The meaning parents attribute to toddler’s behaviours they identify as indicating innate spiritual connection: Implications for paediatric palliative care

Background: Children’s spirituality has become an essential element of the holistic approach within palliative care. Yet, the experiences of toddlers and their families are poorly represented in the literature, creating a significant knowledge gap, especially in regards to the innate aspects of spirituality. This limits the quality of holistic care toddlers and their families can receive. An initial research baseline, created from day-to-day family experiences of parents in the general community, is needed as a foundation for further research in the palliative context. Methods: Qualitative narratives elicited by open questioning and focused upon the toddler period were collected from self-selected parents of children between 20 months and 9 years of age, to allow for reporting of both current and retrospective experiences. Recruitment was organised through spirituality, religion and/or parenting related Facebook groups. Five parents (three mothers and two fathers) from different families chose to provide stories. A grounded theory approach was used to explore emerging themes. Results: Several themes emerged including ‘parents as spiritual meaning makers’, ‘connecting with the invisible’, ‘connecting with knowledge and knowing’, ‘darker side of spiritual development’, ‘toddler spirituality in a social context’ and ‘healing as a connective state’. Conclusion: Findings suggest the widespread literature gap is not representative of the importance of this topic to either non-palliative or palliative families. Further understanding of this topic will be of benefit to the provision of holistic paediatric palliative care to toddlers and their families.