A child is not merely a little person who learns or an entity who feels the pull of attachment from caretakers; a child is also an interdependent mean- ing maker. This latter notion may sound strange, and even in psychological circles this has not been a typical way of talking about children. Apparently it has been assumed that children are mere receivers of meanings from oth- ers.
The cognitive– developmental and learning– socialization models seem compelling upon first learning them. This is because, for example, children obviously acquire knowledge and skills by learning (a child who grows up speaking Chinese does not automatically know Russian), and their mental and sensory– motor skills take time to develop (thus, a 2-year-old commu- nicates but not yet in well- articulated sentences, as he or she will by the age of 6). But research conducted in the wake of a half century of behav- iorist and cognitive- developmental thinking about the processes by which children become adolescents and adults seems to be leading to a model of children’s mentality different from those of the past. The child is no longer thought of as a mere logical thought box that automatically goes
“up” a series of stages of mental capability, nor as an initially empty vessel that becomes only what it has been taught to become based on reinforce- ment and modeling. That is, the classic versions of the cognitive– develop- mental and social learning models, although not necessarily incorrect, are inadequate to explain the full gamut of what developing children actually do. They are incomplete even when softened by attachment theory and its accent on interpersonal relationships at an early age.
The cognitive- developmental and social learning views, no matter how insightful they are and how clear and logical they appear to be, cannot
be the whole story. Perhaps children’s religious and spiritual development might proceed along the lines proposed by those views if they were raised in a world in which they were confronted with only those problems that would goad their cognitive systems to step up to the next level, or a world in which the only factors determining their behavior were those stimulus cues and reinforcers sufficient to shape and sustain the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors desired by those who control the reinforcers. But such a sanitized environment is imaginary. In the real (and modern) world, the number of factors that can affect someone is, in principle, infinite. And it is in the real world that real children develop.
The key to understanding children’s religious and spiritual develop- ment hinges on the interdependence of factors including culture, family, and so forth—an idea rooted in a blend of evolutionary psychology (Tooby
& Cosmides, 1992) and cultural psychology (Saroglou & Cohen, 2013)—
the most important of which is the child himself or herself. The result is a picture far more complicated than the past views taken alone, with far greater emphasis on what the child brings to and does in the transactions with those other factors. Thus the meanings (whether religious, spiritual, or otherwise) that get made are not merely inside the minds of the chil- dren. They are a function of interactive processes and undergo continual appraisal that results in their reinstatement or modification (Bruner, 1990;
Park, 2010).
New knowledge suggests that we need to broaden our picture of a child’s developing mind, and that doing so can be enriched by taking interdependent meaning system processes into account. As noted in the Prelude to Part II, when children see, learn, intuit, implement, remember, and imagine, they make meanings. But these meanings are created not by them alone, but in their engagement with others in their family and cul- tural context. Children also appraise incoming information against the (as yet incomplete) overall meaning system that is partway through the pro- cess of developing, and can either adjust or reinforce it in accord with that appraisal.
The Contextual Nature of Belief
I said in Chapter 1 that believing is a process, not a static state, and that a belief is a meaning made. But engaging in processes of believing (Seitz &
Angel, 2012, 2014, call them creditions, analogous to emotions) is some- thing children do whether adults influence them to do so or not. This leads to the question of whether a child is “born to believe,” that is, ready to engage in the process of believing. The answer is yes, but not quite in the sense that those who favor religious believing might wish.
The evidence suggests that a child’s mind does not automatically or mechanically do only what the classical cognitive– developmental models
suggest. Consistent with the classical views, a child’s mind at age 3 does not work the same way that it does at age 8. But neither does it always fol- low in stepwise fashion the strict rational logic of the stage models. Chil- dren’s minds do things not predicted by the cognitive– developmental or the learning– socialization views. They instead do things in addition to them, not necessarily always instead of them (Barrett, 2012; Boyatzis, 2005;
Richert & Granqvist, 2013). What are some of these things and how do we make psychological sense of them?
Children of preschool age seem to find it easy to believe in many things, including gods, spirits, ghosts, and other invisible beings, to all of whom are attributed the property of agency, meaning that they can choose, decide, and cause things to happen. Preschool children easily believe in nonphysi- cal agents (Barrett, 2012). They can also, for example, look at a computer screen that portrays a triangle and a square in motion and appears to show the square being “chased” by the triangle, and use language that indicates that they think the triangle is trying to catch the square and that the square is trying to get away from it. That is, children can make attributions of agency to objects that have no agency. These findings seem to demonstrate that a child’s mind comes into the world preset to believe . . . something.
Does it have to be “religious” or “spiritual” things? No. No one comes into the world designed to believe any specific doctrine, theology, or alter- native teaching (no matter how true, obvious, or “natural” doing so may seem to adult believers). Such outcomes are left to the influence of fam- ily, peer groups, culture, and the like. Children are not born to believe in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hindu, atheism, or anything else in particu- lar. Thus the meaning of those teachings, doctrines, and practices that the parents may so earnestly want their children to accept (or to disdain) in the same way that the parents do, cannot be delivered to the children in the form held by the parents. Children have their own minds that make their own meanings out of the information that enters their system; and what- ever that becomes is unique to them.
