2 days ago
14
My teenager has recently decided to believe in God. She bought herself a silver cross pendant and has begun wearing it every day.
When I was a teenager, I also wore a cross around my neck, and I also believed in God. I had been raised as a churchgoing, tithe-paying Catholic, but as I hit puberty, my faith became more than cultural. It became deeply personal, with the full spectrum of emotions which characterise first love.
It shouldn’t surprise me that my child wants to develop a faith of her own. Psychology researcher and professor Lisa Miller in her book The Spiritual Child explains that spirituality often increases in adolescence. The teenage brain has a larger gap between “experiencing” and “interpreting” than in adulthood. As a result, adolescents’ feelings are strong, dramatic and oscillate more wildly than the playground swing you so recently used to push them on.
According to James Fowler’s theory of stages of faith, my daughter is entering the “synthetic-conventional” stage. This starts around the age of 12 or 13, and many adults remain in this stage for the rest of their lives. In this phase, exploring a spiritual dimension to life is inherently linked to a search for meaning, identity, purpose and connection. For adolescents, there is a strong social component, which might also explain my child’s recent decision to attend a Christian youth group.
The next stage, which Fowler says can emerge in a person’s late teens or thereafter, involves reflection, critical thinking and individualisation of a person’s faith. Later, a middle-aged person might enter into the “conjunctive faith” stage, embracing mystery and diversity. The final possible stage, which Fowler notes is rare, is “universalising faith”, in which someone might have quietened the ego enough to devote their lives to the wellbeing of the group, across space and time.
In other words, exploring spirituality is in many ways part of growing up. After being a devout Catholic in my teens, I pivoted to Buddhism in my 20s. Nowadays I do not belong to a specific faith institution, but I believe in “something”, in the universe curving towards creation, an inherently hopeful place to exist.
Although I identify as spiritual but not religious, I have the common Australian suspicion of overt religiosity in anyone under the age of 80. I worry that my daughter’s faith explorations will change her irrevocably, in ways that I will not be able to relate to.
In some ways, that is the point of adolescent spirituality. My daughter is engaging in the healthy, necessary stage of individuation, finding her own voice and identity. This includes her own spiritual engagement with the world.
In a review of 30 years of research, professors Sam Hardy and Pamela Ebstyne King found that spiritual engagement is generally positive for youth development. Parents can help their children flourish by being accepting and supportive of their children’s explorations.
There are also maladaptive possibilities of religiousness and spirituality, such as feelings of alienation or shame. I can help to protect her from these outcomes, role modelling values like openness, tolerance and kindness. I can support a context for spirituality which is focused on positive thriving, rather than the feelings of judgment and inadequacy that characterised my own religious upbringing.
As I do with my daughter’s engagement with all media, I can encourage critical thinking. She knows to check the sources of internet information, and understands that some influencers might have agendas that are less than transcendent.
My daughter is dipping her toes into sacred waters, seeing what it feels like to surrender, finding a sense of meaning to her life that is bigger than herself. I have instilled good values into my kid, along with strong media literacy and critical thinking skills. As she learns what it feels like to trust in a higher power, maybe I can learn to trust my parenting self.
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Jackie Bailey is the author of The Eulogy, winner of the 2023 NSW Premier’s literary multicultural award. When she is not writing, Jackie is helping families to navigate death and dying. She is an ordained interfaith minister with a master of theology and is working on a nonfiction book about spirituality in a post-religious world
