Teaching Kids to Pray {the beginning}

I’ve had a lot of conversations about prayer with moms, many of them wondering the same thing: How do we teach our kids to pray?

There are many ways to help your child cultivate a prayer life and quite a few ideas to make prayer a part of your family’s daily rhythms.

But the best way to teach our kids to develop a life of prayer is to model a life of prayer. 

Before we tackle ideas for teaching our kids to pray, we need to take an honest look at ourselves. 

• Am I a praying person?
• Do I spend time talking with God and listening?
• Is prayer a part of my life?

Maybe, for some of us, we can answer yes, yes, and yes, but though we pray before meals or even during our quiet time with God, our prayer lives are dead.

“How do you know when your prayer life has died?” writes Bill Thrasher in his book A Journey to Victorious Praying, “when you pray with no expectancy, it has died!”

This week, before we begin this series on prayer and our kids, let’s spend some time ourselves, asking God to show us any areas where our prayer lives have died.

Are we simply “going through the motions”? Has prayer become a performance? Is sin, indifference, or apathy hardening our hearts, preventing the Holy Spirit from developing in us a Christlike fervency and compassion?

Teach us to pray, Lord! Revive our hearts. Revitalize our prayer lives. Draw is more closely to Yourself, we pray!

A Few Prayer Resources

A Journey to Victorious Praying: Finding Discipline and Delight in Your Prayer Life by Bill Thrasher

Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home by Richard J. Foster

Becoming a Praying Family

Resources for praying for our kids