Many millions of individuals associate their spirituality with easily and quickly identified symbols.  The symbols include the red crescent that represents Islam, the cross that represents Christianity, and, the Star of David that represents Judaism.  In addition to giving assurance to countless individuals, they represent three of the major religions of the world.  No doubt, many individuals and families find that their spiritual needs are met because they actively participate in institutional religion.  They belong to a church, synagogue, mosque, or other congregational community.  Many believe that their faith community is an extension or a feature of their family.  In short, they discover and hold important meaning through their active involvement in their practice of religion.  Because this is the spiritual and religious life for countless individuals and families, it deserves protection and, often, admiration.  In addition, many individuals search for spiritual meaning, quite apart from institutional religion.  This, too, deserves protection and usually admiration.

The information here is intended to assist parents with their goals of helping their children to discover and find fulfillment in their spiritual lives.  To get there, parents need to reflect on their experience of spirituality.  To help parents with focusing on their spirituality, this discussion begins with offering several suggestions.

Parents and Their Spirituality

To help parents with focusing on their spirituality, this discussion begins with offering several suggestions.  If you wish to utilize the suggestions below, keep in mind that no one is likely to take all of the suggestions and implement them.  Instead, some of the suggestions will be taken and utilized, while others will not.  This is the way it should be.

Don’t over-think “spirituality.”  Similar to thinking about spirituality, most of us also think about other common human experiences, such as marriage or physical health.  In response to the question, “What is marriage?,” the answers are large and complex.  Is it a relationship that is sanctioned by the state?  Is it a relationship that began seven months ago or forty-six years ago or some other length of time?  Is it a relationship that involves shared parenting?  Is it a relationship that follows the tragic death of a previous spouse?  And so on.  Likewise, just as marriage means many different things, spirituality means many different things, too.  Like marriage, one of the important features of seeking and finding a meaningful spirituality is that you keep it personal.  No matter what it may look like, your spirituality may or may not be like the spiritual lives you see in others.

What do you need?  Again, just like thoughts about marriage, all of those who pursue a vital spiritual life do not need the same things.  Some want tranquility and meaningfulness?  Some want a shared spiritual connection with others.  Some want insights that will help them to guide their lives, including their parenting, business decisions, and other relationships.  The point here is that you may want to invest in yourself by reflecting on what you most need from pursuing your spirituality.

Who inspires you?  Not everyone who inspires you is also a possible spiritual model or mentor.  Still, if you aspire to have an enriched spiritual life, consider others who appear to you to have such a life, already.  When you have opportunities to do so, try to make contact with them.  Ask them about their spirituality?  Possibly, join them in their spiritual-related activities.  Seek direction from them toward others or activities that will enhance your spirituality.  Here are some questions that you may want to pose to them:

Are there certain events that turned you toward spirituality?

Who has most influenced your spirituality?

When you think of places that inspire you, do you consider going to them?

How do you keep your spirituality going?

Are there resources that you have found to be helpful for you with your spirituality?

Locate and read about spirituality.  This may be one of the most challenging suggestion to make or to follow, mainly, because there are so very many things to read.  For one person, it may be the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., while for others the speeches simply do not work.  For one person, it may be an ancient classic, such as St. Augustine’s The City of God, while others would find little of value in such a reading.  For some, it will be The Bible, but for others, The Bible falls flat as a source of spiritual meaning.  For most of us, spiritual readings are more likely to be books that tell us how, say, and soldier who was critically wounded in Afghanistan and who discovered important life-giving meaning from the injury and recovery.  Along this line, books that reveal deep spirituality typically come out of deep injury, whether the injury is physical, social, or mental-emotional.  At the end of this discussion, you will find a list of devotional, spiritual classics.  These are the ones that have been tested by time—sometimes, a very long time.

Give yourself times of freedom.  This is simpler than it may appear, but also more difficult than it may appear.  The fact is that, on any given day, most of us are captive of many responsibilities.  Obviously, our responsibilities should be taken seriously.  We need to keep track of tax-related information.  We need to get the kids to school.  We need to visit an ailing neighbor.  We need to pick up laundry.  We need to, well, live our lives.  And, in living our lives, we could easily list, maybe, one hundred or more responsibilities that occupy our time, money, and effort.  These are sometimes the things that keep spirituality at a distance.  So, allowing for responsibilities, not to mention our compulsion to check email messages or other things on our smart phones, we need to find times of freedom.  This is freedom to let ourselves live, without the impending necessity of doing the next thing immediately that responsibilities require us to do.

