How can I help my children's prayers grow with them so that they don't grow out of them?

The training process for almost everything we teach our children is progressive. We start at ground zero, progress step by step, and end up with young people who are fully prepared to tackle life on their own. The same sequence is true for prayer. We need to start talking to our children about, and walking them through, the basics of prayer when they're still very young. We can then move them progressively forward so that when they leave our care they have a strong, healthy, and growing prayer life.

We talked earlier in this blog about a basic parenting principle: when teaching your kids something, explain the process to them and help them understand it so that they can begin to take ownership of the goal and be motivated in the training process. Our children should know what their prayer life should look like when they leave home. They should also know what their intermediate goals are was we move them progressively along. One of the main reasons we lost our children in any life training process is that we take them to a certain level and then stop, expecting them to take over at that point. But they can't travel without someone's help if they don't know where they're going, why they're headed that direction, and how exactly to get there. Therefore, any training process must continue until it's complete.

As we proceed through the prayer training process, we need to remember that each one of our children is unique, and that no effective training can follow a cookie cutter pattern. The general stages and ideas outlined over the next several posts should be used as a general guide in the process, but they should be used with flexibility to allow for our children's responses and growth. We shouldn't try to force our children to fit into the exact mold of a heavily regimented training process.

On the contrary, we should reinforce and celebrate our children's uniqueness. God didn't create any of us alike, and he responds to each one of us as individuals. God created for each one of our children a special opportunity for a relationship with him that can never be duplicated. God loves our children uniquely and wants a special relationship with them that no one else can step into. Telling our children this will help them understand even more as they grow older, that prayer isn't a religious exercise that we perform. It's an individual and very real relationship with our wonderful, loving Father.