An Unexpected Way to Teach Our Kids to Pray
Each night, my husband and I snuggle our girls in their cozy twin beds (alternating each time, of course) for a bedtime book and prayer. It’s something we’ve been grateful to do for years now, but as my daughters get older, prayer time is shifting. The seven-year-old has started to ask, “Mom, what should I say?”
It’s a great question and lets me know she’s starting to understand prayer on a deeper level. After years of praying about whatever her eyes land on, she’s getting her first glimpse of the struggle to come to God in “the right way.” And how do I teach her when it’s a lesson I’m still trying to learn myself?
Teaching our kids to pray can seem so daunting when we don’t know what to say too. But the beauty of our gracious God is that he doesn’t need our perfectly crafted words. Growing in our own prayer lives has the ability to speak volumes to our kids.
As a podcast host, one of my favorite questions to ask guests is if prayer was modeled for them as a child. It’s amazing how our parents’ prayer lives have shaped our own. Inevitably though, what seems to have had the greatest impact isn’t primarily all the words that were taught. Those certainly help, but the biggest difference was seeing a mom who consistently turned to God.
What if what our kids need most is for us mommas (so accustomed to sacrificing for others) to make space for a more confident and consistent prayer life ourselves? It feels almost too simple, but I think it relieves a lot of the pressure we can feel to train up our kids in the way they should go.[1] I am a big believer that, as a mom desiring to see her kids walk with the Lord, my calling is to clearly show them that God is alive and good and active in our lives. If they think God is nothing more than an inanimate statue, they will never commit their life to such a thing. Who could blame them?
But what if they got to know, from an early age, that God is real? That God hears our prayers and works in our lives? That God transforms our hearts as we pray? That God acts on our behalf?
Teaching our kids how to pray starts in our own hearts. And this shouldn’t scare us. We can redirect our efforts from communicating the perfect prayer lessons to cultivating our own desire for prayer. It might look like reading Scripture and noticing how often the words “God hears” or “God responds” are included (I made a list of these and it overwhelms me each time I read through it!). It might be as simple as asking the Lord, like the disciples did, “teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1).
As we learn to pray, we still won’t have all the perfect words, but by God’s grace, our kids can see the hearts of women who wholeheartedly believe that spending a lifetime learning to pray is worth it. That as we stumble over words or cry out with doubt, nothing is too big to stop us from actually praying. Nothing is too daunting to paralyze our prayers!
That’s a big part of my own story. I was a worried little child, and my mom and I went early and often to the throne room when my fears crept up. My mom didn’t always have the perfect words. She’d even tell you that she still jumbles things, makes long pauses, or loses her train of thought, but what matters most is her devotion to keep going to God.
I don’t have strong memories of seeing my mom in her quiet times, but I can testify to the faith that she instilled in me through prayer times together. As we prayed for my fears about robbers and fires and physical pains, I learned that God cared about every detail of my life, and nothing was too small to bring to him.
As my own kids now ask questions about prayer, there are tons of resources I could share with them or lessons to impart, but I truly believe the greatest gift I can give them will be developing my own confident and consistent prayer life. A legacy of prayer that is filled with ways God has worked.
Mommas, we can do that! We can remove some of that pressure of teaching our kids what we’re still learning ourselves. How do we do that? By daily drawing near to our Father. What a gift it is that God can use our insufficiencies and our weaknesses to magnify his strength.
“We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders that he has done” (Psalm 78:4).
[1] Proverbs 22:6