Spend time with nature.  Adding to the idea of finding times of freedom, the times that you find for yourself are not likely to be totally empty.  You will be somewhere, doing something.  A sometimes wonderful, positive way to slow your thinking and lose the need to set a pace that leads to visible accomplishments and just be—just experience the moment of being another feature of nature, letting your spirit find its way in the moment.

Make time for special others.  Again, adding to the idea of finding time of freedom, make time to be with others who value you and whom you value.  Enjoy them.  Let them enjoy your.  Allow yourself to be re-minded of the importance of belonging, of affirming life, as you are affirmed and as you affirm others who are important to you.  For many of us, this is the essence of life.

Practice positive values.  So, if right now, you were to decide how to practice generosity, what would you do?  Give money to Big Brothers?  Get groceries for an elderly neighbor?  Or, what would you do if you were to decide right now to practice forgiveness?  Toward whom would you release your need to get even and claim your freedom from resentment or hurt or similar feelings and thoughts?  Or how about compassion?  Or, how about making amends?  The fact is that, when you practice your important, positive values, your open an expansive roadway along which you affirm life and discover a meaningful spiritual life.

Practice curiosity.  In relation to spirituality, curiosity is not about merely gathering information, such as checking on your home’s worth.  Instead, the curiosity that can enrich your spirituality is different from this.  It asks truly difficulty questions.  For example, it may lead you to ask how you may have gained from suffering through the experience of your father’s illness and death.  Or, it may lead you to explore your level of your genuine commitment to justice and empathy, along with other important values, after your husband’s infidelity.  You see, to sustain your suffering or to cling to your hurt denies you the opportunity of becoming spiritually fulfilled.

Take a long view.  Just as parenting cannot be successfully achieved in, say, ten days, spiritual growth and development cannot be achieved quickly nor permanently maintained with no disappointments or bad days.  The nature of growth is that it is often fulfilling but is also a process that involved failure sometimes and predictably uncomfortable changes.  Can you recall something that you believed to be right and true when you were, say, eight years of age, but grew beyond it and had to give it up, when you realized that it was no longer right and true?  Spiritual growth is like this.  So, taking a long view enables you to adjust to the fact that, over a long stretch of time, you will grow—sometimes out of traps that have held you in place and, at times, into wonderful discoveries.

Joining Your Child’s Spiritual Growth

As you contemplate helping your child with spirituality, you do not need to define yourself as a spiritual mentor or model, although you may be the most important mentor and model in your child’s life.  You are, first, a parent for your child.  Everything else flows from this basic relationship.  Allowing for this, what may you do to assist your child with spiritual development?  Here are some suggestions:

Parents who wish for their child to have a fulfilled spiritual life often observe that somehow their wish is not realized.  Sometimes, they can account for this, when they see that their child has been influenced by factors beyond their control.  As heartbreaking as these factors can be, parents encounter them in the form of injury, birth defects, experimentation with drugs, rejection from the child’s peers, and so on.  The fact is that the best of what parents wish for their child may be frustrated by many different influences.  Generally, though, parents are not helpless, when it comes to helping their child to have a fulfilled spiritual life.  Here are some recommendations.

Listen carefully.  If parents listen carefully, they will likely hear comments or questions that challenge their ability to give satisfying answers.  For example, “What happens when you die?”  Or, “How do you know when you’re in love?”  The question about death is likely to come from younger children, while the question about love is likely to come from older children.  Their questions need to be heard for what they are.  This involves listening carefully, showing interest in the question(s), and inviting children to say more about their concerns.  For example, the young child who asks about what happens when someone dies may not be wondering what happens when someone dies, but how they can get through grieving the loss of a grandparent.  The importance of listening carefully is that it affirms that your child can raise questions, but can also openly search for answers.  When your child approaches life with questions and pursues answers, she is likely exposing her need for an enriched spiritual life, among other things.

