Children and adolescents' understanding of God and religiosity in the studies of Piaget's, Kohlberg's and post-Piagetian theory of cognitive development

This paper is a brief analysis of a segment of mostly Anglo-Saxon literature from the last fifty years which is dedicated to the children and adolescents' concept of God and religiosity. The analysis starts with the conceptual approaches of the Piagetian and the post-Piagetian model of cognitive development and the Kohlberg model of moral development, presented through the works of Fowler and Goldman, the pioneers of this line of research, and their followers. The paper tries to summarise briefly the results of the research which looks at how children up to the age of three perceive religion and its terms; what God, spirituality and religiosity mean to the age group three to six, later in their mid-childhood and in the period of adolescence. The results show that the understanding of religious concepts corresponds to the psychological development of a child. The paper follows the developing perception of God and religiosity starting with the animistic and the anthropomorphous to the feeling and understanding of the transcendental.