Young children and spirituality: understanding children’s connectedness in a group music class

In a fast-paced materialistic world, it is important to create opportunities for spirituality in early childhood music education, a developmental element often neglected in the scholarly literature. The purpose of the present hermeneutic phenomenological study is to understand the meanings that children ascribe to their experiences of connectedness in a group music class for 15 children, aged 4–5 years, at a nursery school in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Data were collected by means of interviews, close observations, diaries and drawings. In a qualitative data analysis, the following themes emerged regarding the children’s experiences in the music class: Music is the best; My body dances; Music takes me places; We can play together; You and me; I feel better and You can have mine. Music group classes in early childhood education could be useful in creating opportunities for spiritual experiences, promoting connectedness and consequently fostering children’s spiritual well-being.     

‘Tied together feelings’ Group psychotherapy with latency children: the process of forming a cohesive group

In this paper we describe our experience of running a psychoanalytic psychotherapy group for six children, ranging in age from 4-8 years old. The group ran for a year, with sessions held weekly for an hour. The rationale for group work, selection criteria and the treatment setting are discussed. The paper charts the evolution within the children of the concept of an internal 'work group' (Bion, 1961), as opposed to a 'gang', as their self-awareness and capacity to relate to each other improved. This reflected a corresponding shift in their relationship to the two group leaders, moving from their initial perception of us as neglectful and in conflict with each other, towards recognizing us as a therapist couple who could work together thoughtfully for their benefit. The children's relationship to the group leaders, representing a 'parental couple' in the transference, was the focus of much of the work group. The positive outcomes for most of the children, resulting from this treatment, are reported.     

Taking a children’s rights perspective on children’s spirituality

Abstract

The right to spiritual development has had little attention in public educational policy. This is more challenging, considering the fact of increasing religious diversity and the focus on spirituality and religion in that context, as well as the way the spiritual is mentioned in documents on children’s rights. This article traces the development from the first documents on the rights of the child and responses to these documents. It is argued that educational policy and practice should pay more attention to the way children’s spirituality is included in the documents. This is an issue of general education as well as of moral philosophy. The article concludes with a claim: spiritual development is a matter of survival and flourishing as human beings, and considering this in the framework of children’s rights could mean exploring spiritual sources in one’s own faith as well as in other faiths.     

Trainee therapists’ views on the alliance in psychotherapy and supervision: a longitudinal study

The shape of alliance in psychotherapy and supervision using growth curve modeling was examined for clinically inexperienced trainee therapists, who were engaged in long-term cognitive behavioral - or psychodynamic individual psychotherapy at a Psychology Clinic in Sweden. Trainee therapists rated their view of the alliance with their clients and their supervisors on the Working Alliance Inventory at five time points. The alliance to the client show a consistent, positive development throughout the therapy. The alliance to the supervisors show initially a decrease, followed by an increase, and then again, the rate of increase in the supervisory alliance ratings slowed down indicating a more complex view of the supervisory alliance compared to the view of the alliance in psychotherapy.     

Getting a Grasp on Children’s Representational Capacities in Pantomime of Object Use

This study examined how 5- and 9-year-old children (N = 40) produce pantomimes of object use on verbal request. The task required participants to enact an action with an imagined object. Results showed that with age, children (a) proceeded from body part as object to imaginary object and (b) incorporated into their pantomimes more distinctive features of the object and its use. While the first result replicated previous findings with more items and a more sophisticated coding procedure, the latter result revealed new insights. Children’s selection of distinctive features in pantomime was related to their performance on a semantic odd-one-out task that requires the abstraction of specific features without situational support. The discussion focuses on the cognitive requirements of the task and the potential of pantomime being a reflection of children’s representational development. We suggest an explanation of the findings within the more general developmental model of Karmiloff-Smith.     

Reflecting on a journey of resilience in children’s blood and cancer nursing

Reflective practice is recognised as an integral part of being a highly skilled and successful health care professional. Many benefits have been identified from being a reflective practitioner including the opportunity for critical thinking, growing self-awareness and supporting individual resilience. There is a growing body of literature recognising the negative emotional impact that caring for children with cancer and blood disorders can have on health professionals. Currently there is an emerging interest in a more strengths-based approach focused on maintaining staff wellbeing. Resilience has been suggested as a framework for coping and maintaining wellbeing in areas, like children’s oncology and has been used as a term to describe the ‘surviving’ health professional. This paper explores the first author’s (GA) experiences of being a children’s oncology nurse and paediatric palliative care nurse specialist in the context of existing empirical and theoretical literature, with a particular focus on how GA developed resilience. Reflective examples of practice are used within the context of themes identified from a recent literature review exploring how resilience is defined within empirical literature.     

Retention of visually presented information in children’s spelling

Memory & Cognition - One hundred and thirty-six 8-year-old children participated in two studies of their ability to spell familiar or nonsense words which they had seen or heard for 2–5...     

Mister Rogers’ environmentalism: children’s spirituality in a trash apocalypse

In 1990, when Earth Day was set to go international, the iconic Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood – which ran for 900 episodes from 1968 to 2001 and won a Peabody Award and 4 Emmy Awards and received 25 Emmy Award nominations – ran a series of episodes on ‘Caring for the Environment.’ The show grappled with how children might face the looming environmental crisis. In these episodes, Rogers offers a spirituality for children that enables them to grasp the severity of the issue but does so by situating the concern in a hopeful worldview and indicating ways that children can take action. Instead of instilling fear and apathy as popular environmental apocalypticism does, Rogers prepares children for the new social order that must emerge to address the environmental crisis. It is an approach that prevents children from being overwhelmed by anxiety in the face of the environmental crisis but instead develops in them a sense of responsibility for the environment.     

