Praying with Toddlers

One of us prays daily with our eighteen-month-old son. To some this might sound bananacrackers crazy, but it’s actually no big hassle. It’s a lovely part of our day and it’s a huge priority for us as we try to build up a rhythm of family life that incorporates devotion as something that feels as integral as mealtimes and naptimes. We hope we are building a lifelong habit and we believe in starting little to grow big: start when they’re little and start with something little.

Make it part of your routine

The easiest way to pray with a toddler is to tag it onto something else that you are already doing. We decided to make it part of bedtime, as that’s a nice mellow time of day anyway that has a set pattern already. It was easy to interject a small prayer time in between bathtime and story time.

It can also be helpful to add a prayerful dimension to something you’re doing anyway. For example, when we first started doing a bedtime routine with our then-baby, there was great debate about what the goodnight song should be. Seriously, the homoousios-homoiousios thing had nothing on us. But eventually it came to us in a moment of divine inspiration – why not chose the Ambrosian hymn from Compline? It’s perfectly fitted to that time of day in words and tune and we both knew it already. (My husband sings it in Latin, I sing it in English, and to his eternal chagrin I only know the festal tune – but we all have our crosses to bear!) One day I hope our little boy will learn to sing it with us, but right now we stand over his cot singing to him in the dark as the last thing before we say goodnight and close the door.

Keep it short

When he was one-and-a-bit, we introduced prayers to our bedtime routine. He brushes his teeth, has his bath, gets into his pyjamas, and then it’s time to say our prayers. This takes less than two minutes from start to finish. We light two candles, say an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory Be (again, in Latin or English depending on who is doing bedtime…) and then blow out the candles and go into his bedroom for his story, song and lights out. He’s pretty biddable at this time of day, but you could easily make it shorter if you wanted to. Stop in front of a picture of Our Lady on your landing and say a single Hail Mary.

It is short, deliberately so, but as he grows older it will provide an existing moment in the day to hang other devotions on – much as our existing bedtime routine gave us something to hang evening prayers on. I think it helps us too that it’s always the same – three, standard, rote prayers. We intend to keep it that way to retain the soothing comfort factor of routine, and to ensure that he can gradually learn the prayers and join in with them.

Make it special and involve the senses

Children know that they can behave differently in different places and with different people. If you haven’t already, create a space for prayer in your home. It could be as simple as hanging a devotional image on a wall, or as involved as a dedicated feast table that changes with the liturgical seasons. We are lucky enough to have a tiny (truly truly tiny) box room that we’ve outfitted with a stool, a radiator cover, a crucifix and two candlesticks.

As well as making the space special, make the time special. We light the two candles, which our toddler loves. I am pretty sure he thinks the entire point of evening prayers is the lighting and blowing out of the candles. That’s fine! We hold him in our arms (er, safety first!) while we say the prayers and he gazes at the candles and then he “helps” to blow them out. Remembering to keep it short above all, anything you can do to grab their attention and engage their senses will help to make it a time they enjoy rather than a time they try to escape.

Keep your expectations reasonable

We hold our toddler in our arms – partly because of lit candles, but partly because otherwise he might well be toddling out of the door to get to his story quicker! There’s no way he would sit, stand or kneel still for any length of time – so we don’t ask him to. It would all end in tears.

We try to get him to repeat “Amen”. Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t. If he starts saying other things we either shush him gently or ignore him, depending on which we think will be more productive at that moment.

“Not actively disruptive” is the goal here, and we get out every tool in our toolbox to make that as easy as possible. We don’t want prayer time to become a time when we’re telling him off and nagging him constantly, so we tailor it to what we think he can manage. If this hadn’t worked out, we might have decided to try some loud hymn-singing and clapping as part of our morning routine, for example.

Think long term

At this stage it’s just about doing something that you can develop later, but making it part of your everyday routine so that your toddler comes to expect it. You can always change stuff if it’s not working, or add stuff later. No one seriously expects a toddler to have an active personal spiritual life!

It’s about the formation of the habit of daily prayer rather than what the prayer involves specifically. I hope that in time, it will provide an easy way to teach our son classic Catholic prayers (yes, probably in English and in Latin…) and to provide a springboard for his own devotional life as he grows up so that he has a moment in the day to hang personal prayer on and a model for what it might look like. But all that is many years away. All I want him to learn now is that we pray every day and that it’s a nice, special time to look forward to.