THE IMPORTANCE OF SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT
Parents play a crucial role in helping children find a sense of meaning
As children progress through life, many areas of development are tracked through measures such as height, weight, and their grades at school. If problems arise, parents tend to seek help from physicians, teachers, therapists, and other resources to remedy the issue. But Rev. Courtney A. Ducharme, chaplain at Golisano Children’s Hospital of Southwest Florida, believes there is one area that is often overlooked: a child’s spiritual development. “An individual’s spiritual development is equally as important to protect them in life as their physical development, their behavioral health, their cognitive development, and their emotional development,” she says. “All of these things are facets of our humanity.”
Ducharme says people often equate spiritual development with religiosity. “For some people, their spiritual development is overlapping with their faith precepts and beliefs,” she says. “But spiritual development is much bigger than that.
“Spirituality is discerning a sense of meaning and purpose for your life,” she continues. “It is related very deeply to relationships—the relationship you have with yourself, your immediate family, your friends, your community, your larger nationality, nature, and anything or any power that one would consider transcendent or beyond the ordinary or even sacred.”
What individuals believe to be true about the world and themselves influences how they conduct their lives. “Your spiritual development is a lifelong process,” says Ducharme. “But if it’s ignored, it becomes stunted, and you don’t have the resources to be able to weather the storms that inevitably we experience in every human life.”
Spirituality can mean different things to different people and be nurtured in a variety of ways. “It can be meditation,” says Ducharme. “It can be being out in nature. It can be reading and painting. It can be serving others.”
Parents are usually the first and most likely influences in supporting a child’s spiritual development. Ducharme invites parents to leverage their substantial role: Have meaningful discussions with your children and help them develop their own identities and beliefs. Find places that have felt significant to you or your child and spend time there to understand why. Turn off the TV and electronics to embrace silence or talk to each other.
Nurturing your child’s spiritual development can impact their future happiness and success. “Your sense of identity is as much wrapped up in your spiritual development as it is in your cognitive development,” says Ducharme. “What you know is important, but what you judge to be meaningful and true is probably more important… When parents do not explicitly address the spiritual development opportunity for their children, they handicap their children in a significant way, in my estimation, in not helping those young people gain the skills that they need to thrive in their lives.”
Spirituality can mean DIFFERENT THINGS TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE AND BE NURTURED IN A VARIETY OF WAYS.