The Development of Religious Experience in Children

Children's understanding of religion: Interviews with Arab-Muslim, Asian-Muslim, Christian and Hindu children aged 5–11 years

“…Three stages of development were shown with children progressing from a global undifferentiated concept of religious identity at round 5 years, to a concrete concept at around 7 years and finally to an abstract understanding of religious identity at 11 years. Similar stage based approaches have been suggested by authors such as Goldman (1964) and Harms (1944).…”

“…The research presented in this paper suggests that a Piagetian approach to this domain which has been taken in previous research (Elkind 1961(Elkind , 1962(Elkind , 1963(Elkind , 1964(Elkind , 1970(Elkind , 1971Goldman, 1964;Harms, 1944) is inappropriate and that future research should look to theories allowing for the effect of religious group membership to partially account for development in this area. Social identity theory (Tajfel, 1979) could be a potentially useful theory in this area, although at present it does not provide an account of development of social identities.…”

Religious and Spiritual Development throughout the Life Span

“…Methodological issues notwithstanding, numerous studies (Bucher, 1994;Hanisch, 1996;Heller, 1986;Nye & Carlson, 1984;Pitts, 1977;Pnevmatikos, 2002) have confirmed the trend described by Harms (1944). On the basis of more than 4800 drawings and conversations, Harms found that children, aged 3 to 6, produced predominantly fairy-tale figures of God, while older children portrayed God in an anthropomorphous manner.…”

Children's God Concepts: Influences of Denomination, Age, and Gender

“…The focus is on eight distinctive Christian groups. Following Harms's (1944) lead, we studied the children's use of three types of symbols: religious (e.g., crosses, stars, altars), nature (e.g., landscapes, animals), and power (e.g., lines or fire, emanating from figures). We also recorded the gender of each representation.…”