In her article “Creating a Spiritual World for Children to Inhabit,” Karen-Marie Yust talks about children’s formation and the role of practices, rituals, and ideas. She addresses especially how repetition\u00a0enforces learning. She takes a helpful example.<\/p>\n
An African American toddler boy who repeatedly watches cartoon videos in which the “good guys” with light-colored skin always beat the “bad guys” with dark-colored skin concludes from this observation that light-skinned people are good and dark-skinned people are bad. (A Caucasian child comes to a similar conclusion.) When he is four or five and becomes aware of his own skin color, he will likely experience a tension between his sense of himself as good and his cultural observation that dark-colored skin belongs to bad guys. His white peers will also be more likely to label him as bad when trouble erupts on the playground.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This also applies to gender-images. As part of the childhood culture those experiences that they see in “the adult world” are then “played out” or “tried on.” And here comes the connection to the Religious Life.<\/p>\n
When adults act as if religious education is mainly a tool for children’s moral development, children quickly catch on to the irrelevance of religious culture for the grown-up world. They have no incentive for committing themselves to a particular spiritual identity on\u00a0adolescence\u00a0if faith is portrayed by adults as something one shed with childhood.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(The Article appeared in Family Ministry, Vol. 18, No. 4, Winter 2004<\/em>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In her article “Creating a Spiritual World for Children to Inhabit,” Karen-Marie Yust talks about children’s formation and the role of practices, rituals, and ideas. She addresses especially how repetition\u00a0enforces learning. She takes a helpful example. An African American toddler boy who repeatedly watches cartoon videos in which the “good guys” with light-colored skin always … Continue reading Religious Life<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[34,63,95,124,126,147,150,168],"class_list":["post-1722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","tag-community","tag-family","tag-kfumk","tag-racism","tag-relationship","tag-storytelling","tag-teaching","tag-youthwork"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ispeculate.net\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ispeculate.net\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ispeculate.net\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ispeculate.net\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ispeculate.net\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ispeculate.net\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1722\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ispeculate.net\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ispeculate.net\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ispeculate.net\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}