My children seem to be most comfortable praying upside-down. Or while crawling on top of one another. Or with their feet in my face. In this, they’re probably similar to most kids. I often hear my parishioners complain about having to wrangle their children during prayer time at home, and I have seen many parents chase their child down the aisle during my sermon, at prayers, or as they line up to receive the Blessed Sacrament. I’ve seen kids dragged out of church kicking and screaming because of how they are acting, and I have cut our bed-time prayers short when my children have been unable to stop dancing during the Lord’s Prayer.

On the one hand, I feel like I’m doing something wrong when I demand that my children behave during our prayer time. First, and perhaps most obviously, children simply haven’t learned social expectations about how to pray. It’s my job, as a father, to teach my children how to sit while they pray, and it’s not my job to get mad at them when they’re goofing off. We may say that children should know better (I mean, we tell them our expectations more than enough!), but the adult world is really confusing for kids, especially in transitions. Think about how we can be happily wrestling with our kids one moment, then suddenly be stern and expectant that they come to the dinner table for orderly conversation the next moment – or even worse, that they have to be quiet and go to bed. 

I have also read and observed that kids pray (and learn) with their bodies. My daughters have repeated back to me, word for word, the most important parts of my sermon when I know they’ve spent the whole time coloring or driving their mother nuts in the pew. Both have learned spelling and counting syllables by swinging their arms up and clapping at each letter or syllable. I don’t get the psychology of it, or if it’s just true for some kids and not for others, but at least anecdotally I have seen kids pick up some tough concepts or memorize information if they can get up and move around or have manipulables. That’s one of the reasons that my church provides bags of activities for kids in the pews: let them color and look at pictures, even if they’re not Bible-related. Their minds are still paying attention and “learning” important things about God, church, and the liturgy.

Raising kids and teaching them about God, though, isn’t just letting them do whatever they want. Praying, and especially praying in a community, is more than just doing your own thing. That’s actually one of the reasons that we pray in community: we grow and deepen in our experience of God by praying, not as a collection of individuals, but as a group. Also, prayer and religion aren’t just cultural convention. Just as we can sing better if we stand up straight, certain prayer postures naturally (and I think supernaturally, too) help us pay attention to God. It’s no coincidence that prayer posture is generally pretty similar across religions. We adults have a lot to teach younger generations, and even as we continue to see child-centered learning as important, we can’t forget that there needs to be content in education.

So what do we do? Do we let kids roll around in the aisles or do we expect them to sit prim and proper in their pews? Well, as an Anglican priest, I’ll of course suggest the via media, the middle way – which, it’s important to note, is not to say that we should find some practice “in the middle of” letting kids roll around and sit proper, or to let them do a little of both. Following the via media is about finding a third option that isn’t on the spectrum between two supposed opposites. Actually, the via media tries to break apart opposites and show that they’re not opposites at all, just different ways of doing things, just like Anglicanism says that there is a different way to do Christianity than just being Catholic or Protestant. The via media suggests that we’re not working in two dimensions but that we have a whole range of options in a three dimensional land- and sky-scape. The via media doesn’t usually provide answers; it breaks up our assumptions and hold-ups so that we can see a wider range of options to a problem.

Turning back to our kids, we don’t have to choose between praying upside-down and placid, well-behaved faces. At the end of the day, what is important is not the way that our kids pray. What’s important is that they come to have a relationship with God in Jesus Christ. Part of that is knowing what kind of person our kids are and who they’re becoming as they grow up. Part of that is also learning about our traditions and not having to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the life of Christian discipleship. Our role as parents, priests, teachers, or just adults is to care for our children’s learning just as God has cared for our own: to get to know who we are and to invite us into deeper relationship.

For my kids, that looks like chanting and candles. Both of my girls love music, and both of them are (in part) visual learners. Christian tradition has countless styles of praying in music, and I let my daughters choose which we use for our bedtime prayer. They both grew up hearing me learn how to chant (I’m still learning…), and they especially love the simple, sung version of “alleluia”, which I make sure to put at the tail end of any of our prayers. Sometimes they want to sing “Jesus loves me” or “The angel Gabriel from heaven came”, and while they’d sing Christmas carols all year, we reserve those for the Christmas season and maybe a little of Advent, just for fun. 

Candles are easy. They are used the world ‘round for focus and to change any location from its secular use to something that just feels more holy. My children are too young to light the candles, but I let them blow them out. We also have a chime to play (again, music), and while the girls sometimes argue over who gets to blow out the candle or play the chime or help daddy with a reading, these disagreements just lead to another important lesson: you’re not the center of worship. The family is. The gathered community is. God is. And they listen, and they get it.

I don’t write all this to suggest that it’s the best prayer method for every family. It’s just how our bedtime prayer time has developed over the years by observing what who my kids are and thinking about what they need to “learn” as they grow as Christians and as human beings. One thing they’re learning is that there are expectations. They can’t sit on their heads while we pray (they might knock over the candle, which, yes, has happened before). We pray thanksgivings before we pray petitions, which suggests a really important theology about how we approach God. And importantly, they learn that their individuality and their gifts don’t have to be discarded just because there are expectations. They can still be their authentic selves while they’re thinking about the needs of the people around them (actually, this is an important lesson for kids and adults). 

At least, that’s my intent. I still get frustrated when my kids play with a toy when we’re praying for a sick relative. And there are times when I don’t want to go through the whole rigmarole of lighting a candle and chanting one of the daily devotions for families. But that’s okay. There’s nothing inherently sinful in all that. We don’t have to beat ourselves up with words like “failed” or phrases like “not enough.” And that’s another important lesson, this time for us. Spending any time with our kids, even if it’s spent on our heads, is good. Just as simply sitting with God is enough some days, simply sitting with our kids is enough. Remember that love is, at the end of the day, what’s most important.