Have you ever wondered how your life might have been had you been introduced to spirituality earlier in life? Many spiritual parents often wonder if they can include their children in their spiritual practices.
According to Nancy Montgomery, spirituality helps create a foundation to guide your child during trying times. As your child grows older, strong connections to family and community and a sense of purpose and accomplishment can make them more resilient in creating their life path.
There are simple ways to introduce touches of spirituality to your child. And to help, we provide you with a comprehensive guide to raising a spiritually rooted child.
What does it mean to Raise a Spiritual Child?
Dr. Lisa Miller explained in her essay that spirituality is innate, and every child is born a spiritual child. But this natural capacity can be cultivated and enriched through parenting.
A spiritually rooted child has a connection to a higher power that is loving and guiding. It could be God, nature, the universe, and even a tree. The main point here is that the force of spirituality has a pivotal and active place in the child’s life.
A spiritually rooted child is empowered, grounded, mindful, and always sees the beauty of life, leading them to possess a positive outlook on their future.
Your child’s connection to spirituality can happen through yoga, meditation, or something simple as your child’s connection with a family pet, a beloved tree, or nature.
It goes beyond religion, culture, and language barriers. It’s also innate to them, and as a parent, you play a major role in your child’s spiritual development.
Spirituality is your child’s birthright. You support and nourish your child’s spirituality when you talk, sing, dance, and play with them. These simple interactions and moments spent with them greatly influence how your child achieves their highest spiritual potential.
Tips on Raising a Spiritual Child
All children are spiritual children. However, the physically imperfect life and connections pull them out of this state of being and into a state that leaves them questioning their identity and purpose.
As a parent, you have the capacity to allow your child to grow into who they are supposed to be and never lose their spirituality. Here are tips on how you can help your child grow spiritually.
1. Spend Time in Nature
Spending time outdoors is the simplest way you and your family can enjoy the benefits of spirituality. Many children prefer their smartphones and video games to playing outdoors. However, spending time outdoors, under an adult’s supervision, is good for them.
Consider going on picnics every once in a while. You can take your family out for a picnic once every few weeks and use the opportunity to spend time in nature.
You can also think about going on walks or jogging together in the mornings. Even ten minutes spent outside can enable your children to better develop their spiritual roots.
Nature is imbued with spirituality, and spending time in nature can promote peace and tranquility.
2. Do Yoga Together
Yoga is an excellent practice for developing yourself spiritually. You can also introduce yoga to your children and teach them yogic practices from an early age.
Yoga also builds core strength and flexibility, which works even better for children. They are naturally more flexible at their younger age and can master yogic practices by reaching adulthood.
Yoga also brings many positive benefits to the body and mind. Regularly practicing yoga has been shown to decrease anxiety and stress and promote feelings of calmness.
You can start small by doing ten minutes of yoga a day with your children. Consider enrolling them in a yoga class for children, where they can meet other children interested in yoga. You can also invite a yoga teacher to your home to teach your children yoga.
Yoga is a skill that you and your children can learn together.
3. Mindfulness and Meditation
Regularly practicing mindfulness can go a long way to being spiritually grounded. Being mindful allows you to be present at the moment and enables you to be free from worry related to the past and the future.
Meditation is one way you can practice mindfulness. To be mindful, you have to find ways to stay spiritually rooted in the present moment. And this is a great skill you can pass on to your children.
Being mindful will enable them to focus better on the present and enjoy their childhood fully. They’ll be able to overcome failures, learn from them, and healthily achieve success.
You can introduce mindfulness to your children through mindfulness meditation. Only ten minutes of mindfulness meditation daily is known to bring surprising benefits when it comes to being grounded.
4. Let Them Freely Express Their Emotions
According to Katherine Crofton, parents often fail to address how their children express their emotions.
Most ask their children to suppress their emotions and behave well without knowing the root cause of their ever-changing emotions. Instead of spiritual children, you’re raising robots that will grow up as frustrated adults.
