I just wanted to ask what suggestions you would have for teaching children to pray?

Answer

I think a really great thing to use to teach a child to pray would be just the Lord's prayer, which really should have been called the Disciples' prayer. Not that that's the normal prayer for the Christian, it's a Jewish prayer, really asking for the Kingdom to come. But it's a beautiful thing to talk about the things to pray about. "Our Father," God is our Father. "Who art in heaven," that's where He is. "Give us this day our daily bread," we pray to God for the food that we eat, the things that we need every day. And then there's forgiveness in it. And then the Kingdom of God to come. I think to use the Lord's prayer is kind of a beautiful way to start to teach a child just what are the basic ingredients in prayer.

Well I'll tell you how I work with my children and that is that...and their ages are 2 and she's out, she's running around the room at the time...how old are my kids? Seven, nine and eleven. And we pray every night and we share requests. We pray specifically. In other words, my daughter used to always pray, "God bless the whole wide world." You know, and I used to tell her you can't pray that because God can't answer that. What's He going to do, you know, zap the whole wide world? And you'd never even know it. So you have to pray specifically. So we say, "What do we want to pray about tonight?" "Well, a little girl in my class, you know, broke her leg, or we want to pray for the missionaries, or let's pray for Dad because he has to speak or he has to study," or whatever. We share little requests and we just pray about those things.