Children, Spirituality and Happiness...

 

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

I'm an atheist. That being said, a new study (which I haven't read, I can't find it, I've seen reports but I don't think it has been published) seems to show that spirituality has a significant positive effect on the subjective well-being of children. Don't send your kids to Jesus Camp just yet. Keep in mind, this study seems to show that spirituality has a relatively enormous positive effect on the subjective well-being of children, not religiosity, so you might consider teaching your children the lessons of the Buddha before you ship 'em to a madrasah. This study doesn't examine the long term effects of spirituality on the subjective well-being of children but it has been shown over and over again that spirituality and religiosity do in fact (for one reason or another) have a small but significant positive influence on the subjective well-being of adults and it should be noted that the Character Strengths and Virtues handbook lists spirituality as a character strength/virtue.

                                                                                        Excelsior!

                                                                                        C.L.Sosis

Comments

[Kate Hawkins]

Either people's views on spirituality vary more than they used to or they just feel a stronger need to discuss it, but this is definitely an interesting topic that I’ve come across a lot lately. I have encountered articles that discuss the question of whether involving religion in the upbringing of a child is more beneficial than not, but I think you have introduced a much more relevant argument by bringing spirituality into the picture as well. There is a difference between spirituality and religiosity, and when speaking in terms of a large population, such as ‘children’ and their upbringing, it is important to identify that difference and consider both as comparable practices to no religion/spirituality at all. Barbara Fredrickson, the author of an article you provided as a link in this entry, says that subjective wellbeing can be measured by tracking the momentary good and bad feelings that an individual has, and that positive emotions (good feelings) are the ones that serve as an active ingredient to wellbeing. Four of the main positive emotions; joy, interest, contentment and gratitude; are feelings that encourage one to expand their thoughts and pursue greater life experiences. Okay, so if it is known that positive emotions are the key ingredient to keeping your children happy and healthy, you’re going to be in search of ways to release those emotions; perhaps even belief systems that set up a method to practice them and maintain a subjective wellbeing. Spirituality goes hand in hand with this, because the belief of a greater meaning in life, perhaps life after death, or the existence of a higher power that cares for your highest good holds many ties to positive emotions. Individuals who are actively involved in their religion also benefit because as Fredrickson mentioned, public religious participation/practices evoke many positive emotions, as people are working together in a group. However, because religion includes a set of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’, it is also capable of evoking negative emotions. Religion is more of a structured, committal option than spirituality and can involve judgment, rules, etc. that hold the child back from exploring life from different angles. So overall, I would agree that spirituality (more than religiosity) has a largely positive effect on the subjective wellbeing of children because it teaches them to express their positive emotions and leads to a broader, happier mindset that most parents aim for their children to achieve as adults. But, if those positive emotions can be reached and expressed in other ways to the balance that is needed for a child to be happy, then it may not be necessary. Having said that I’m ‘for spirituality’, I can also say that I believe that somewhere ‘out there,’ a higher power exists. This benefits me when something unfortunate in my life occurs because I can depend on a higher good to figure out the reason why it did instead of stressing over it myself. I find that I am generally less angry and pessimistic about the future than someone who only buys into what they see with their own eyes. When I find comfort in ‘What goes around comes around,’ or ‘God has His reasons,’ I’m okay with them calling me a sucker for the fortune cookie problem because I’m happier and saving myself a lot of worry and mental energy than they, a strict ‘realist.’

[Jeffrey Kahn]

