By Hal Pickus · · 5 min read
Praying for your kids: a guide for tired parents
There's a specific kind of worry that comes with having kids. It wakes you up. It rides along to drop-off and sits with you while they're at a sleepover. You can't be with them every minute, and somewhere around the time they learn to walk, you realize you can't protect them from everything. Prayer is how you cover the ground you can't.
Start here: they were God's before they were yours.
Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
Psalm 127:3
A heritage. A reward. Not a possession you have to manage perfectly — a gift on loan from the One who loves them even more than you do. That stops being a cliché the night you're scared; it becomes the only thing that lets you sleep.
What to actually pray for your kids
When the worry is general, the prayer gets vague — "God, just be with them." Specific is better. Pray for these:
- Their hearts — that they'd stay soft toward God and toward people, and quick to come back when they wander.
- Their safety — body and mind, the parts you can see and the parts they'll never tell you about.
- Their friends — that God would put one or two genuinely good ones in their path. Few things shape a kid more.
- Their faith — that one day it would be really theirs, not just inherited from you.
That last one has a promise attached to it worth praying right back to God:
And all thy children shall be taught of the LORD; and great shall be the peace of thy children.
Isaiah 54:13
A prayer
Father, my kids are yours before they're mine. Today I'm asking you to teach ______ yourself — to be near them in the rooms I'm not in. Keep their hearts soft. Give them good friends. Protect them in ways I'll never know about. And one day, let their faith be truly their own. Amen.
When you're praying for a kid who's wandering
Maybe your child isn't little anymore, and they've walked away — from the faith, from wisdom, from you. This is the prayer that gets prayed through tears. Hold onto this one:
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6
"When he is old." There's a long timeline in that verse. The story isn't over. Keep praying — parents have watched that promise come true decades later.
And let yourself off the hook a little
Here's what no one tells exhausted parents: praying for your kids is not one more thing you have to do perfectly. A whispered "God, help them" in the car counts. A sigh over their bedroom door counts. John said it best about the people he loved:
I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.
3 John 1:4
That joy is what you're praying toward. If you're carrying a heavy worry about one of your children right now, you don't have to carry it by yourself — write it down and let other parents and praying people stand with you.