Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Karen Marie Yust teaches Christian education and spiritual formation at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. She is the mother of three children and an ordained minister with dual standing in the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). She served eleven years as a parish pastor and conducts workshops on children and spirituality around the world.

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Foster a Life-Sustaining Faith in Your Child

"With gentle wisdom grounded in solid theology and child development theory, Karen Marie Yust provides parents practical ways to help their kids grow in faith. I highly recommend it."
Michele Borba, author, Building Moral Intelligence, and No More Misbehavin

"Real Kids, Real Faith is thoughtful and practical, affirming and challenging, steeped in traditions and grounded in contemporary life. By avoiding pat answers on the one hand and abstract philosophy on the other, Karen Marie Yust offers the inspiration and tools needed to nurture life-shaping faithfulness in children."
From the Foreword by Eugene C. Roehlkepartain, director, Family and Congregation Initiatives, Search Institute

"This is the most balanced and useful guide to the spiritual growth of children that I know. Written by a wise professor and loving mother, this book will enrich the spiritual lives of children as it deepens the spiritual lives of parents."
Don Browning, University of Chicago and author, Marriage and Modernization

"Parents interested in how children incorporate a spiritual worldview will find this book illuminating. Drawing on child psychology, anthropological and theological perspectives on acculturation, and development of a spiritual system, Karen Marie Yust offers an explicit understanding of how children can be encouraged to incorporate spirituality into their lives. Personal anecdotes help to illustrate her insights."
Cyndie White, comanager, Harvard University Office of Work/Life and Family Resources

Aus dem Klappentext

In a culture that has lost touch with love, compassion, and meaning, how can parents be intentional about building a spiritual foundation for their children s development? In looking to their own upbringing for guidance, parents often feel even more at a loss. They don t want to make the same mistakes their parents did, so they either become too strict, or they take a completely hands-off approach.

A pastor, teacher, and mother, Karen Marie Yust offers a refreshing array of resources and provisions to guide and sustain parents and children on their mutual journey. Drawn from a three-year study of children s spirituality as well as the best in theological tradition and literature, Real Kids, Real Faith provides insight and a variety of helpful tips for nurturing children s spiritual and religious formation. Yust challenges the prevailing notion that children are unable to grasp religious concepts and encourages parents to recognize children as capable of genuine faith.

In addition to its wealth of practical advice on how to engage children in authentic faith practice, Real Kids, Real Faith helps parents identify their own important role in a child s deepening life of faith. This book forges a path for a child s spiritual life and invites parents to share the journey.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Real Kids, Real Faith

Jossey-Bass

Introduction

Maya Angelou has a wonderful poem in her collection I Shall Not be Moved that reads,

Midwives and winding sheets know birthing is hard and dying is mean, and living's a trial in between. Why do we journey, muttering like rumors among the stars? Is a dimension lost? Is it love?

The sentiment expressed and questions posed by this poem characterize the perspectives and musings of many of us. We are afraid that our contemporary culture has lost touch with love and compassion. In varied ways, we are wondering, what is the nature of life in our time and place? Have we lost touch with what might nurture and sustain us in our living? What might that sustaining force be? How do we connect with this force? These are spiritual questions that shape our adult lives because we do not want to be wandering through the trials of life without a sense of belonging and purpose. And for those of us who live and work with children, these are questions we ask on behalf of our children, hoping to spare them some of our own doubts and misgivings about life and its meaning. Thus we set out on a journey in search of meaning for ourselves and the children we love, looking around us for resources and provisions to guide and sustain us on our way.

A Search for Resources to Guide Us

Finding resources can be more difficult than we first imagine. Our culture professes to love children, and our businesses market numerous products to parents and children that they claim are necessary for a "good" childhood. We have "Happy Meals" and Big Comfy Couch; we have digital cameras for recording each developmental milestone and video devices for spying on the babysitter. We can buy classic children's books like The Cat in the Hat; Little Women; Robinson Crusoe; and Good Night, Moon, and put them on our children's shelves alongside contemporary favorites like Tomie de Paola's Strega Nona and the Harry Potter books. Disney videos abound for our children's entertainment; they've been joined by Veggie Tales and the film industry's myriad "family entertainment" flicks. But few of these products help us or our children explore the bigger questions in life. We know that the happiness promised in a Happy Meal is fleeting, that we can't remain sequestered in comfortable places, that images captured electronically don't tell the whole story, that books don't explain everything we want to know about our lives, and that movies provide more of an escape from reality than a full engagement with the problems we encounter. Our children experience heartache, frustration, and confusion as well. Both we and they need something more in our lives than the stuff and the fantasies that companies want to sell us. We want to find a more nurturing and dependable source of purpose and meaning. And then we want to establish a connection with this source that will endure throughout our lives and the lives of our children.

Sometimes we suspect that our children are more attuned to such a source than we are ourselves. We applaud their innocence and purity and wish that we could regain their rather charming navet. At other times, we deplore their childishness, wondering what monster has taken over our child's body as we attempt to cope with tantrums, biting, stubborn defiance, and other commonplace childhood events. Life today is such that we want our children to be both innocent and sophisticated, both compassionate and competitive. We know that society judges children primarily by their cognitive abilities. We agree, at least in part, with society's intense focus on containing and channeling children's energies and interests into a productive adult life. We tend to assume, because it is what we've been taught, that childhood today is a training period for "real" life and that children's development is the most important purpose of parenting and teaching children. But training for some future life as an adult is not necessarily the primary purpose of childhood, although it is a very real aspect of children's lives.

If we ask ourselves whether we've lost touch with something that might nurture and sustain human lives, we have an opportunity to shift our thinking away from developmental models of adult-child interactions to models of nurture and sustenance that value both the moment and children as they are in the moment. We can imagine creating places and ways for children to encounter that which sustains their living, however we might define it. We can embark on a spiritual journey with children, both teaching them and learning from them along the way.

Anne Lamott has a chapter in her book Traveling Mercies titled, "Why I Make Sam Go to Church." Sam is Lamott's son, and he is less than enthusiastic about churchgoing. But Lamott writes that she still requires him to go because

I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say, a path and a little light to see by. Most of the people I know who have what I want-which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy-are people with a deep sense of spirituality. They are people in community, who pray, or practice their faith; they are Buddhists, Jews, Christians-people banding together to work on themselves and for human rights. They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something beautiful.

Anne Lamott makes a point that I think is crucial to our understanding of children and spirituality. Our spiritual lives are something we discover and explore as part of a community of faithful people seeking to act in ways consistent with their values. This community can be as small as a household or as large as the major religious traditions of the world. But whatever its size, it is essential to our children's spiritual formation and their acquisition of a language and rituals that help them to identify and express their values and beliefs.

For over a decade, I have been talking with parents and other adults about what they hope for children and children's spirituality. As I've listened to participants in my research projects, parenting workshops, and congregations, these are some of the dreams I've heard expressed:

"Maybe the most important thing [for children] is acceptance for who you are." Children need something "to fall back on" in difficult times. "I want my kids to get positive role models and positive influences from other `good' kids. I want them to learn [in church] the things they don't get in school: how to be a good person, a caring person, and to treat others with respect-to learn to discern who are good kids to play with and who to avoid." Children need "experience in leadership." Give children "a good place to hang out"-one that is safe and free of negative influences. Adults need to provide "a broad sense of religion." Children should have a "tremendous sense of community" that provides a "feeling of extended family." Children need socialization in "basic principles," for example, fairness, acceptance, equal opportunity.

These are good dreams for children. They point to the fact that...