My teenager has recently decided to believe in God. She bought herself a silver cross pendant and has begun wearing it every day.

When I was a teenager, I also wore a cross around my neck, and I also believed in God. I had been raised as a churchgoing, tithe-paying Catholic, but as I hit puberty, my faith became more than cultural. It became deeply personal, with the full spectrum of emotions which characterise first love.

It shouldn’t surprise me that my child wants to develop a faith of her own. Psychology researcher and professor Lisa Miller in her book The Spiritual Child explains that spirituality often increases in adolescence. The teenage brain has a larger gap between “experiencing” and “interpreting” than in adulthood. As a result, adolescents’ feelings are strong, dramatic and oscillate more wildly than the playground swing you so recently used to push them on.

According to James Fowler’s theory of stages of faith, my daughter is entering the “synthetic-conventional” stage. This starts around the age of 12 or 13, and many adults remain in this stage for the rest of their lives. In this phase, exploring a spiritual........

© The Guardian