An Overview of Muslim Spiritual Parenting

Muslim life on the individual, family, and community levels continues to revolve around fundamental spiritual principles, themes, and values with corresponding meanings that impact purpose of life and even lifestyle. Muslim parents pursue ways and means to nurture their children’s spirituality, strengthen their moral resilience, and shape their identity as effective members of society. This theoretical study explores Islamic insights into spiritual parenting, addressing questions around what defines spiritual parenting and constitutes its core tenets, characteristics and approaches, and principles and guidelines used by Muslims to raise spiritual children. This study identifies a rich Islamic conceptualization and theoretical approach to holistic spiritual parenting that engages with modernity and allows room for adaptation, creativity, and intercultural experience. Further empirical research is needed to shed light on the current dynamics of Muslim spiritual parenting, parents’ struggles, accommodations, adaptations, as well as caregiver resistance in practices of spiritual parenting, which would help us better understand the needs and challenges facing Muslim families today and further enrich our understanding of comparative and cross-cultural parenting in multicultural societies.

Engaging with Dewey’s Valuation in Religious Education to Enhance Children’s Spirituality for Democratic Life

In this paper, we want to address how the educative growth of children’s spirituality within religious education can be better understood through Dewey’s theory of valuation. We would like to draw attention to the link between an education for authentic spirituality and the pursuit of a genuine democratic life, because education, even religious education, is always political. In doing so, we point to the urgency and importance of fostering spiritual education for children in the face of the current rise of authoritarianism throughout the world and the demise of authentic democratic life. In order for genuine democracies to survive and thrive, their citizens must be educated. Unlike indoctrination and propaganda, which control populations through manufacturing public opinion by which individuals are compelled to comply to an officially approved consensus, education is emancipatory by offering opportunity for dissensus. Emancipatory education enables individual citizens to initiate and participate in activities at the grass-roots level that pursue public and global goods, without waiting to be led by various authorities. Such an educated way of being, which is essential for democratic life, requires young people to be educated spiritually so that they are able to transcend the pressures to conform to public consensus and the will of authoritarianism, and instead to actively live their spirituality by undertaking activities that pursue the good, even when such activities are deemed to dissent from public opinion.

Pembelajaran Kontekstual di Masa Pandemi untuk Mengembangkan Kerohanian Anak

The spiritual dimension is the goal of the national education section. While the teacher himself as a professional educator. However, during the pandemic, it is currently ready to use learning patterns that must be adapted to the circumstances. This literature research and writing method aims to discuss spiritual meaning and provide a learning model in order to develop children's spirituality during a pandemic. The contextual learning model should be cheated by educators, because this learning model focuses more on the uniqueness of students.

Co-Creating Authentic Sacred Therapeutic Space: A Spiritually Sensitive Framework for Counselling Children

Social work values client-centered holistic approaches of care, yet there is a lack of approaches addressing spirituality in counselling with children. Children’s spirituality and conceptualization have been disenfranchised. Children’s spiritual experiences, ways of knowing and perceptions are important to attend to when supporting them through an impactful life event such as trauma, grief, or loss (TGL). Parents may not fully understand or have the capacity to attend to their child’s spirituality. Counsellors appear to lack knowledge and training to attend to the spiritual needs and capacities of children. This article offers some research findings of children’s spirituality deemed to be vital for healing from TGL and counselling. It provides an understanding of some of the constructs and isolating processes described by children, parents and counsellors related to children’s spirituality in TGL. It also will present a spiritually sensitive framework specifically attuned to the spiritual dimension and creating spaces of safety and hope when working with children. The implications of not addressing the critical spiritual dimensions in practice for children are discussed, and recommendations for continued research and training for further theoretical development and future social work practice are offered.

Young Children and Spirituality

The term ‘spirituality’ is notoriously challenging to define, partly because it is reliant on translating inner feelings and experiences into words or other modes of expression, which will be interpreted in a multitude of ways depending on the audience’s own inner spiritual and cultural landscape. In describing spiritual concepts, we are reduced to using terminology such as ‘self-transcendent,’ ‘sacred,’ ‘awe-inspiring,’ or ‘connecting’ as we attempt to communicate ethereal experiences and beliefs. The difficulties with expressing spirituality are further compounded when applying the notion to young children. Typically, when we refer to ‘young children’ we mean children aged from birth to eight years. What then, is spirituality for this age group? The extant studies about young children’s spirituality are interested in how young children operate holistically. This makes an extremely important contribution as the spiritual dimension can be lacking in many studies about holism in which spirituality might be conflated with culture or well-being. Scholars of children’s spirituality contemporaneously understand this age group to primarily experience the world (and therefore potentially spiritual experiences) though their bodies. As such, readers are reliant on those scholars’ observations and interpretations of when and how children experience reverence and wonderment, and even the divine, based on young children’s nonverbal expression as much as what they say. Descriptive accounts are frequently the primary source of data and are often the only mechanism a reader can use to assess the credibility of a researcher’s claims. This makes for a field of research that is not without its challenges. A further challenge is untangling spirituality from religion or religious practice and understanding them each as constructs that are often interwoven but that can exist without the other. The intent in the present review brings together literature that has attempted to address the sticky terrain of children’s spirituality with three primary foci, which are (1) spirituality as distinct from religion, (2) young children as those aged eight years old or younger, and (3) enough descriptive detail for the reader to probe the authors’ assertions about children’s spirituality. While there are considerably more sources addressing spirituality in publication than what is represented here, there is a paucity which foregrounds these three factors. A final note is that two significant themes have not been addressed here: (1) ecospirituality and children’s relationships to nature, and (2) young children’s spiritual development. While many of the articles in the present review refer to these two themes, they have not been special foci as they are thoroughly addressed in a separate Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies article “Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence” by W. George Scarlett.

The Child in Our Midst: The Shifting Trends in Ministry with Children and Families over the Past Forty Years

For the past 40 years, the field of children and family ministries has emerged, developed, and been strengthened through the intentional engagement of various teaching/learning approaches, the influence of developmental theory, and the rise of a children’s ministry leadership vocation. The significant growth and development with children and family ministries have contributed to the movement away from a narrow and simplistic view of children to a deeper understanding of how children’s spirituality and faith develops. Yet, more diverse research and improved ministry practices are needed. Integrating children as full participants in the faith community, along with continued evaluation of and improvements in teaching and learning practices, integral partnerships between home and family, and additional voices and diverse perspectives will all aid in better understandings and practices in ministry with children and families.

Peran Pendidikan Agama Kristen dalam Keluarga di Era Digital terhadap Pembentukan Spiritualitas dan Moralitas Anak

This article discusses the role of Christian religious education in families in the digital era to improve children's spirituality and morality. The digital era is an era where everything is instantaneous and fast. In this era, all human activities are carried out online, be it work activities, education and also worship. These online activities have both positive and negative impacts. By using a descriptive-analytical method,in this paper the author discusses the negative impact of online activities on children's spirituality and morality. Spirituas and morality are the main and foremost things for children's lives or things that are very basic for children. Therefore, parents have a very important role in the family to shape the spiritual and moral of the child because good or bad spiritual and moral children depend on the role of parents in the family. In the family, parents must play their role as the first and foremost role in improving children's spirituality and morality through the role of parents as teachers, educators, mentoring, motivators, and role models.