After reading the article “Children, Spirituality, and Happiness”, based on the idea that spirituality has a significant positive effect on the subjective well-being of children, many interesting points come to mind. First off, the “New Study” that USA Today wrote regarding the well being of children and the fact that spirituality leads to happiness, is completely unrepresentative of the population of children. In this randomized study, there were not enough children to make a conclusion that spirituality causes happiness in all children. I believe that if the study included 10,000 children in the world who were smiling, laughing, feeling happy, and performed a retrospective study. In this study you could have a control group of children who weren’t happy, and children who were happy for the experimental group, and analyze to see if spirituality causes that happiness in the experimental group. Although this study is more conclusive, you still have to worry about confounding factors such as McDonalds® being introduced, causing the happiness to occur in the children.
After evaluating this study, which confused me because were the children Canadian that they tested or were they children from around the world. Also, the study was performed in Canada, written by a USA newspaper, so where was the study group selected from. Relating this back to the main point, it is still inconclusive that spirituality causes happiness in children. After viewing the “Jesus Camp” video, you really get a sense of how much brain washing parents do in order to get their kids to go to “Jesus Camp”. I believe that this phenomenon starts from the parents’ belief that they have to instill their religious views into their children’s mind. So, concluding that spirituality leads to happiness from these videos is speculation because these children “flock together like birds of a feather”, meaning that these children tend to associate themselves with other children of their same religious belief. Like it was mentioned in this article, this is more a form of religiosity rather than spirituality. For instance, the kid in the picture has a “Reece’s Pieces” shirt with the word “Jesus” replacing the logo. I believe that these kids haven’t made their own choices, rather their parents have implanted this idea that their religion will lead to happiness. From this video I got the impression that social factors lead to unrepresentative biased information.
Teaching our children the lessons of Buddha would be a good, but making sure there are alternative beliefs out there and it should ultimately be the child’s decision of what to believe in or not to believe at all. Although parents think that forcing their children into a religious belief is the right thing to do, it causes biased information from the child because we don’t see if the child is happy because of the religiosity or happy because it is almost over. What is conclusive is that children need to be able to experience many different views on religion and then when they are old enough to fall into the traps of mental accounting, then they are old enough to choose their religious belief.
So, it still has not been proven that spirituality leads to happiness in children, which brings me to my final point. Some people might get satisfaction from church or temple, but it seems more of a fortune cookie problem than anything. Since there is no experience to disconfirm our beliefs that children should mirror image their parent’s religious views, it leads to a misconception. I think that every person at one time or another will feel happiness, so it is hard to say that spirituality necessarily causes happiness in children. The whole idea that spirituality causes this happiness in children is vague because no real tests have been done to conclude this claim. Therefore, until we really test subjects without biased information, social factors, and confounding issues, we will never have a decisive answer.

[William Douglas]

Children, Spirituality and Happiness…

Arguments aim to give you reason to believe something is true. There are no good reasons in this study to believe why
spirituality is a strong positive influence on the happiness of children. Mainly this is due to the fact that the blogger did not include the full study with data to back up the causal claim. You shouldn’t have posted the article on your blog to begin with Clifford. This is a bad argument that didn’t give good reasons to believe something. However even a bad argument can lead to a true conclusion. I do personally believe that spirituality plays a positive role in children’s lives. However I also believe that as an intellectually honest person you shouldn’t make a claim without relevant evidence substantiating that claim.

The argument is based on a sample. A sample of 315 children aged 9 to 12, measuring spirituality and other factors such as temperament and social relations
that can affect an individual’s sense of happiness. The strength of an argument based on samples depends on how representative the sample is of the entire
population. The amount of children used is relatively small. This short cut could be ok if the people conducting the study were knowledgeable about the population. Since there was no specific data included it is possible this was an unrepresentative sample, due to the small sample size and lack of information on whether it was selected randomly or not.

There may have been a problem of hidden data. There doesn’t seem to have been a control condition. We don’t know what would have happened if spiritualism was altogether absent within the sample. Ideally a controlled experiment would be setup as follows. The causal claim is that spiritualism causes a significantly positive impact on children’s sense of happiness. Next, one would set up a control group without spiritual kids and an experimental group with spiritual kids. Then it would be observed if there was a difference between the groups when it comes to a sense of happiness. A randomized experimental study would be too impractical because you can’t just introduce spiritualism to the experimental group. There are too many moral and practical difficulties. A more realistic study would be a prospective study in which an experimental population of children aged 9-12 whom are spiritual are matched to a control population of children of the same age who are not spiritual. This fixes the morality problem with a randomized study. However then there is no longer a random selection. There is an increased risk for confounding factors. There could be important relevant ways that the control and experimental groups might be different. One could also try a retrospective study in which a population of children who are spiritual and have an above average sense of happiness are matched to a control population of children who are spiritual but do not have an elevated sense of happiness. Look for a variable that appears in the experimental population but not the control population. However this study also will be vulnerable to confounding factors since we know that the populations differ.

Without proper data and detailed analysis of what type of study was conducted on these children, all that is offered is an easy explanation. It gives the readers
a false sense of understanding because you are offering an explanation for how these children are behaving. Consider the opposite. If something else occurred, such as spiritual children being more unhappy then their counterparts, could you have explained that too? Could you have predicted the results of the original study before it even happened?

The study was given to us second hand by a blogger. The testimony of the researches was sharpened in that the main point of the children’s spirituality positively affecting their happiness was emphasized. Their testimony was leveled by the blogger in that the context and details of the study and data were de emphasized or ignored. Otherwise why was the causal claim posted without any significant study to back it up? Either the data was ignored or couldn’t be found. In either case the study should never have been posted online. Clifford is no expert and that is one of the few circumstances in which testimony without proper data is to be accepted. In this case it seems he is
concerned more with entertainment by posting the unsupported causal claim on his blog.

[Sue]

Hi, Im from Melbourne in the make believe land of Oz. Please check out What To Remember To Be Happy at:

http://www.dabase.org/happytxt.htm