018: The Spiritual Child: Possibly exaggerated, conclusions uncertain

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Transcript Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We have a bit of a different episode lined up for today: we’re looking at the book Your Spiritual Child by Dr. Lisa Miller.  I was chatting with some parents in a Facebook group a while back and mentioned that I’m always looking for podcast episode topics, so one of them suggested I do an episode on this book.  My first thought was “well that doesn’t really sound like my cup of tea but I’ll read the book and see where it goes from there.” So I read the book and I was pretty surprised – Dr. Miller makes all sorts of claims about the integral role that spirituality can play in a child’s development.  Her thesis is that children are naturally spiritual and that by not allowing them to develop this quality we’re depriving them of an essential ingredient in their success.  The really surprising part to me, though, was that her claims are underpinned by actual scientific research.  So I emailed Dr. Miller and said “hey, I’m an atheist but I read your book and I’d love to interview you on the show so we can dig into this and both my listeners and I can understand it better.”  She initially responded with something along the lines of “sounds great!” but we had some scheduling difficulties and then I stopped hearing back from her.  While the scheduling attempts were going on I was doing all the background research I normally do for an interview and I started to get more and more worried.  I was finding discrepancies between the outcomes of studies Dr. Miller referenced and the way she was describing them in the book -not in all cases, but in enough that I wanted to understand the issues further.  In the end I emailed her and told her what I’d found, explained that I was really interested in a rigorous intellectual discussion and didn’t have any malicious intent, and invited her again to be on the show but she didn’t respond.  I told her it would be a bit of a bummer to have spent all this time doing research and not have an episode to show for it so I would plan to go ahead and run it without her if she decided not to participate – so here we are. So, let’s start with the book.  Dr. Miller defines spirituality as “an inner sense of living relationship to a higher power, which might be God, nature spirit, universe, the creator, or whatever your word is for the ultimate loving, guiding life-force.”  The important thing here is that spirituality is not tied to religion – it’s about an individual’s personal relationship with the transcendent, not about how organized religion might shape that experience.  We know this through the results of a study of White, Caucasian twins in Virginia by Kenneth Kendler, which asked the twins about their experience of spirituality religion as part of understanding whether these could be protective against substance abuse.  Researchers like to study twins because it’s the closest thing we have to two people who are identical but still have important differences between them, like their experience of spirituality.  Dr Miller says that “by comparing monozygotic (which are twins from the same egg and who are thus genetically identical) with dizygotic twins (which came from two different eggs fertilized at the same time and are thus genetically different), our tendencies around personal devotion are due 29% to broad heritability, 24% to family environment, and 47% to our own personal unique environment.  Now I actually couldn’t find this result in Kendler’s study.  These specific findings aren’t discussed.  It’s possible Dr. Miller worked with the statistical results provided and devised these percentages, but they are not found in the paper.  Later in the book she calls him her “senior colleage,” so I wonder if she had access to data not described in the paper.  In the paper, Dr. Kendler finds that age and number of years of education are positively associated with personal devotion (which is what Dr. Miller calls transcendental relationships) and that none of the three dimensions of religiosity differed between monozygotic and dizygotic twins, although he doesn’t mention these differences for  personal devotion. The study did that personal spirituality is a different thing from religious affiliation, which was another point that Dr Miller made, and this was corroborated by a follow-up study by Dr. Kendler.  The first study also found that both spirituality and religion are associated with lower levels of alcohol and tobacco use which is something we’ll get to again later.  Spirituality was inversely associated with depressive symptoms, indicating that people who experience spirituality are less likely to experience depression, and this actually wasn’t the case for religion.  But other than these findings, there were no significant correlations between spirituality or religiosity and any of 27 other mental illnesses. It seems as though organized religion is at a bit of a crossroads in the U.S..  A Gallup poll that’s updated annually finds that the percentage of people reporting ‘none’ as their religion is increasing, and people reporting that they have a great deal of confidence in the church or organized religion is declining, while people who say they have ‘very little’ confidence in these organizations is increasing.  Yet 89% of people asked in 2016 if they believe in God will say “yes”- and that’s down from the 96% who believed in 1944, but it’s still really high.  So what do all these people who believe in God but don’t believe that organized religion has the answers tell their children?  Dr. Miller quotes some parents she’s talked with as saying “I don’t want to share my views about spiritual things because I’m not so sure myself.  I could say something to steer my child in the wrong direction.”  Another said “I’m just not sure how to put it.  There is almost nothing at all for parents that helps us talk about spirituality, other than religion.  But I’m not religious and I don’t like the way religion was taught to me.”  Many parents they know they don’t want organized religion for their children, but they don’t know what else to replace it with. Dr. Miller goes on to quote these studies from Dr. Keller a number of other times, so in each case I tried to corroborate the evidence from an alternate source.  