Children Spiritual Development and its Utilization in Health: a Review Study

Over the past decades, the growing awareness of spirituality has increasingly raised the interest of clinical professionals to work in this area. An issue that has not been properly addressed is the importance of understanding spirituality in childhood.The aim of this study was to obtain an accurate understanding of spiritual development of children and its application in the field of health This integrated review was performed using Broome method. Databases of SID, IranMedex, Google Scholar, Medline, Scopus, Elsevier, PubMed, Science direct and ProQuest were used to find related articles. About 984 extracted studies and finally 30 studies were used. Fowler has introduced the stage of faith development. In his theory, faith stages are: intuitive-projective, mythic-literal, synthetic-conventional, individuative-reflective, conjunctive faith and universalizing faith. Results obtained by Coles have been indicative of a natural tendency toward spirituality, which originates from the innate sense of curiosity and fascination of discovering the world. Therefore, this type of tendency is observed from the early stages of life. Theory of “relational consciousness” is proposed by Hay and Nye, according to which all children have innate spirituality. It’s developed capacity for awareness toward relationship with self, others, the world and a greater power. From the mentioned study, three spiritual sensitivity or consciousness were obtained, including feeling of alertness and awareness, a sense of mystery and sense of value. Bradford introduced the fourth branch of spiritual sensitivity to be the social dimension. Gardner was the first scholar who presented the theory of multiple intelligences and introduced spirituality as intelligence. Zohar and Marshall explained that spiritual showing the most appropriate path. Intelligence can give deeper meanings to life of people by showing the most appropriate path. Growing results of researches shows that spirituality has a significant impact on human physical, psychological and mental health. Despite the fact that the theory of Fowler, in which neurological development processes including cognitive knowledge and logical thinking are the main focus of concepts of spirituality in the science of medicine, review of other studies have demonstrated that new perspectives can be used to understand the spirituality of children and have more effects in Providing child health.