Spirituality Is Key To Kids' Happiness, Study Suggests

Spirituality Is Key To Kids' Happiness, Study Suggests 
"To make children happier, we may need to encourage them to develop a strong sense of personal worth, according to Dr. Mark Holder from the University of British Columbia in Canada and his colleagues Dr. Ben Coleman and Judi Wallace. Their research shows that children who feel that their lives have meaning and value and who develop deep, quality relationships - both measures of spirituality - are happier. It would appear, however, that their religious practices have little effect on their happiness. These findings have been published in the online edition of Springer's Journal of Happiness Studies.
Both spirituality (an inner belief system that a person relies on for strength and comfort) and religiousness (institutional religious rituals, practices and beliefs) have been linked to increased happiness in adults and adolescents. In contrast, very little work has been done on younger children. In an effort to identify strategies to increase children's happiness, Holder and colleagues set out to better understand the nature of the relationship between spirituality, religiousness and happiness in children aged 8 to 12 years. A total of 320 children, from four public schools and two faith-based schools, completed six different questionnaires to rate their happiness, their spirituality, their religiousness and their temperament. Parents were also asked to rate their child's happiness and temperament.
The authors found that those children who said they were more spiritual were happier. In particular, the personal (i.e. meaning and value in one's own life) and communal (i.e. quality and depth of inter-personal relationships) aspects of spirituality were strong predictors of children's happiness. Spirituality explained up to 27 percent of the differences in happiness levels amongst children.
A child's temperament was also an important predictor of happiness. In particular, happier children were more sociable and less shy. The relationship between spirituality and happiness remained strong, even when the authors took temperament into account. However, counter intuitively, religious practices - including attending church, praying and meditating - had little effect on a child's happiness.
According to the authors, "enhancing personal meaning may be a key factor in the relation between spirituality and happiness." They suggest that strategies aimed at increasing personal meaning in children - such as expressing kindness towards others and recording these acts of kindness, as well as acts of altruism and volunteering - may help to make children happier."

No More Yelling

http://www.qualitytimewithyourkids.com/
"People retain many behaviors that we experience in childhood in the neural patterning of our brains.

The memories of these behaviors stick with us and can have the tendency to be come more pronounced as we become parents. Since most habitual behaviors create neural patterning in the human brain, the strategies from the dominant paradigm, like yelling, are often unconscious and not always the conscious choice of the parent.

The dominant paradigm of being, behaving and parenting is often what parents will resort to during times of emotional stress be cause it’s what they know.

When a parent begins to practice the Simple Directions along with the meditation that’s in our member area HERE, she is actually re-patterning her brain towards more peaceful parenting strategies and away from older, dominant strategies like yelling.

And, as a parent shifts her parenting strategies, then guess what happens with her child?

The child shifts too because your child is modeling you in every moment. So no more yelling for a parent means a decrease in yelling for the child.

And, don’t you just love a peaceful home?"

"You can shift any pattern in your life at any time and that you have an incredible power within your mind that naturally wants to move towards love, connection, abundance and support."

"Find fulfillment and gratification, while happily embracing an authentic, honest and real approach to the challenges that all of us face. "

Jolette Jai, founder of The Quantum Mindshift Process and Peace of Mind Parenting (PeaceofMindParenting.com), is a passionate mom, writer, and motivational speaker who inspires you to break any cycles of shame, blame, manipulation, or any form of physical, mental or emotional abuse left over from your past or the way you were parented so that you can be confident, connected, abundant and radiant right now.

Throughout Jolette’s programs, parents develop deep listening, empathy, and loving speech so that they can guide their children to learn unconditional ways to express their feelings and needs and to resolve their problems.

Kiva Leatherman is a radio host, speaker and innovator in the new paradigm of women, motherhood and business. Her presentations on women and investing laid the groundwork for what eventually became Wise Workshops and her personal mission to ensure that women are self-reliant with their resources of time, money, intellectual capacity and worth. She teaches women to create a framework for success which gives them the power and freedom to live well and to stop living vicariously through others.