One explanation for a child’s propensity to infer agency even when he or she cannot see a real agent can be captured in a clever concept that Barrett (2004) developed, call the hypersensitive agency detection device (HADD). There is no actual device in the brain, so please keep in mind that this is just catchy shorthand for a neural process; its workings are not in the slightest way mechanical even though the word device is part of the phrase.
But this concept conveys the idea that the human cognitive system comes prepared to easily infer agency under certain circumstances of ambiguity.
Take the rabbit in a clearing, described in the Prelude to Part II. We can use the HADD concept as a shorthand way of saying that upon hearing the leaves rustle at the edge of the clearing, the rabbit’s mind has evolved to infer a dangerous agent behind the bush whose intent is to enjoy a rabbit dinner. Thus, the rabbit runs away and stays alive regardless of whether or
not there was any dangerous agent in any one instance. The rabbit, like the human in analogous circumstances, is in the long run better off intuiting that there is. Overall, as Barrett (2012) put it, “Regardless of culture and without need for coercive indoctrination, children develop with a propen- sity to seek meaning and understanding of their environments” (p. 9).
Theory of mind (ToM) is a phrase that refers to the tendency to infer that others’ behavior is due to things such as beliefs, desires, and intentions that are located inside their minds. For example, if Person A invites Person B to a Sabbath evening meal and you are an uninformed observer, ToM might suggest that you would infer that Person A’s mind contains positive thoughts about B, that A desires that others present at the meal meet B, and that A believes B is a friend. Thus, your mind explains Person A’s behav- ior by attributing certain contents to his or her mind—a meaning- making process.
Within the ToM framework, agents need not be visible any more than people need to be visible in order for a viewer to believe that they are there.
In fact, we all believe other people are there even though we don’t always see them. It is evolutionarily natural for humans to have developed this automatic tendency to believe that entities not immediately seen neverthe- less exist, just as it is for human and nonhuman primates to have evolved the capability to remember that the food they have saved for later is still there even though they cannot see it at the moment.
ToM research with children who have invisible friends also suggests that children attribute agency to beings they cannot see. Wigger, Paxon, and Ryan (2013) explored whether children ages 3–8 would, when given three different problems to solve, attribute knowledge to their imaginary companion, God, a human, and a dog. The 3-year-old children (those with the least ToM capability) were more likely to attribute knowledge to all four agents. The 4-year-old children (with emerging ToM) began to see the agents differently, attributing different degrees of knowledge to them, and viewing God and humans differently. The oldest children, who had developed robust ToM, were more likely to attribute knowledge to God maximally, as a kind of super- knowledge, compared to the dog, human, and imaginary companion. In general, the imaginary companion seemed to occupy a position between God and the human and dog.
Does the finding that children from ages 3–8 attribute knowledge to invisible agents mean that the meaning they are making is true and accu- rate? Not necessarily. One way to explain why the youngest children are more likely to attribute knowledge to all agents, putting humans, God, a dog, and an imaginary companion on the same plane, is that they tend to overapply rules. Or perhaps they are overgeneralizing based on intuiting their own inner experience and perceptions. In fact, children may use reli- gious and spiritual language before they really understand or appreciate the full meaning of what they are saying. At a certain stage during language
development, children learn rules for how to use certain words (e.g., add- ing -ed to the end of a word for the past tense), and they overuse them. A child’s mental operations are using the rule even when it does not work.
For example, a child may say she “runned” (instead of ran) or he “goed”
(instead of went). When a 4-year-old learns the New Testament story about Jesus dying, being buried, and then being alive, he or she may wonder how Jesus could be alive and dead at the same time. Asking a parent “How can Jesus be both dead and alive?” may represent the simple mental operation of overapplying a rule. However, when a 25-year-old student of philoso- phy and biology ponders how Jesus could have been dead and then alive, different mental processes occur, and the person may experience a more profound, multifaceted understanding of death and life. In other words, the same exact language spoken by someone young and someone old may reflect very different cognitive processes. This distinction underscores the developmental process of meaning systems, in which literal meaning gives way to more complex figurative meaning.
Overall, children and adults seem to engage in the process of making attributions of meaning about the contents of others’ minds as an evolution- arily rooted capability, and not only with respect to the behavior of other humans, but also to that of what they imagine to be nonphysical agents of myriad sorts— sometimes invented by themselves but largely introduced to them via their family and subculture, or the larger culture (Bruner, 1990).
Culture and Family Transactions
In some ways the importance of cultural and familial influences on chil- dren’s religious and spiritual development is so obvious that it hardly needs repeating. Even so, some suggest that a child’s mind is preset to think in terms of an invisible supernatural agent in particular, and that this ten- dency is universal. For example, if the question posed to children concerns how the world originated and how the species of plants and animals got here, what would children of different ages and cultures say? The “uni- versal” view predicts that, if given a choice between God and evolution- ary processes, children across various ages would select God and that this response would be the same in different cultures. But the data vary. Some findings suggest that children ages 5–7 show a mixed preference for the view that God created things or that they just happened, and that children between 8 and 10 tend to prefer the creationist explanation (Evans, 2000).
