Abstract

By reviewing and critiquing the research on children’s spirituality, this article considers the implications for how the spiritual overlaps with the moral and religious dimensions of children’s lives and for how these can be nurtured. While how spirituality is defined and understood is elusive, common themes relate to its innateness, the need for descriptions to apply in both religious and other frameworks and the search for identity, meaning, purpose and connectedness. A holistic, cross-curricular approach which seeks to strengthen children’s sense of agency and dispositions such as empathy, kindness and open-mindedness is advocated. This requires reciprocal, trusting relationships in inclusive, hospitable and caring environments which provide time, space and sensitive guidance and modelling. Such an approach, broadly based on virtue ethics, runs counter to current educational and socio-cultural assumptions, such as the emphasis on knowledge acquisition, immediacy and individualism, associated with neo-liberalism and messages from the media.