As a parent, it’s important to listen and be attentive. Most of the time, children do not know what they feel. They just know something is wrong, and it’s a parent’s responsibility to help their children healthily express their emotions.
Here are a few easy steps to help your children understand and deal with their emotions:
- Help your children identify, name, and understand their emotions.
- To foster empathy, teach your children to identify others’ emotions through observation and allow them to name the emotions they have observed.
- Discuss with your children how they can express their emotions and give them a healthy outlet. By teaching them how to healthily express their emotion, you are helping them enrich their emotional intelligence.
5. Remove all stereotypes
As a child, your parents might have told you what’s good and bad and what you should do and should not. And while this might seem helpful, such acts often rob the children of their independence and autonomy.
According to the Minds Journal, programming good and bad behavior to children often makes them feel that they have an alter ego and that their behavior determines their self-worth.
You might be a victim of excessive parental dictation, and it’s time to end this generational process.
Ensure that the correction is in the deed and not your child. Let them learn how their deeds affect others and see how they develop healthy sensitivity to their surroundings and the people they interact with.
Another stereotype you must aim to remove is gender stereotypes. Gender stereotypes destroy a child’s vision of who they are supposed to be. And it plays a negative role in children’s development.
As a parent, you must let your children explore and determine their identity. Let them play with the toys of their preference, wear clothes showcasing their personality, and decide how they want to express their gender identity.
Signs of a Spiritually Rooted Child
1. Forgiveness
The capacity for forgiveness is a powerful force. A scenario such as parental abandonment exemplifies this form of forgiveness.
When a spiritually endowed child demonstrates forgiveness in purity, their sincerity and simplicity might look otherworldly.
2. Honest, Polite, Loving, and Kind
Most spiritually gifted children are very caring and have a genuine sense of compassion. This is because they perceive both the strengths and weaknesses of others around them.
When these kids spiritually connect with you, you are given genuine warmth and civility.
3. Powerful and Strong
These kids will demonstrate their strength and authority in a variety of ways. While they are strong, they are not violent or required to be.
With knowledge of the existing system, they have no need to fight, preferring to carry out tasks as they see fit.
4. Possessing an Understanding of How to Use Their Spiritual Gifts
Children and adolescents who exercise their spiritual abilities find it relatively simple to express them.
They may be experts in reading auras or astral travel. They may manufacture scenarios and other possibilities that would otherwise be believed impossible. Their spiritual toolkit may include the gift of healing.
5. Struggles with Community, School, or Family Rules
A spiritually gifted child is exempt from rules, but the rules must make sense. Teaching rules for the sake of teaching them will lead you nowhere.
It is not the desire to be courteous, but they have a stronger appreciation for pleasantness. They often ponder whether something “feels” correct.
6. Sensitive
Spiritually endowed children are naturally sensitive, especially toward their parents. While sensitivities are a great trait, they might sap a child’s vitality for completely thriving when they attempt to parent.
Be conscious of your child’s sensitivity and appreciate and appreciate it.
Certain odors, noises, and rhythms might be triggering. Instead of pressuring them to dismiss their sensitivity, assist them in finding a way to use their talent in a manner that is not harmful to them.
Do not teach children to desensitize- this may result in undesirable vices or escapism later in life, like using drugs or alcohol and other coping techniques.
7. Talent
Natural and spiritual abilities are limitless. These abilities in music, arithmetic, literature, the arts, and everything in between are standard among spiritually gifted children.
8. Beyond Their Years of Knowledge
Take the time to listen intently. Your kid may possess a spiritual dimension of comprehension that extends beyond their intellect or perhaps this globe. As a parent, you must inquire about your child’s spiritual and physical understanding.
9. Reading
Children who like reading, regardless of their speed or slowness and dyslexia, might be deemed talented. They like the opportunity to connect with the knowledge and energy they get.
Reading may also refer to different methods of acquiring knowledge, and each person will have their unique method of obtaining the information they want.
10. Intense Personal Reflection
Gifted children are adamant about changing immediately, with no excuses for habits, routines, or ways of doing things.
