing the spiritual
in life experience. In identifying spiritual capabilities, and in being
sensitive to how the spiritual is experienced and expressed by children
within the context of all of their developmental capacities, it may be
necessary to allow for a range of possible perspectives and assumptions.
What makes any perception or set of perceptions and abilities identifi-
able as spiritual? Is it possible to be certain or is it necessary to enter
into a liminal or marginal space of understanding to accept the re-defini-
tion of experience as spiritual? If relational consciousness is to be under-
stood as a term to describe the spirit of the child as one that attends
to and connects with the world relationally, with others, with Other,
with the physical world and all its creatures and with the self, how is
this connectivity also spiritual as well as cognitive, moral, social and
emotional? I believe these questions have to be considered if spiritual
development is to be known as part of a child’s life experience.
Implications for Child and Youth Care Practice
If child and youth care is to acquire a working understanding of
spiritual development so that the spiritual well-being of children and
families is part of child and youth care practice, it will be necessary to
Daniel G. Scott 127
be able to identify children’s spiritual experiences, to assist children
to interpret and process those experiences, and to do that in the context
of life-span development and a child’s life-world. Is relational conscious-
ness (Hay and Nye 1998) an appropriate starting place? Can it evolve
to include life-span developmental knowledge and links? I believe rela-
tional consciousness can be useful as a guide for child and youth care
practitioners and researchers to engage children’s spirituality. Ac-
knowledging that children are relational, that they can and do have
beyond-the-self experiences, that they have perceptions and sensitivi-
ties that open them to spiritual experiences can provide an initial
framework to inform our understanding of children as spiritual in a
variety of cultural settings. The three sensitivities—awareness, mys-
tery and value—will need to be further honed and enhanced by existing
developmental knowledge and insights so that spiritual development
can be understood as part of life-span development with distinctive
processes and implications.
Children, youth and adults, have experiences that transcend the
ordinary and seem to have lasting impact on people’s lives (see Hawker,
2000; and Miller & C’de Baca, 2001). Robinson (1983) provides a number
of examples of children who have had experiences of oneness with or
through nature or have a sense of the world being alive, infused with
light. Their experiences of oneness are seen as giving them grounds
for meeting life and engaging difficulty with optimism and perspective,
sometimes providing a core sense of certainty, and occasionally an
impetus to vocation. It is important to note, as in the two examples
below, where adults report these kinds of childhood experiences they
claim them as touchstones of engagement, not actions of escaping from
life:
But for the brief seconds (when I was about eleven) while it lasted I had
known that in some strange way I, the essential “me”, was a part of the
trees, of the sunshine, and the river, that we all belonged to a great unity.
Iwas left filled with exhilaration and exultation of spirit. This is one of
the most memorable experiences of my life, of a quite different quality
and greater intensity than the sudden lift of spirit one may often feel
when confronted with beauty in Nature. (Robinson, 1983, p. 37)
The most profound experience of my life came to me when I was very
young—between four and five years old...Inthat moment I knew that
I had my own special place, as had all the other things, animate and so-
called inanimate, and that we were all part of the universal tissue which
was both fragile yet immensely strong, and utterly good and beneficent.
This vision has never left me. (Robinson, 1983, p. 32)
These two attempts to articulate beyond-the-self experience include
a spiritual component in the thrust outward and beyond the normal
borders of identity and personal space. They can be identified as encoun-
Child & Youth Care Forum128
ters of awe and wonder, allowing that wonder may not always be
positive or affirmative, and can include moments of threat and terror.
I accept that these accounts are identifying a human capacity to per-
ceive and be linked in a way that is more than cognitive or emotional,
but may be informed by both sensate and intellectual capacities. Being
beyond the self and remaining as self simultaneously is a necessary
tension in spiritual experience. It implies an understanding of the self
that is more fluid and open (an issue for another paper). Levine (1999)
suggests that children have the capacity to move between the concrete
and imaginative without contradiction and I think this is part of their
ability to be at ease in this state of being beyond-the-self or to have a
more immediate access to it. Their borders are fluid and their percep-
tions open.