I did find one from Professor Ralph Piedmont of Loyola University, who wondered if spirituality could be considered a dimension making up a person that’s different from the other traits that make up a personality and found that transcendence does indeed appear to be a different component of personality than other characteristics.  So these studies point to the idea that at least a part of our spirituality is a genetic component of our makeup, and not something that is something we learn through exposure to organized religion. Dr. Miller’s second major finding is that while we might notice elements of and a curiosity about spirituality in young children it really comes into its own in adolescence.  This fits with reading I’ve been doing for my classwork on adolescent development, related to the identity exploration that adolescents go through as they ‘try on’ different identities to see which one fits them.  It turns out that teenage angst and not wanting to be around parents very much are developmentally necessary things for adolescents to go through as they figure out who they are as separate beings from their parents. My expectation would have been that the influence of biology decreases over time as the child is exposed to more experiences over the course of her life but a study by Dr. Tanya Button at the University of Colorado finds that at age 14, the largest impact on a teen’s spirituality is from her family, but by age 19 it is primarily shaped by her biology – in other words, the biological changes of puberty and adolescence.  When the researchers looked at the underlying causes of that shift they found that it was about half due to the force of genetic expression, or the “unlocking of the window” as Dr. Miller puts it, and the other half to the personal environment that the teens create as they go through the search for their identity – things like going to a youth group or to church, or trying meditation.  This shift in the influence of heritability was corroborated by Dr. Laura Koenig at the University of Minnesota using another twin study, so we can be reasonably sure about the conclusion that there is a surge in the importance of biological factors in determining an adolescent’s interest in spirituality.   So all of this brings us to the question “why should we care about spirituality?” It’s nice to believe nice things about the world and the people in it, but are there any real benefits to being spiritual?  And this gets to the heart of the issues I was having as I read through the research that Dr. Miller draws on for the book.  Because as far as she is concerned, the evidence is pretty cut and dried – but it seems to me that it’s rather less so. So let’s take a look.  We’ll start with young children: Dr. Anat Shoshani studied 479 five-year-old children in Israel to find out what kinds of characteristics are linked to a child’s adjusting well to school.  Dr. Miller reports that “the degree of the child’s transcendent strengths, based on spirituality, hope, humor, and gratitude, was more predictive of teacher’s ratings on school adjustment than the child’s other inborn capacities of intellect or temperament.”  But it turns out that that’s not what the study really said – it looked at four different types of school adjustment – cognitive, behavioral, social, and emotional.  Transcendent characteristics were indeed better related to good emotional adjustment (by a really tiny amount in some cases), but for cognitive, behavioral and social adjustment there were other factors that were more important than transcendent strengths in every case.  In fact, transcendent strengths weren’t even among the top four factors for cognitive and behavioral adjustment.  This study also brings up a methodological issue related to the study of spirituality – this Israeli study was the only one I saw that included hope and humor as definitions of a transcendent strength, and it’s entirely possible that these factors aren’t really related to spirituality at all. Dr. Miller has done a lot of work related to spirituality and depression.  She and her colleagues did a study looking at MRIs of people with a high risk for depression; some of these people reported that religion or spirituality was important in their lives, while some said it wasn’t.  They found that the outer layer of the brain, called the cortex, was thicker in some places where people reported a high degree of religiousness and spirituality, and that a thinner cortex is associated with a certain type of familial risk of depression.  They caution that they can’t say which causes which; or even if one causes another – it’s possible that people with thicker cortices like to go to church or perhaps people who go to church altered the cortical thickness. In another study, Dr. Miller found that adults who reported that religion or spirituality was highly important to them had about a quarter the risk of experiencing major depression over the next 10 years compared with other participants, and that this effect was most pronounced among those who were at higher risk for depression by having a depressed parent., who had about one tenth the risk of depression over the next 10 years than those who didn’t find religion or spirituality important.  This protective effect was found primarily against the recurrence rather than the onset of depression, which wasn’t adequately explained in the results – it’s not clear to me why spirituality wouldn’t protect you from getting depressed in the first place, but it does protect you from getting depressed again.  Yet in another of Dr. Miller’s studies, she assesses the impact of maternal religiosity as a protective factor against depression in offspring.  One of her major points in that work is that “overall the findings do not support the hypothesis that offspring religiosity is protective against offspring major depressive disorder.”  Another finding, that if mother and child has similar spiritual beliefs then the child is less likely to experience depression WAS cited in The Spiritual Child, but it’s not clear to me why she reports that finding but not the other finding that contradicts some of her other work. Dr. Miller also looked at how spirituality and religiosity is associated with substance use and abuse in adolescents – and this is one of the few studies on spirituality...