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Teaching Children to Pray: Try These Ideas in Your Family

  • Use a game I call Musical Prayers. Place a chair for each participant in a circle. Tape a prayer target to each chair. Begin playing music and have everyone walk around the chairs. When the music stops, each person finds the nearest chair and prays for that need.
  • Use an inflatable world globe and pass it from person to person. When the music stops, the person holding the globe can choose a country. Then pray for the children in that country to know about Jesus.
  • Take your children on a prayer walk. Children are terrific prayer walkers because they enjoy movement. Plus, being “on site” makes the prayers more meaningful and concrete. To begin, walk around your neighborhood and ask God’s blessing and salvation on each family. Pray for the children in each home.
  • Give children the freedom to talk to God in different postures: sitting, standing, kneeling, marching, or bowing. When you have family prayer time, allow each person to choose a different posture for prayer.

Pray a Blessing

Praying a prayer of blessing on your child’s life each night at bedtime (or other times of the day) can bring comfort, reassurance, and hope to your child’s heart. Pray for God’s favor, protection, and peace. Thank the Lord for something specific, such as a gift, talent, or quality in your child.

You can use a Bible blessing such as Psalm 5:12 or Numbers 6:25 or speak from your heart. When you pray scriptural blessings, you are speaking words that match God’s desire for your child.

Thanksgiving

An essential part of prayer is simply saying, “Thank you, God.” Try these suggestions when teaching children to pray with grateful hearts:

  • Blessing Basket
Fill a small basket with little slips of paper. Encourage family members to write or draw pictures of things for which they’re thankful.
  • Best Part of the Day
Ask each child to say a sentence prayer, thanking God for the best part of her day.
  • Family Journal
Keep a notebook full of things for which the family is thankful.

As you try different ways of connecting with God, children will learn that prayer is one of the greatest adventures in life. We have the privilege of calling on the God of the universe and then hearing from Him. We also have the privilege of teaching children to pray!

As Jeremiah 33:3 says: “Call to Me and I will answer you and tell you great and wondrous things you do not know.”

12 Keys to a More Powerful Prayer Life