“I want to teach my kids about faith, but I also want them to learn how to think for themselves.”
This desire came up time after time with mom after mom, as our team conducted interviews with moms across the country.
Some moms reported their families were highly involved in a local church or place of worship. Others said they sporadically attended church activities with their kids, while also trying to offer meaningful faith experiences outside the church. Still others said they didn’t attend a formal church with any regularity, but still considered themselves spiritual people and wanted to raise their children with good values.
But regardless of how these moms thought about church, almost all of them had the same end goal. They wanted their kids to develop a faith and sense of meaning that their children could own for themselves.
As a company, Sparkhouse Family seeks to support moms in goals like these. That’s why we’re constantly thinking through the best ways to introduce faith concepts at home and trying to create resources that meet families’ spiritual needs. Below, we’ve compiled a list of five practices that help grow kids’ faith during your family’s everyday rituals. We hope you’ll find something to encourage you along the way.
Moms help grow kids’ faith when they …
1. Provide daily centering rituals built into kids’ ordinary schedules.
This may involve mealtime prayers, bedtime Bible stories, purposeful times of gratitude, and other activities that promote healthy values.
2. Choose meaningful activities for kids to take part in with their families.
One of our popular downloadable freebies, for example, offers 8 meaningful service ideas for kids and parents to do together. You can find additional ideas via web search or in our freebies category, which offers purposeful activities for kids to engage in during the year.
3. Make use of expected (or unexpected) down time.
Whether it be during road trips or while waiting for a table at a restaurant, moms frequently have to find creative ways to occupy kids during down times. Sparkhouse Family offers subscriptions to unlimited faith based videos for kids for just $3.99 a month (free trial here!) as well as fun, engagingbooks that teach positive faith values.
4. Keep themselves resourced with wise advice and good ideas from other parents facing similar challenges.
You can find helpful reading material from other moms (and dads!) who are being thoughtful about faith in our Parenting category. In addition to our contributing writers, who also write elsewhere on the web, we often offer recommendations of popular mommy bloggers like these 5 women who brought humor and perspective to Back to School season.
5. Relate to your kids questions as you go.
One of our contributing writers, Rage Against the Minivan’s Kristen Howerton, recently wrote this fantastic post on how to work through kids’ spiritual questions while still working through your own faith questions as a parent.
As you try these and other ways of teaching and living your faith as a family, we’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to come check out our website, follow along on our blog, and connect with us on social media (Facebook/ Twitter/ Pinterest). We love learning from real life moms every step of the way.
Sparkhouse Family is a publishing company that seeks to create fun and engaging Bibles, videos and books for families to use at home.
