John Wesley said: “Prayer is where the action is.” So true. And really, prayer for the believer is life – it’s how we go about our days (at least ideally), returning to God throughout the moments of the day. Since prayer’s simple – just talking to God internally or aloud - teaching our kids to do it should be easy, right? Well, yes and no. Generally prayer routinely happens twice a day: before meals and before bed. OK, good start. Those prayers can become pretty rote though, and at our house it’s not an optimal time to go deeper. We also pray “on the spot” prayers when someone’s hurt or sick, if a crisis occurs, or to ask God to provide comfort, cheer, correction (etc) as the situation demands. But it felt like there was so much more in the prayer realm that we could be doing and weren’t. 

Recently I heard a several Sunday school teachers speak on children and prayer, and they advocated using picture prayer cards to help young kids learn to pray a bit more specifically. The cards can guide pre-literate children through relevant prayer topics, sparking ideas and providing some structure. Brilliant idea, I thought. So I made some. I picked five categories:

1. things to thank God for (house, clothes, food, church, nature, Jesus)
2. the world (specific places in the world we’re praying for now, such as where we support missionaries)
3. relatives (grandparents, aunts, uncles,and cousins)
4. friends (family friends closest to us)
5. family members (our nuclear family)

I assigned a color to each category. Then I made six cards in each color, printed the name of the category and specific person on the front, pasted a corresponding picture on the back, and had them laminated.

After dinner, we pass around the box and each kid chooses a color and picks the front card in that category. We talk about the card s/he drew, and then the child says a short prayer. Short! Usually one to two sentences. Then we move onto the next person, parents included.

Praying with the aid of the prayer cards has worked great for our family. I love it. Here’s why:

• It acquaints kids with different things we want to regularly be praying about. We pray for family members and friends. We thank God specifically for different gifts He gives us, not taking them for granted. We pray not just for our own locale but for the whole world.
• The oldest and youngest can participate in this prayer process equally well. Even our two-year old, who can barely talk, will enthusiastically pray a one-sentence prayer over a card she’s just picked, with guidance from us. I know that Jesus, who loves the little children like no one else, must love this.
• It allows us to talk and think about people we love, discuss unique and important things about them, and contemplate things that they might want prayer for. All of our family and most of our closest friends live far from us, so discussing them in this way is really helpful.
• It normalizes praying out loud and demonstrates that simple, direct prayers suffice. Not every kid is eager to pray out loud (and nor is every adult); but helping kids feel comfortable with talking aloud to God without it being weird or hard is valuable. This format has served the purpose well for us.
• It teaches our kids about the world and its people, allowing us to discuss and pray for the many ways the world desperately needs God. It gives us a vehicle to discuss these things with them.
• It allows our kids to consider and brainstorm things they’d like prayer for, and how to pray for others. Yesterday our 5-year-old son drew his 4-year-old sister’s card. “What would you like to be prayed for?” we asked her. When she didn’t have an immediate response, I offered some suggestions of areas of her life that God might help her in, and he was able to choose from among those. What a great opportunity to demonstrate considering the best way to lift other people to the Father in prayer.

The prayer cards have been a gift for our family in this season of our life. Certainly they’re incomplete, and I can envision rotating our current ones out at some point, inserting new ones like praise topics, character traits to pray for, areas in which to confess sins, and the like. But what we have now is a great starting point. For now we do this two or three times a week after dinner, when time permits.

How do children and prayer come together in your house? What practices have you found especially helpful in building prayer familiarity and habits into your kids?