Analysis: Story and play are the native languages of children and can be used to nurture children's spirituality in the home
By Sínead McCauley Lambe and Cora O'Farrell, DCU
'What happens when you die?’ ‘Where was I before I was born?’ Children ask hard questions and their questioning can often feel relentless. It is relentless: children are always questioning, always curious, and always wondering.
Young children have a deep need to connect to their spirituality, as they become intensely aware both of themselves, and of themselves in relation to the complex world around them. It's a world that throws up moral dilemmas on a daily basis; dilemmas that children pose to the adults around them and dilemmas that those adults don’t have answers for.
Enter story and play. Story and play are the native languages of children and how they attempt to make sense of the world, process complex feelings and work through dilemmas. Play is defined as deeply immersive and joyful. Young children fluctuate between feelings of intense despair and delight in their everyday lives. Such feelings are described by David Hay as being integral to the child’s spiritual experience.
Young children fluctuate between feelings of intense despair and delight in their everyday lives
As adults, we also seek such deep feelings of joy and complete immersion in meaningful activity. We also seem to want to play, to reconnect to our playfulness - to our spirituality perhaps?
It is Saturday morning, and there is a sizeable crowd gathered around a local cafe in Chapelizod. Soon they will enter the Phoenix Park through the small Twirly Gate. Once inside the lush confines of the park, they will form a large circle where they will perform a sequence of movements before heading off for a run together. They will return then to the cafe, where they will form a (kind of) orderly queue for coffees, croissants and acai bowls, which they will eat together as they chat and socialise outside the cafe. A spiritual endeavour it seems, if somewhat in disguise.
Finding spirituality is an individual and community endeavour. In recent years, sea swimming groups, men’s sheds, gatherings at saunas and hot boxes have surged in popularity. With such access to a wide variety of communal and joyful activities, adults are scaffolded by wider societal practices in their search for a deep connection and richness of life and connection with others, and there is growing recognition of this need in adults. While naturally spiritual, children still need guidance and accompaniment through their spiritual journey, with child-led spaces and rituals facilitated that honour their own native languages of story and play.
While naturally spiritual, children still need guidance and accompaniment through their spiritual journey
But there is little on offer to support parents in developing the playful approaches they can use to accompany their children on this spiritual journey. Just as children need space to be listened to, parents need opportunities to come together to uncover their own natural gifts of navigating spiritual conversations in ways that feel natural, engaging, and meaningful for both parent and child.
Recognising this, in April 2024, DCU's Mater Dei Centre for Catholic Education and Centre for Inclusive Pedagogy collaborated to facilitate a 4-week course on Playful Parenting. The aim was to work with parents to explore how story and play can be used to nurture children’s spirituality in the home.
Deep Talk and puppets were used as ways to enable parents to support their children to navigate tricky moral dilemmas. An adaptation of Godly Play, Deep Talk is a multi-sensory way of sharing stories from a variety of traditions. Stories are powerful in enabling children to make sense of the world around them. Deep Talk provides a safe structure within which children can grapple with complex moral dilemmas. The process is punctuated by both silence, and by times to wonder aloud, and helps to nurture the spiritual and moral dimensions of the child’s life and to build community.
Puppets are also a powerful tool for inviting children into story in a safe and non-threatening way. Using a puppet to pose a moral dilemma can enable children to identify with the puppet’s character, develop empathy and reflect and wonder about their own lives and their own experiences. While the puppet might not have a nice neat solution to a child’s dilemma, often just hearing their own story aloud is a sense-making and healing process itself. Puppets provide a safe distance from the child, to enable them to process their complex feelings and attempt to make sense of them.
While every parent's heart's desire is to provide solutions to their child’s problems and dilemmas, this way of working instead, honours the child’s own story and their capacity to reflect on their own experience. Participant numbers in this programme were modest, but what spoke volumes was that each participant attended all four weeks of the course despite the usual demands of parenthood and working life.
The feedback from participants told its own story. They spoke about the importance of having a ‘space’ to work with other parents and hear their stories and their experiences. They spoke about their ‘fears’ of using playful approaches like puppets and Deep Talk, but how this course reminded them of the importance of playing with their children, and of being present to them. It also gave them the space to wonder and to recognise the power of the ‘I wonder’ response to their hard questions.
If you are interested in finding out about upcoming Playful Parenting courses in DCU, please contact cora.ofarrell@dcu.ie or sinead.mccauleylambe@dcu.ie.
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Dr Sinéad McCauley Lambe is an Associate Professor in the School of Inclusive and Special Education at the DCU Institute of Education. Dr Cora O'Farrell is Director of the Mater Dei Centre for Catholic Education (MDCCE) at DCU.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
