Children’s Spirituality and Traditions: Theoretical and Practical Considerations

Do traditions contribute to children’s spirituality? Why and how so? From theoretical and practical considerations, this book explores children’s weaving of and distancing from family, cultural, educational, and religious traditions.

It examines the transformational relationship between traditions and young people’s lives and spirituality and pursues answers to the following questions:

• What kind of traditions influences young people’s spirituality and how are those influences exerted?
• How and under the influence of whom do children develop their own worldviews and their own sets of values?
• How does that contribute to their identity building?
• How is children’s spirituality connected to traditions?

The chapters in this book seek answers to these questions by delving into the varied influences that contribute to children’s spiritual development such as: construction of identities, the role of rituals, fables and symbols, subcultures and new religious movements, neoliberal educational practices and the importance of play and languages in spirituality experienced by both the children and the young.

Insightful and thought-provoking, this book will be a key resource for practitioners, researchers and scholars in theology and religious studies, early childhood and education, education, developmental psychology, and children’s studies, and will also appeal to anyone interested in understanding the relationship between traditions and young people’s lives. The chapters included in this book were originally published in the International Journal of Children’s Spirituality.

Elaine Champagne holds the Religion, Spirituality and Health Chair at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Sciences (Laval University). Her research in practical theology focuses on spiritual care in pediatric contexts. Her recent projects examine relational dynamics, agency, vulnerability, and the hope of children in the context of serious illness.