My three sons aren't particularly into football. They enjoy kicking a ball around in the courtyard outside our house, but just as happily play with their skateboards and scooters. They quite often play football at school, they tell me, although this is apparently as much to do with the fact that so few boys are not into football that there would hardly be anyone to play with if they did not join in with them, as it is to do with wanting to play the game itself.
In some ways, I have found this surprising; as they have got older, I have been half expecting to have requests to go and see football matches and to watch it on TV (and have braced myself for such a possibility :-)). There is often an assumption that boys will be into certain things, and football is one of those things.
Assumptions about what children will find interesting are commonplace, and these are often gender-specific. There is some truth in such assumptions; child development research shows that from a young age boys and girls show general differences in the way that they play, and the type of toys that they prefer to play with if given the choice.
What is important, though, is that such assumptions, gender or otherwise, do not restrict children (and thankfully my sons' school offers a variety of actvities for children to partake in during school time on certain days of the week). Children should be given the opportunities to grow and develop and to be nurtured as individuals; to be given the chance to explore and discover who they are without limitations placed upon them caused by assumptions. This can be applied not just to what and how they play in the playground, but to how they experience worship, too.
For the last few years, I have been helping with the Sunday School at church and have recently taken a more active role in the planning of sessions. Many of the activities that I planned during the sessions involved the chance for the children to do crafts and to be physically active; to do lots of singing and to be engaged in a very action-orientated way. I know from my teaching experience that actively engaging children is a very effective way for them to learn and to have fun, rather than them experiencing a mainly didactic approach involving the teacher at the front and them as passive recipients. I also know that children like to make a noise and like to make a mess, and there was plenty of that, too.
And then my assumptions were challenged, in a very gentle and quiet way. I went along to a Prayer Spaces day which was organised to show the different ways in which spaces can be created to give children the chance to reflect upon things that matter to them and to pray. Although the initiative was founded to create spaces for children in schools, there is no reason why the ideas cannot be used in other settings, including Sunday School. The ideas were creative, but there was an inherent stillness as part of them, allowing children the room to think and reflect, to still their minds and be open to thought and prayer. I felt humbled as I read about the children's thoughts about the prayer spaces and what it meant to them to experience this, and wanted to give the small group of children to whom I minister the opportunity to have this type of space as part of what we do.
During my next session leading Sunday School, I asked the children how they liked to pray. One child put up his hand and said "I like to wave my arms around and sing!" and another child put up his hand and said "I like to close my eyes and put my hands together and be really quiet." Here in their answers was an illustration of how differently children like to talk to God and from then on in, I was going to help each child to have the chance to be with and talk to God in their way, by creating space for them to do this, not only through the louder, more messy activities that we had been used to, but also through quiet reflection and stillness.
We don't have a great deal of time at each Sunday School session, but there is time within it to create space for the children to learn about and explore God in their way and to help them to grow closer to Him, whether this is in the banging of the cymbals or in the stillness of quiet.
Through changing my assumptions, I hope that I am helping them, each and every child, to do that.
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