Dev Psych Podcast

Elliot and Joel are exploring the impact of religion on development in early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. They found that parents often want their children to share their religious views, but also prioritize passing down moral values. Studies show that children tend to adopt their parents' religious beliefs regardless of how important it is to the parent. The age groups of early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence were chosen because they are stages of brain development and moral formation. In early childhood, children are highly receptive to religious teachings. In middle childhood, children develop reasoning skills that deepen their understanding of religious values. In adolescence, brain development influences emotions and thinking, which can lead to questioning and solidifying religious beliefs. Media, such as movies like The Lion King, can also depict moral development accurately. Hi, my name is Elliot Hammond. My name is Joel Harvickson, and the topic we decided that we wanted to look into is what the impact of religion is on development in early childhood, middle childhood, and in adolescence. As for why we picked this topic and why we think it's worth exploring, I personally wanted to look into this topic because I was brought up in a Christian house, and I wanted to look at how religion can influence the moral development of a person growing up. And I believe that as we become adults and we become parents, we also feel that the religion we subscribe to, oftentimes we feel that it is important that our kids also grow up and share our same religious values. To pursue this aspect of moral development, also because of my upbringing as a Christian and how that infiltrates almost every aspect of my life in the ways that I live, the ways that I think, speak, and act, and I think it's really worth exploring because of the way that religion can actually shape someone's morality and also, like I said, the way that they think, the way that they speak, and the way that they act in the future based on moral values that they have relating to religion and how they were brought up. For us to look at this topic, we had to choose two different studies. One of the studies we chose to look at came from Pew Research and is titled Most U.S. Parents Pass On Their Religious and Politics to Their Children. The study found that 35% of parents feel that it was extremely or very important that their kids grow up to share their religious views. The study also found that parents felt that religion and political views were less important to pass on to their children than morals are, such as being honest, hardworking, and an ethical person. One of the polls found that teens from the ages of 13 to 17 largely share their parents' political and religious affiliations. If the parent was religiously unaffiliated, 86% of the time their kid would also be religiously unaffiliated. Conversely, 82% of children with Protestant parents were also affiliated with Protestantism. There doesn't seem to be a link between how important passing down religion is to the parent. It seems that the child will most likely lean the same way that the parent does, and it doesn't matter if the parent thinks it is important or not. The other study that I chose to look at is a study called How Today's Parents Say Their Approach to Parenting Does or Doesn't Match Their Own Upbringing. This study largely went over the similarities and differences in how parents say that they are raising their own children similarly or differently to their own upbringing. 63% it was found in the study say that they bring up their children similarly than they were raised with regards to values and religion, while 13% say that they raise their kids differently than they themselves were raised. This shows that parents are more likely to raise their kids the way that they were raised in respect to values and religion. However, it differs in other areas such as love and relationship where it's 16% similarity as opposed to a 44% difference ratio. These different values kind of show how parents would opt towards religious morality and standards being more of something that they would pass down to their children over other things that might be less connected to religion. The three age groups that Joel and I decided to look at were early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. These age groups seem likely to apply this issue due to the brain and therefore the morality of the child being highly malleable at those stages. This leads these age groups in particular to be old enough to understand and form morals as in early and middle childhood, yet not too old that they already have made their morals and are more set in their ways above adolescence and leaning into adulthood, especially late adulthood, where morals and values can still change, but it is definitely less likely. We chose these age groups because of the malleability of the brain and morality, plasticity actually if you will, if you want to use the term found in the book, and that is very important with regards to how children learn and retain morals, values, and information as a whole. One of the reasons we felt that these age groups would work well together is because they are all in succession and we wanted to see how religion can make an impact at different points of development up through adolescence as there are still many changes that are occurring during adolescence. So as a brief overview, in early childhood, as we talked about in the lecture, there is a widespread growth in every domain. You have rapid developments in the brain that help with self-regulation and impulse control and around the age of four, you start developing what is called the theory of mind and this is when the child starts to realize that others think and feel differently than they do. And then later in middle childhood, you see greater impulse control and they are able to selectively pay attention to different stimulus and it is also around this time when Piaget believed that the person develops this sort of mutual respect for others and intentions behind actions become much more important to the child. And in adolescence, you have puberty starting to come online. By this point, most emotions are fully mature while the problem-solving part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, is still lagging a bit behind. In adolescence, relationships also become much more important to us. These groups all end up in development due to their ages leading right into the next group, like Elliot said and like we have both said before. This makes it really easy to follow the child along their path of moral development and also tracking it with respect to religious beliefs and upbringings. So like Elliot said, for early childhood, it's widespread growth in every domain and that comes with brain plasticity, as I had mentioned earlier. We mentioned in class that it is far, far easier for children to learn languages when they're younger and it is more easy for them to learn different concepts and take on different aspects and perspectives of situations. And while they might not understand those better than an adult or an adolescent even, they would still have the ability to adapt to that and kind of bend around it because the brain is plastic in a sense. So that definitely leads to this grasping of ideas with religion kind of infused into that. These religious beliefs are taught to the kids and especially, I saw this in my life, so I was taught from