I think it is also worth considering whether these kinds of experiences
in children’s lives are more common than recognized but remain unno-
ticed or inadequately processed because they have not been acknowl-
edged. It may be that there are parallels to children’s initially unac-
knowledged accounts of sexual abuse. Because children were not expected
to have such experience, their attempts to speak of it were dismissed.
Are we now in a similar phase in our understanding of spiritual experi-
ence? The child and youth care field has not yet developed effective
skills and strategies to address spiritual experiences with children.
Theoretical assumptions and frameworks are just beginning to emerge.
Field textbooks remain mostly silent on spirituality and child and youth
care practitioners are not provided with adequate guidelines or models,
only the call to have spiritual development as part of their foundational
knowledge. A hesitation to address religion in children’s lives may have
blocked the child and youth care field from the potential resource and
insight that might be available through spiritual awareness or a rela-
tional consciousness that is natural and normal for children.
Perhaps spirituality is being partially expressed in other aspects of
life. There are various images of children that do occur in the literature
of children’s spirituality. Coles (1990) suggests the child is like a pil-
grim, that is, someone on a life quest seeking beyond the self in an
intentional way to interpret life. Both Coles (1990) and Robinson (1983)
suggest that children also have a visionary capacity which includes a
search for mattering or meaning that may take a variety of interpretive
forms. In visionary experiences there may also be a link to perceptions
that use the senses but are not necessarily based on immediate physical
realities yet are experienced as physical and sensate. Children may
have visionary experiences that are about more than their own lives
and contain necessary insights for their community. The challenge for
children is in conveying any sense of meaning or vision. Therefore,
there may be important links to imagination and creativity that have
Daniel G. Scott 129
spiritual overtones. The desire to give voice or shape or sound to height-
ened or altered perception may have spiritual qualities. Literature,
art, movement and music have often been informed by beyond-the-self
sensitivity. Across history and cultures these impulses are often expressed
through religious metaphors and symbols. Perhaps there is value in
paying attention to the creative and imaginative expressions of children
and youth to ascertain if some of that work is an attempt to articulate
spiritual insight or experience.
Any attempts to express the spiritual will, of necessity, include intel-
lectual and social/emotional aspects that will come into play differently
throughout the stages of life. An awareness of value and meaning
becomes then part of the process of relating to the world and implies in
it a meta-perspective as part of its way of knowing the world. Relational
consciousness may be a theory that can be expanded to include other
interpretations of experience to give spirituality in children and youth
a common frame of reference.
In order to respect the contemporary understanding of life-span de-
velopment, it will be necessary to pay attention to how spiritual experi-
ence may shift in later stages of life. There may be models in other
cultures and from other eras that might help us formulate an under-
standing of spiritual experience at different life stages. For example,
many cultures have acknowledged and practiced deliberate coming of
age ceremonies and rites of passage that include careful attention to
spiritual values and perceptions (Mahdi, Foster & Little, 1987; Scott,
1998; Westerman, 2001). The beginning of the transition from childhood
to adult life may be a time of considerable openness and sensitivity to
spiritual awareness as matters of identity, value, meaning, and voca-
tion come into focus. I believe there is, or was, an indigenous wisdom
of the spiritual in rites of passage that is being ignored as those ceremo-
nies are diluted or deleted from current cultural practice. If this is
the case, a more astute understanding of the spiritual lives of young
adolescents during the time when adult values, as well as a personal
sense of community and identity are being developed might have a signifi-
cant impact on our work with young adolescents.