Affirm your child’s growth.  This one can be a slippery one.  On the one side, parents want to and often do affirm their child’s growth.  No problem.  However, a child around the age of eight years has begun to know about and understand rules and morality and, along with this knowledge, may want to inform her parents about their inadequate attention to the rules and their moral failures.  So, while this represents growth, it can also be irritating.  Similarly, a twelve-year-old son may announce that he is grown up and does not need any more parenting.  “I’m an adult now.  Don’t treat me like a child.”  Allowing for this relational hiccups in parent-child conversations, parents can and should find ways to affirm and celebrate their child’s growth, emerging insights, initiatives, and courage to adapt to the complex demands of growing up.  When it comes to spiritual growth, this is particularly important.

Maintain open communication.  This recommendation poses challenges, too.  The older your child is, the more likely he is to need to keep secrets from you.  Adolescents need to learn to have a life apart from their parents, while also maintain a close relationship with them.  So, for both parents and their adolescent child, maintaining open communications can be inconsistent and difficult.  An important feature of open communication is that, as already discussed above, parents listen carefully to their child, but it also involves parents’ readiness to share important personal information, too.  “Mom, do you and daddy ever pray?”  Obviously, this question calls for curiosity about what the child may need, but it also calls for more than a simple “yes” or “no.”  If mom and dad pray, why do they pray?  If not, why not?  Or, “Dad, do you wonder what life is all about?”  Or, “Mom, if you could do anything you want, something that would tell you that you are living just right, what would it be?” 

Tell stories.  This one is easier than some of the others.  In short, tell stories about important event and turning points in your life.  The important event and turning points in your life will go a long way toward helping your child to understand you and what makes life good or not.  “When we moved from Pittsburgh to Nashville, I was just eight years old.  I thought my life was over.  There was no place better than Pittsburgh.  But then, I would never have met your mom.  So, the move proved to be one that gave me more good things than I could ever have imagined.”

Focus on what has worked for you.  If you have an interest in your child’s spiritual well-being, you likely have already given serious attention to your own spiritual well-being.  You have likely come to some important conclusions about your spiritual beliefs, practices, and commitments.  So, share these things with your child.  You have likely found books that have made a positive difference in your spiritual life.  Share your gains with you child.  You may have discovered that certain individuals or places, including places in nature, have been important to your spiritual growth.  Again, share these with your child.  Of course, sharing these things with your child will also help you to be clearer and more confident about your spirituality.

Make introductions.  If you know someone who exemplifies spirituality as you believe it should be, consider the possibility of introducing your child to this individual.  Or, maybe, you and your child can search for examples of strong and positive spirituality and get acquainted with them together.  Spiritual mentorship may be important for you and your child.

Share resources and connect your child with them—together or independently.  The immense volume of resources makes finding good ones truly difficult.  The Institute for Spirituality and Health (ISH) has gathered, curated, and posted many useful and reliable resources.  The ISH provides links to other resources.  The URL for  ISH is: https://www.spiritualityandhealth.org/resources

Give your child needed “space” and understanding.  Parents want the best possible life for their children.  You are likely one of these parents.  In wanting the best for your child, you may want to see spiritual maturity before your child is ready or capable of it.  Keep in mind that all of us, including you as a parent, grow mentally, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually throughout our lives.  Give your child space and understanding so that your child can continue to grow toward the spiritual maturity that you would like to see.

Join with like-minded parents.  This may take a lot of time and effort, but your child is well worth investing both time and effort.  For one thing, as you try to support your child’s spiritual development, you will find valuable understanding from mutually sharing your parenting experiences.  Also, as you share, you will also likely gain information about ideas and activities that  will be useful for you and your child.  For example, as you hear from other parents, you may gain insights about the spiritual importance of some of the music that your child and theirs listen to.  Or, you may receive information about books or events about which you would not have known.

Enjoy spiritual exploration with your child.  If you have been exposed primarily to a Christian view of religion and spirituality, you may want to consider visiting a synagogue or having conversations with a leader of a synagogue.  You may wish to consider reading from The Torah or The Qur’an.  While this may be challenging, immerse in the music that your child believes is important to her and talk about it.  Either independently or separately, ask family and friends with whom you have appropriate rapport about their spirituality.

Mostly, whether you and your child come to a clear and settled view of spirituality or find satisfaction in sharing the same experience of spirituality, you may need to remind yourself about the most important features of your spirituality.  Among other things, you are likely to remember that your spirituality has been a fulfilling adventure.  So, let it be this way for your child—an adventure, a truly valuable, life-sustaining adventure!