Transformation, Religious

Infancy

The relationship between human growth and religious life begins at birth and is transformed with each new stage of development. The capacity to deal with absent objects (such as a parent who leaves the sight of an infant) develops during infancy, leading to a lifelong search for permanence in a world of change. The concept of God is a universal religious solution to this search.

Childhood

Children apply their normal cognitive (thinking) processes to religious ideas and concepts, and their cognitive developmental level sets the limits for their level of religious thinking. During the early years (ages 2 to 6), stable patterns of knowing are not yet developed, and a child's ability to reason is controlled more by the imagination than by logical thought. Children at this stage of development are, at times, unconcerned with reality, and learn through free experimentation and intuition. Young children do not yet distinguish between fantasy and reality, and tend to think of God in magical terms or concrete terms such as God's being a kind and generous old man with a beard. Such views are often reinforced, and even introduced, by adults, so it is often difficult to say for sure what part of children's beliefs comes from adults, and what part comes from their own minds.

[Page 456]At about age 7, a dramatic shift occurs in a child's reasoning abilities from intuition and imagination to thinking that is concrete (tangible, practical) and based on reality. Children at this stage of development can clearly distinguish between dreams and reality, but cannot yet distinguish between a hypothesis and a fact. At this developmental stage, a child's concept of God/sacred would be based on concrete images or objects such as pictures, icons, and religious books such as the Torah or the Bible.

Older children (ages 7 to 12) understand and embrace concrete images and expressions of religious life because they are only capable of applying their logical reasoning to present concrete objects or events. A religious statue would be an example of a concrete image, and a worship practice such as prayer would be an example of a concrete expression of religious life. Older children also establish a sense of belonging to their religious communities by acceptance of the religious stories, beliefs, symbols, and moral rules that are taken literally (real, based on actual facts).

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