However, those data come from the United States, a country that has a highly religious population even though it is constitutionally secular. In contrast, Smith and Richert (2011) conducted analogous research in China that showed the opposite trend. Chinese children ages 6–14 uniformly endorsed an evolutionary explanation. Overall, this set of findings suggests that the meanings children across the age span give to things in the world
are to be found not only in their developing mental abilities or their culture, but in the interdependent workings of the two.
To carry this idea further, it has been argued that religions are cul- tures (Cohen, 2009). Thus, the degree to which childhood religiousness and spirituality are a function of the interactions between cultures and children’s developing minds would be due to their interdependence with their religious subculture. A prediction follows that even within one larger culture, subcultural differences are to be expected in how children make meaning out of ambiguous issues having to do with religious or spiritual claims. A good example of this is Boyatzis’s (1997) study discussed earlier in this chapter (exploring how preschool children think about the concept
“soul” as applied to furniture, plants, cats and dogs, human babies, chil- dren, and parents). Importantly, there was a relatively unique subcultural difference in this study. There was a small group of Mennonite children from conservative Christian families in rural Pennsylvania who had had little contact with the broader U.S. culture; thus, we should expect that their subculture would be a dominant factor in determining their views.
None of the Mennonite children attributed the property of soul to plants, animals, or furniture, but 88% attributed soul to babies and children and 100% attributed soul to parents.
The implication seems clear that what children think in response to religious and spiritual questions is not only a function of their progress along the path of mental development, but is highly interdependent with their cultural context. And it is those unique meanings, not the child’s state of mental development per se, to which they respond— responses they will cling to or depart from throughout adolescence and the rest of their lives. As Boyatzis (2005) put it, “we must study children growing up in different reli- gions to capture the complexity and variety in children’s religious cognition and ontologies” (p. 131). An implication is that neither the indoctrination nor the total independence views of religion and spirituality in childhood is adequate; the evidence seems to lead to the concept of interdependence.
The interdependence model has an important implication. It is that what a child develops into in terms of his or her religiousness or spirituality is not a matter of unidirectional communication from parents to child but is instead the consequence of bidirectional, mutual give-and-take commu- nication between them (Boyatzis, Dollahite, & Marks, 2006; Boyatzis &
Janicki, 2003; Kuczynski, 2003). In the Boyatzis and Janicki (2003) study, families with children between 3 and 12 years old were asked to keep a diary of all conversations about religion or spirituality for 2 months. The results showed clearly that the communication between parents and chil- dren is bidirectional, with mutual exchange and influence. The parents influenced the children and the children influenced the parents. This find- ing, like others summarized above, suggests a child’s eventual religiousness or lack of it is a function of transactions between him or her and family
such that the thoughts, beliefs, and practice of either party is interdepen- dent with those of the other.
One important line of research on the transactions between par- ents and children concerns what is called parenting style, elaborated and researched by Baumrind (1967, 1991). As reviewed by Hood et al. (2009), she proposed the existence of
Four very different styles of parenting, based on parental responsive- ness and demandingness: “authoritarian,” “authoritative,” “permis- sive,” and “rejecting/neglecting.” Authoritarian parents are high on demandingness but low on responsiveness, preferring to impose rules on their children and emphasize obedience. Authoritative parents tend to be both demanding and responsive, explaining why rules are necessary, and being open to their children’s perspectives. Permissive parents make few demands, use little punishment, and are responsive to the point of submitting to their children’s wishes. Rejecting/neglecting parents are neither demanding nor responsive, being generally disengaged from their children. (p. 90)
Their review is suggestive that an authoritative, but not authoritarian, style of parenting seems to show the greatest probability of facilitating the socially responsible development of children, whether in religious, spiri- tual, or other areas. (See Mahoney, 2010, for a comprehensive review of other research on religion in families.)
Mental Flexibility
In Chapter 4 I explained why “either/or” thinking that leads to “nothing but-ery” is an unnecessarily constricting framework for considering how religious phenomena come to be, because scientific and otherworldly expla- nations are logically orthogonal to each other. The difference between them is that scientific explanations are in principle testable and can therefore be supported or disconfirmed by publicly accessible empirical evidence.
Otherworldly explanations cannot be supported or disconfirmed by such evidence, and therefore must remain in the realm of unverifiability. One thing developmental research suggests is the mental flexibility with which children of various ages can approach trying to understand something that for some adults can be explained only one way (i.e., via either/or thinking, when there is no reason for it). That is, whereas some adults (e.g., those who hold very conservative or fundamentalistic religious views) may insist that either natural processes caused something to happen (e.g., the evolu- tion of humans) or God did it but not both, children can, depending on their cultural context, hold such diverse views at the same time.
For example, Legare and Gelman (2008) examined how children ages 5–15 living in a peri-urban settlement outside of Johannesburg, South