Hardwired for Spiritual Connection

"     • Spirituality is an untapped resource in our understanding of human development, resilience and illness, and health and healing. The absence of support for children’s spiritual growth has contributed to alarming rates of childhood and adolescent emotional suffering and behaviors that put them at risk. Knowledge of spiritual development rewrites the contemporary account of spiraling rates of depression, substance abuse, addictive behaviors, and other health concerns.

      • Awareness of spiritual development creates opportunities to prepare teens for the important inner work required for individuation, identity development, emotional resilience, character, meaningful work, and healthy relationships. Spirituality is the central organizing principle of inner life in the second decade, boosting teens into an adulthood of meaning and purpose, thriving, and awareness.

       • Spiritual development through the early years prepares the adolescent to grapple more successfully with the predictably difficult and potentially disorienting existential questions that make adolescence so deeply challenging for teens (and their parents). It also provides a protective health benefit, reducing the risk of depression, substance abuse, aggression, and high-risk behaviors, including physical risk taking and a sexuality devoid of emotional intimacy.

       • Biologically, we are hardwired for spiritual connection. Spiritual development is for our species a biological and psychological imperative from birth. The innate spiritual attunement of young children—unlike other lines of development such as language or cognition—begins whole and designed by nature to prepare the child for decades ahead, including the challenging developmental passage of adolescence.

       • In the first decade of life, the child advances through a process of integrating his or her spiritual “knowing” with other developing capabilities, including cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development, all of which are shaped by interactions with parents, family, peers, and community. Without support and lacking encouragement to keep developing that part of himself, the child’s spiritual attunement erodes and becomes “disaggregated” in the crush of a narrowly material culture.

       • The science of spirituality enables us to see adolescence in a new and more helpful, hopeful light: the universal developmental surge in adolescence, previously viewed as a fraught passage toward physical and emotional maturity, is now understood more fully to also be a journey of essential spiritual search and growth. This developmental phenomenon is seen in every culture, and research shows clinical and genetic evidence for this adolescent surge of spiritual awakening.

       • Parents and children share a parallel developmental arc in which a child’s need and yearning for spiritual exploration coincides with a similar “quest” phase in adult life. For parent and child, meaning and connection often lead to spiritual self-discovery. This mutual impetus means that the adult’s quest phase and the child’s can be mutually awakening and supportive. Our children can be our impetus for spiritual discovery, our muses or guides, and at times the source of illumination."

"There is no question that the parenting journey wears away our ego, but ultimately we are not made less by the exhaustion, tired eyes, worn short-term memory, and endless laundry. Rather, we are so very much more—from our children’s wondrous arrival into our lives to their rounds of questioning and development, when we pay attention and we reflect, we can see great things through their spiritual lens. What if this parenting journey is actually the ultimate spiritual journey? The equivalent to the deep awakening of the isolated monk, the pilgrimage to Mecca or Jerusalem, or the climb up Mount Everest?

I come to this work as a scientist, a clinician, and a parent. I consider each scientific finding to be a bright dot in an Impressionist painting of my journey...I combined aspects of several stories to illustrate a larger idea or paradigm. The voices of children, adolescents, and adults sharing from their own experiences and reflections, including transcendent experiences that rarely are shared, have a prominent place in this book. I have also made practicality a priority, weaving in examples and suggestions for parents throughout the book to enable science and theory to serve them in the most direct possible way: in their everyday interactions with their children and one another.

I am hopeful that these narratives bring science to life so that you can feel the presence and power of spirituality and science and explore its place in your journey. A commitment by all of us to foster children’s spirituality, grounded in science and in our natural love, can truly change our global culture. We will know our nature, and discover before us an opportunity to live in dialogue with our world."

~ Dr. Lisa Miller, The Spiritual Child: The New Science on Parenting for Health and Lifelong Thriving