Teaching children about religion, spirituality, themselves, and others: The role of faith‐based recreational activities

Abstract

A wealth of research has examined children's participation in organized extracurricular recreational activities, detailing rates and types of participation and relationships with academic and psychosocial functioning. However few empirical efforts have explored children's participation in faith‐based recreational activities. This study obtained information, through questionnaires and interviews, from 590 parents of kindergarten through fifth grade children about their child's participation in faith‐based organized recreational activities, including why they enrolled their child, and the beneficial outcomes that they perceived accrued to the child from participating. The findings revealed the unique nature of faith‐based recreational activities in promoting children's religious and spiritual development, and in parents’ perceptions that such participation contributes to the development of desired intra‐ and inter‐personal characteristics in their child. Data were further partitioned to explore sex and/or grade (kindergarten through fifth) differences, and few were detected.