a young age all these beliefs and morals and what to do and what not to do and that would kind of just set in with me and I still remember some of those silly mantras or sayings that are stuck in my head or some of the demonstrations that we did in Sunday school. So it really sticks with you. So in middle childhood, Piaget believed that this held a lot of different kinds of thinking for kids including concrete operations, reasoning, like including objects that are real and tangible and thinking with objects that are systematic and scientific. That's from the lecture that's in our notes. So with this higher ability of reasoning and thinking, the child can be able to grasp these different concepts that they're being taught. Whereas when they were younger, you might be taught, this is wrong. And then you think, okay, sure, that's wrong. But when you have that higher level of reasoning and thinking, you start to realize, oh, this is why. Or you can start thinking about it for yourself instead of just taking it at face value, which can really help give depth to that moral, that value, that teaching that you have been given, which really cements it as in concrete operations. It just really cements it in your brain and can keep it there and help you stay convicted and devoted and committed to that. As for adolescence, it really involves the process of the limbic system transferring its majority control to the prefrontal cortex over the ages from 12 to 17 and moving on. So from 12 to 14, emotions run high and regulatory and higher order thinking really lags behind. This is part of the three-phase model that was found in the lecture slides that we took notes on. And then as you move forward into middle adolescence, regulatory and higher thinking, it's more strengthened, but it's still inconsistent. So that leads to probably teenagers in the middle of their adolescence just kind of questioning things and going back and forth between this higher thinking and reasoning things out for themselves and thinking, oh, this makes sense, but no, this is what I was taught, but this is different. And then that then transitions into late adolescence to our ages of 17 and on into regulatory and higher order thinking being more dependable and also less susceptible to outside influences. And this, more than anything, probably cements, in addition to the prefrontal cortex fully maturing at 25, probably cements these ideas and morals and values into the child in question. So as we all know, media can play a very important role in how we perceive the morality of different age groups. So next, Joel and I will look at two separate depictions of moral development in movies that we felt were accurate based on our findings. The one clear example that I found is in the movie Lion King, which is a classic Disney movie. Mufasa is the king of the Pride Lands and he has a son named Simba. Mufasa tries to teach his son what it means to be a responsible leader for the kingdom, for all the animals. And then later Mufasa tragically dies at the hand of Simba's uncle, Scar. And Simba runs off and lives a carefree lifestyle for a while to try and forget this tragic event. Simba later comes back to the Pride Lands and eternalizes all of these teachings that were passed down from his father when he becomes the king. And he takes responsibility for the well-being of the kingdom by being a good leader. Likewise, when I think about kids developing morality, The Chronicles of Narnia comes to mind. Another movie about the coming-of-age story between four kids traveling through this mysterious kingdom through a wardrobe. So these movies, if you're not familiar, tie in threads of Christianity as it's written by C.S. Lewis, a famous Christian writer and, in a way, a movie maker. So it ties in threads of Christianity while leading a group of kids on a journey through a mystical world and crazy, crazy experiences with different species and witches and lions and wardrobes and such. As Aslan, displayed as a Jesus figure, leads the kids through dangers and ends up dying for them, they come to mature and grow in their roles in the new land they're in. This specific example shows how religion, specifically Christianity, which is what Elliot and I are more focusing this podcast around as we were brought up as Christian, affects the children and the choices they make and how it ultimately leads them to mature and to find people. So they start out as these immature kids who are just playing hide-and-seek in this other person's house as they flee from World War II and from the war. So they get into this house and they're playing hide-and-seek and they enter through this wardrobe into another world and they find that it's full of peril and hardship and tragedy as this witch has overtaken the land and is enslaving the people and making herself the overseeing ruler of the entire land. So they go from these immature kids to suddenly, they have to save the kingdom. So as they travel along, they learn new things and have new experiences. Like with a satyr, Mr. Tumnus, satyr, half man, half goat, top half man obviously, they meet him and he's in a really desperate situation. So he's in trouble with the witch, the ruler of the land at this point. And so he befriends one of the kids and ends up having her for a cup of tea, but then later he gets kidnapped and they don't know where he is. And so they have to make the decision to, okay, well, let's try and save Mr. Tumnus and go and find him instead of maybe just leaving or going back out of the wardrobe, which is something they definitely could do. So another big thing that actually ties into the Christian lifestyle is with Edmund, one of the other kids, one of the middle children actually. So the white witch approaches him in an attempt to get to the other kids and she offers him Turkish delights, so a candy that he takes, which symbolizes temptation that he falls into. And in doing so, he falls into the white witch's clutches and becomes one of her pawns. So she uses Edmund as her pawn to get closer to the children and try and thwart their plans to overthrow her by following Aslan, the Jesus figure, in the right lifestyle, in the right way. And so Edmund, who has therefore fallen in temptation, is her pawn and he's being used against them. And so they have to save him and pull him out of that slavery, pull him out of that temptation. And they have to do it in a kind way. They don't just, you know, he's not a bad guy. He's someone who has fallen from grace and needs grace to be able to return to his previous self and to be once again a good human, a good person, and just available to help save the kingdom. So in doing that, those two experiences especially, it really shows how the clear Christian lifestyle can help infuse morals into these children and show them that, yes, this certain style of acting or way of acting leads to this event, which is a desirable event, right? They save their brother Edmund, they save Mr. Tumnus, the satyr, spoiler alert, and eventually they save the kingdom and defeat the White Witch, all by doing things that Aslan instructs them to do by following his ways. And when they don't, then that's when problems arise, when Edmund falls into temptation or when they end up getting captured by the White Witch. So this all really ties back to the foundations of Christianity in that you want to live for God and you want to obey his laws and his ways and then blessings will follow. And I really think that's a great, great visualization of Christianity and what it teaches kids to do.