This kind of reflection is akin to binary mathematics- you have either made or have not made changes. When things are in harmony, your kid accepts them as they are.
They will be candid in pointing out where you are out of harmony with yourself, and they will do it out of love, not cruelty or disobedience.
11. Questions
These children comprehend how to focus on a single subject using a well-constructed inquiry. Although they are straightforward, these questions are intelligent and potent.
Straightforwardness is not synonymous with rivalry or argumentation. A spiritually gifted child wants you to comprehend what they are communicating.
12. Curiosity
Children are naturally interested, but spiritually endowed children use their curiosity to learn. They are adamant about recognizing what is lacking in their worldview.
They are unsatisfied with short or vague responses to their inquiries due to their unique sense of concentration.
When Do Children Develop Spirituality?
Children develop spirituality at the age of 6-7. This is the age that a child learns from their environment and tries to make sense of things.
When the child crosses this stage, there is more concrete spiritual development. Such development is more prevalent in households that are religious or spiritual.
By this age, a child who is spiritually evolving will start to take part in spiritual practices. If not, they will show positive inclinations towards the same.
The child becomes increasingly concerned with energy, power, and more. They no longer need symbols to understand things. They are now more cognitively and spiritually developed.
Another aspect of this age is that parents have to be active at this time. This is a crucial stage for the spiritual development of the child.
Parents can either positively contribute to the process of spiritual growth or be an obstacle in their child’s spiritual journey. It is up to parents to decide the rituals, words, and environment that the child will be exposed to.
What is the Importance of Spiritual Upbringing?
A spiritually rooted child understands nature’s workings. They develop a happy mind and a strong disposition. They do not falter under peer pressure and show innate compassion towards others.
Being spiritual makes a child form harmony between mind, body, and soul. They won’t be easily disturbed by life challenges and can freely and positively create the life they want.
Final Thoughts
Bringing up spiritually rooted children enables them to develop their innate abilities to achieve their highest potential. They’ll be able to learn from their past, live in the present, and positively anticipate their future to live life to the fullest.
And while it’s important to impart spirituality to your children, it’s also important to ask for their consent first and ensure that your spiritual journey together will be that of equal volition.
Discover More About Spirituality
Guides
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- Esoteric Spirituality: An Introduction
- Shinto Spirituality: Everything You Need To Know
- Spiritual Awakening: The Complete Guide
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- Spiritual Confusion: What It Is, Causes & How To Overcome It
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- Spiritual Grounding: A Quick Guide
- Spiritual Health: A Comprehensive Guide
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- Spiritual Meditation (A Guide to Strengthen Your Spirit)
- Spiritual Resilience: The Skill to Overcome Hardships
- The Divine Feminine (A Complete Insight and Ways to Unlock It)
- What Is Spirituality? Your Complete Guide
How To
- 12 Ways To Attain Spiritual Maturity
- 13 Ways to Spiritually Cleanse Yourself
- 7 Healthy Ways to Deal With Anger
- 9 Ways to Spiritually Connect With Nature (A Quick Read)
- How To Be Spiritually Minded (Your Complete Guide To Spiritual Mindedness)
- How to Become A Spiritual Person (23 Ways & 7 Signs)
- How To Build Your Meditation Garden (An Easy Guide)
- How To Connect With The Universe (Everything You Need To Know)
- How To Form A Deeper Connection With God
- How to Heal Your Sacral Chakra (A Quick Guide)
- How to Incorporate Anglican Spirituality In Your Life (A Quick Guide)
- How to Lead a Spiritual Life: 13 Steps and Benefits
- How to Raise a Spiritual Child (Complete Tips and Signs for Parents)
- How To Remove Someone From Your Life (Signs and Ways to Break Free from Toxic Relationships)
- How to Spiritually Attract Money (A Complete Guide)
Signs
Questions
- God Loves The Broken: How Does Spiritual Brokenness Bring Us Closer to God?
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- How Does Spirituality Affect The Lives of Millennials? (A Quick Read)
- What Does ‘I am with You in Spirit’ Mean? (Explained)
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