Spiritual Influences on Kids: Who Impacts Them Most?

What if you took the initiative and began hosting milestone events for parents and their kids? How about having classes attached to the big spiritual moments in families’ lives Examples include:

• Parent & child dedication
• Bible presentation
• Faith commitment to follow Jesus
• Baptism
• Transition into middle school

You can get great teaching content for parents and their children for milestone events at this link.

Spiritual Influences: Friends

The other big influence in a child’s faith life is friends, especially close friends. Friends are a powerful factor when it comes to making decisions, which may be right or wrong. Most kids who get into trouble are influenced to do so by their friends.

Show me your child’s friends, and I can tell you what kind of person your child is.

Throughout Proverbs, we see admonitions to have good friends. Proverbs 13:20 says, “Walk with the wise and become wise; associate with fools and get in trouble.”

Friends will use peer pressure to influence other children. This means we must encourage parents to know who their children are friends with. Who their child spends time with. Who their child is close to.  

As parents, we have the responsibility to help our kids choose good friends. That one choice can make or break which direction they go in life and how their relationship with Jesus is.  

So there you have it. The two biggest spiritual influences in a kid’s life. Takeaways:

We must influence parents so they in turn will influence their children.

We must stop thinking it’s the adult ministry’s job to equip and empower parents. Instead, we need to enter a partnership with adult ministry and lock arms to influence parents. 

What percentage of your time each week is used to directly influence parents? How can you improve in this area?

Our children’s ministry programs must have key milestone events in place that impact parents. 

We must help parents understand the importance of knowing and guiding who their children befriend.

Family and friends are the two biggest spiritual influences on children. Those two crucial factors impact which path a child takes in life. 

This article about spiritual influences originally appeared here.