Spatial term apprehension with a reference object’s rotation in three-dimensional space

It has been reported that the overall shapes of spatial categorical patterns of projective spatial terms such as above and below are not influenced by the rotation of a reference object on a two-dimensional (2D) upright plane. However, is this also true in three-dimensional (3D) space? This study shows the dynamic aspects of the apprehension of projective spatial terms in 3D space by detailing how the rotation of a reference object with an inherent front influences the apprehension of projective spatial terms on a level plane by mapping their spatial categorical patterns. The experiment was designed to examine how spatial categorical patterns on a level plane changed with the rotation of a reference object with an inherent front in 3D computer graphics space. We manipulated the rotation of a reference object with an inherent front at three levels (0°, 90°, and 180° rotations) and examined how such manipulation changed the overall spatial categorical patterns of four basic Japanese projective spatial terms: mae, ushiro, hidari, and migi (similar to in front of, behind, to the left of, and to the right of in English, respectively). The results show that spatial term apprehension was affected by the rotation of the reference object in 3D space. In particular, rotation influenced the mae–ushiro and hidari–migi systems differently. The results also imply that our understanding of projective spatial terms on a level plane in 3D space is affected dynamically by visual information from 3D cues.     

Conservation as a predictor of individual differences in children’s susceptibility to leading questions

The relationships between susceptibility to leading questions and several individual differences variables—namely number and mass conservation; self-rated social desirability; and teacher-rated assertive social skills, shyness-anxiousness, and acting out—were examined for 36 first graders. As predicted, children whose conservation skills were more advanced were least susceptible to leading questions. However, there was no reliable direct association with any of the four personality variables assessed. Results were interpreted as evidence that the ability to simultaneously consider multiple dimensions may be one general cognitive factor underlying developmental and individual differences in susceptibility to leading questions.     

Altruistic values in children’s spirituality: a study of children’s responses to the terror attacks in Oslo and on Utøya and issues of education

In reactions to the terror attacks in Oslo and on Utøya on July 22, 2011, belief in an open society, hope and altruism played an important part. This has led to research on the role of such values in Norwegian democracy. The present study explores messages given by children right after the event, using an approach based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialogue. Several issues of educational significance are discussed: the meaning of ritual in children’s thinking, coping with offending, death, and understanding children’s spiritual and religious thinking when confronted with a critical event. It is argued that hope and altruism seem to be natural parts of children’s spirituality, but these values are not self-evident in a society. This is a challenge to education.     

Use of an analogue method to examine children’s appraisals of threat and emotion in response to stressful events

An analogue methodology was used to present a set of realistic, salient stressors to children in grades 3, 5, and 7. Children (N = 146) viewed eight videotaped vignettes depicting interpersonal and non-interpersonal stressors; these were expected to differentially threaten psychological needs for relatedness, competence and autonomy and provoke different emotional reactions. Analyses showed that scenarios portrayed stressors that were commonly experienced by children and evoked a differentiated profile of appraisals and emotions. When tenets of the motivational theory of stress and coping were tested, scenarios more threatening to needs were more distressing, sadness was linked to relatedness and competence threat appraisals, and fear was a more common reaction to parent stressors that involved dyadic conflict. After accounting for threat appraisals and previous experience of stressors, younger children and girls appraised events as more distressing than older children and boys. Future research could use the analogue procedure to focus on children’s development of regulation and coping with stress.     

Piper’s question and ours: a role for adversity in group-centred views of non-agentive shame

This paper aims to contribute to ‘group-centred views’ of non-agentive shame (victim shame, oppression shame), by linking them to an ‘anepistemic’ model of the experience and impact of human failing. One of the most vexing aspects of those group-centred views remains how susceptivity to such shame ought to be understood. This contribution focuses on how a basic familiarity with adversity, in everyday life, may open individuals up to these forms of shame. If, per group-centred views, non-agentive shame is importantly driven by participation in social practices with others, a better understanding of the impact of adversity on individuals’ lives may offer a way of explaining how embodied experience instils in individuals a need for such participation. The upshot is an understanding of the individual’s susceptivity to non-agentive shame, which affords it the same legitimacy as more conventional notions of shame.

     

‘Make sure you keep our house safe!’ Thematic analysis of a children's psychotherapy group

This paper describes a systematic thematic analysis of one particular latency-aged children's group and includes a discussion about potentially helpful outcomes measures. The impetus for our small, practice-based qualitative research project came from the two papers by Reid (1999) and Canham (2002) about children's psychotherapy groups, particularly Canham's (2002) paper, ‘Group and gang states of mind’. Canham and Reid used Bion's theories of group functioning as the basis of their technique with children's groups. We felt that it would be an interesting follow-on from Reid and Canham's findings to explore in some detail the specific therapeutic factors involved in a shift from paranoid–schizoid to depressive functioning in group therapy. We hoped that this might give us some helpful clinical indications as to the circumstances in which group rather than individual psychotherapy and parallel parent work should be considered as the treatment of choice. The paper concentrates exclusively on group work with latency-aged children, therefore referring mainly to the limited number of papers published about psychoanalytic group therapy with this age group.