The high intensity and focus in life experience that can accompany
a coming of age passage is an opportune moment to attend to spiritual
development, perception and values. I am suggesting that we need to
open up the understanding of relational consciousness, to test it in
research and in practice with and against what is already known and
being discovered about human life span development. If it is to serve
as an effective theoretical model for understanding the spirituality of
the young, it is going to be necessary to have a model of spiritual experi-
ence that can work in many cultural settings, respect the strengths
and limitations of children’s perceptions and abilities, and acknowledge
Child & Youth Care Forum130
the significant changes that happen through the period from birth
through adult life. It may be that the inclusion of spiritual development
as suggested by the UNCRC and in the North American Certification
Project Competencies document (Mattingly & Stuart, 2001) will provide
child and youth care professionals with the impetus to attend to spiri-
tual development in children’s experience, assisting a view of children
that is open and flexible. Viewing children and youth as spiritually
aware and capable may help in the process of recognizing and valuing
their full humanity from the moment they join us in the world.
References
Bosacki, S. (2001). “Theory of mind” or “Theory of the soul?” The role of spirituality in
children’s understanding of minds and emotions. In J. Erricker, Ota, C., and Erricker
C. (Ed.), Spiritual education, cultural, religious and social differences: New perspec-
tives for the 21st century (pp. 156–169). Brighton, Portland: Sussex Academic Press.
Bosacki, S., & Ota, C. (2000). Preadolescents’ voices: A consideration of British and
Canadian children’s reflections on religion, spirituality and their sense of self. Inter-
national Journal of Children’s Spirituality, 5(2), 203–220.
Coles, R. (1990). The spiritual life of children.Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Eaude, T. (2001). Searching for the spirit. In J. Erricker, Ota, C., and Erricker C. (Ed.),
Spiritual education, cultural, religious and social differences: New perspectives for
the 21st century (pp. 220–233). Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press.
Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A. N., & Kuhl, P. K. (1999). The scientist in the crib: Minds, brains,
and how children learn.New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.
Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a way of life: Spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault
(M. Chase, Trans.). Oxford UK & Cambridge, USA: Blackwell Publishers.
Hawker, P. (2000). Secret affairs of the soul: Ordinary people’s extraordinary experiences
of the sacred.Kelowna, BC: Northstone Publishing.
Hay, D., & Nye, R. (1998). The spirit of the child.London: Fount Paperbacks, HarperCol-
lins Publishers.
Jones, C., Wainwright, G., and Yarnold, E. (Ed.). (1986). The study of spirituality.New
York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kujawa-Holbrook, S. A. (2001). Courage and resistance: Spiritual formation and mentor-
ing girls for religious leadership. International Journal of Children’s Spirituality,
6(3), 299–310.
Levine, S. (1999). Children’s cognition as the foundation of spirituality. International
Journal of Children’s Spirituality, 4(2), 121–140.
Mahdi, L. C., Foster, S., and Little, M. (Ed.). (1987). Betwixt & between: Patterns of
masculine and feminine initiation.LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
Mattingly, M. A., with Stuart, C. (2001). Competencies for professional child and youth
work practitioners. Retrieved November 20, 2001 from: http://www.acycp.org.
Miller, W. R., & C’de Baca, J. (2001). Quantum change: When epiphanies and sudden
insights transform ordinary lives.New York, London: The Guilford Press.
Morris, L. (2001). Autism and childhood spirituality. In C. Erricker, Ota, C., and Erricker,
C. (Ed.), Spiritual education, cultural, religious and social differences: New perspec-
tives for the 21st century (pp. 234–247). Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic
Press.
Robinson, E. (1983). The original vision: A study of the religious experience of childhood.
New York: The Seabury Press.
Scott, D. G. (1998 b). Rites of passage in adolescent development: A reappreciation.
Child & Youth Care Forum, 27(5), 317–335.
Daniel G. Scott 131
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. (1991). (pp. 28). Ottawa: Ministry
of Supply and Services Canada.
Westerman, W. (2001). Youth and adulthood in children’s and adults’ perspectives. In
J. Erricker, Ota, C., and Erricker C. (Ed.), Spiritual education, cultural, religious
and social differences: New perspectives for the 21st century (pp. 248–259). Brighton
and Portland: Sussex Academic Press.
