How to Encourage Your Kids to Love Their Faith
If your family is religious, then it stands to reason that you want your children to be religious too. You want them to feel connected to their faith, to their God, and have the same values as you and that makes very sensible sense. Having deeper conversations about faith with children can be hard because getting them interested in getting off their tablets and having those discussions is hard.
The thing is, it doesn’t have to be a difficult thing to do as long as you understand how to reach your children. You can watch these epic movies about the Bible here, and you can talk about Bible stories. The key is in ensuring that your children feel comfortable having these discussions in the first place. You have to find ways of making your faith situationally relevant, so here are some simple things that you can get started with.
- Untangle their interest. Increasing your children’s interest in their faith does not mean increasing how many times you take them to church every week. Let’s be honest, even the most faithful families can understand that church is boring for a child. They are encouraged to be quiet and to sit still, neither of which are in the nature of a child in the first place! You want your children to be interested, that means you need to consider what would interest them about God the most.
- Lean into spiritual development. It’s not just about going to church, but spiritual development is about having conversations about prayer and faith. Study the Bible together and talk about the metaphors in the stories. Think about what it means to untangle those metaphors and how they can apply them to real life. Your beliefs also may not need to be within the extreme. Consider what religion teaches from a book that was written millions of years ago versus what the world is like today and what children will have to face . They can learn to draw comfort from the Bible if you lean into spiritual development.
- Ask them what they know and believe about Jesus, and the Bible. Parents can spend a lot of time telling their kids about Christianity, but the important thing is to let children develop their own opinions about it. Forcing a child to read the Bible isn’t going to help to believe in any kind of God. In fact that’s actually going to push him away from it. If you want your children to be more interested in their faith, you have to have discussions rather than demanding their time. Ask your children if they believe in God. Ask them what they know of that would help them to see that God exists in their world. They may not have answers to those questions, but as a parent you can take the time to teach them.
- Consider what they are interested in right now. Some children might love Bible study but hate sitting in a church, so maximize on their interests in the religion. If they love movies, then the epic Bible movies that we spoke about earlier would be a good place to start.
