Assignment task:
Faith development is a delicate process, but I do not believe there has to be development from a young age to have a beautiful relationship with religion. Fowler & Dell map out each stage of development and the connection to faith and how it shapes the social, cultural, and personal foundations for a person (2004). I think if a child is raised in a faith-based home, there is a connection to their journey with religion and their development but not always a healthy one. A parent would not use the same language and concepts to describe religious principles to a three-year-old as they would to their teenager. A child is venerable at certain stages and parents wanting to make religion a forefront in their raising need to do so with caution. The toddler to early childhood stage allows, "...the possibility of aligning powerful religious symbols and images with deep feelings of terror and guilt, as well as of love and companionship. Such possibilities give this stage the potential for forming deep-going and long-lasting emotional and imaginal orientations-for good and for ill" (Fowler & Dell, 2004). This quote emphasizes the power parents have while their child is developing. There are critical moments in a child's life that can impact their future relationships with religion.
I was raised in a Catholic family on paper but not in practice. The Catholic religion references the age of reasoning of seven plus or minus one year (Delany, 1907). Biologically, the brain is at its peak size of 95% by age six (Broderick & Blewitt, 2020). As a child, church and religion were not emphasized in most aspect of my upbringing. I remember having questions about faith and God around the age of seven and my parents answering my questions kindly but with little explanation. In high school, I was told I was going to hell by devote Christians when I said my family did not go to church. This experience was damaging to my faith journey, and I did not begin to reconnect in the faith until later in college. I am thankful that my journey to religion has happened at my pace and with an abundance of questioning and research with little outside influence. I understand the article focused on the interconnectedness of faith and physical development but there are many that do not have any religious guidance during critical phases and still develop healthily and find their own way to religion.