Spiritual Accompaniment with Children

When I tell people that I help adults learn how to accompany children spiritually, the response is often enthusiastic before quickly becoming quizzical. It sounds lovely and important. But how does that work?

Not long ago, I came across a children’s picture book called Noticing that goes a long way toward introducing what accompanying a child is (and is not). It’s the story of a young girl befriended by a painter. The artist models hospitable wonder and delight. She helps the child cultivate her ability to contemplate beauty and goodness in the world around her, others, and within herself. The painter assures the child, “The more you pause and allow for the extraordinary…the more you find it.”

Trusting Their Core Connection

Accompanying a child spirituality is a way of applying the principles of spiritual direction in a child-friendly way. It is not teaching or mentoring but contemplative listening, which trusts young people already have a connection with the Divine and their truest, freest selves. It’s based on the understanding that children have begun to form their own unique views of God and the spiritual world, starting somewhere between four and six years old. That means we don’t have to create spiritual experiences for children. They are already engaging that world even though they won’t have grown-up language for it. Child psychiatrist Robert Coles, who studied children’s spirituality for three decades, learned to “see children as seekers, as young pilgrims well aware that life is a finite journey and as anxious to make sense of it as those of us who are farther along in the time allotted us.”

When the disciples harshly berated people for bringing children to Jesus, as if they would be wasting his time, he shocked them by replying firmly, ‘Let them come!’ (Matthew 19:14). Do you hear it? The children were already on their way toward Jesus. Proximity had been provided by their caregivers, but that was all it took. They didn’t have to be cajoled toward Jesus. The only things the disciples had to do were get out of the way and let them through. The children’s Bible, the Book of Belonging, describes what happened next, “…the kids tumbled toward Jesus. His eyes warmed and welcomed even the shyest of the group as he crouched down to greet them.”

Our role when we accompany children spiritually is to invite children to cultivate awareness and attention to God. We gently use our natural authority and power as adults to let them know those things matter. We can help them recognize and respond to the movement of the Divine in and around them. And every time they practice this, a pattern of holy attention is more fully formed, with profound spiritual and neurological implications.

Consider your own earliest memories of God. For many of us, they involve time spent with a pet or a special person, such as an aunt or grandparent, immersed in an activity like swimming or dribbling a ball, or in nature. I remember a time in kindergarten, as I was swinging on the playground with a friend, belting out a hymn together. It was a sacred moment of freedom, joy, and connection. It’s one of my earliest memories of sensing God’s nearness and delight. If I were to sketch the memory today, I’d draw the Spirit swinging and singing along with us with a huge grin on Her face.

Helping Children Access Their Wonder

Spiritual accompaniment helps deepen kids’ natural ability to be inquisitive and explore, which the world often conspires to stunt or even snuff out altogether. Children are ‘experience expectant,’ primed to discover themselves and the world around them. But, as Jonathan Haidt argues in The Anxious Generation, “smartphones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and adolescents that they cause a serious problem: They reduce interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience” (italics in original).

Haidt also contends that since around 1995, more young people (and, I would add, adults) are apt to be stuck in a posture of defending against threats rather than open to discovery. While the ability to attend to safety is vital, constant vigilance is paralyzing and exhausting, short-circuiting chances to grow and learn.

Spiritual accompaniment can serve as an antidote to these and other threats to loving attention. Because while children wonder, grieve, celebrate, imagine, and discover on their own without prompting, they reflect on and deepen those experiences when they explore them with a trustworthy other. This is life-giving for children and the adults who listen with them.

Spiritual accompaniment, or holy listening, is a way for young people to discover in quiet, simple moments that their sacred selves are worthy of tending. It is the loving attention and breathing room their young souls need. Children need guidance and protection, and they also need to simply be heard. They thrive with room to explore their understanding of God and to notice and respond to their experiences of beauty, mystery, and loss.

As we learn this kind of listening, we practice resisting the assumption that kids are in perpetual need of instruction or commentary from adults. This shift from teaching or managing to curiosity about their loves, worries, and insights is never easy because of postures toward children that are often deeply ingrained. These include notions implying children are empty vessels, need to remain seen rather than heard, or over-emphasizing respect for elders.

Asking Curious Questions

The only thing that doesn’t quite ring true about the child in Noticing is the assumption that she needs to be guided to pay attention and see beauty in the world around her. Often, the reverse is true, with children inviting adults to pay attention and re-learn how to delight in small wonders. Anna Freud, daughter of the famous psychiatrist and mentor to Robert Coles, once told him about working with children, “You’ll be having talks about philosophy and theology—and children can hold up rather well, sometimes, in those kinds of discussions, provided the adult doesn’t assume too little of the child…”.

That said, in our technology-saturated, distracted age, many children’s eyes are so glued to screens that they miss the joy and fascination of the real world around them. In the story, the painter enthuses with the child, “We have the birds, the trees, the sky, the questions, the what-ifs, and the why-nots!”

In the class, we teach grown-ups to wonder with children about things like times when they sense goodness. Or when they sense a whisper of comfort. When they feel a spark of joy or a pang of sadness. When they notice an impulse toward kindness or repairing a wrong. You could try asking the kids in your world, whether your own, those in your classroom or neighborhood, or even little ones whose families are waiting in the check-out line in front of you, questions like these. Try starting with something like, ‘Would you like to tell me about something beautiful (or good or true) from your week?”

Once the painter and the child have become trustworthy friends, she invites her to consider questions like these:

What does home look like to you?
What does kindness feel like?
What does it feel like to have a friend?
What does it look like to be one?

The painter emphasizes, “So many significant things cannot be seen with your eyes, but they are very real. And it is vital that you look for and believe in them.”

As we invite the children to tell their stories, we offer simple tools to facilitate this. Things like art paper and watercolors for painting a beautiful moment or a hard day at school. Stones with simple shapes or faces to tell the story of their day or their week. Play-dough or bubbles to sculpt or playfully blow out their prayers.

We’ve had students from around the world who meet with children on their front porches, in Sunday school rooms or a quiet church pew, and in schools, nurses’ offices, and group homes. It is always a joy to journey and learn alongside people learning to listen differently to children. It all evokes Isaiah’s vision of a future in which wolves and leopards will be at peace with lambs and goats and be led by a little child. Where babies play near cobras (Isaiah 11:1-9). While the passage begins with the advent of a wise and godly leader, children factor prominently in the vision. Stollar points out, “Those who would have been considered the lowliest in social status at the time this text was written—children—receive the same attention as the highest. The last have become first…[And] if we allow Isaiah’s eschatological vision to influence our present, we can change our future accordingly.”

Can you imagine?

Note #1: The fall 2025 cohort of Spiritual Accompaniment with Children is around halfway through our time together. If you’d like to learn more or consider applying for fall 2026, sign up for updates from the Companioning Center or message me!
Note #2: An abridged version of this essay appeared on the Companioning Center blog recently.