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For Preschoolers • Pray for them to experience God’s love • Pray that they will know right from wrong • Pray they will develop godly attitudes For Primary School Children • Pray that you will be parents who model and inculcate the basic Christian disciplines • Pray for them to develop healthy attitudes toward themselves For Youths • Pray for them to have godly friends that would spur one another on to love and do good works • Pray for them to be strong in their faith For Emerging Young Adults • Pray they will walk in the center of God’s will for their lives • Pray for godly wisdom and maturity in handling life
More than just praying for them, teach children to pray by praying together with them from a young age. Invite them to join you in prayer as you pray for different agendas. Then encourage them to pray for yourselves as parents or even for the needs in their lives. As they pray, they will grow in their faith in God. When their prayer is answered, they experience the reality of God working in and through them. They begin to recognize God at work in their lives. B.
Model for them
Our children learn by what they see us do more than what we tell them. There are so many lessons of God and life that they can catch from us.
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Stress is something every person experiences. How you react and handle stress speaks loudly about the faith and trust you profess to have in God. Are we mindful of God in our speech and actions? Or do we punctuate our sentences with vulgarities? When we discipline them, is it in love or is it to vent your anger and frustration? How do we show our children to honor and love God if we tell them that there's no need to attend church during exams? Or something crops up at work and you conveniently decide to skip church for the weekend? We need to consciously shape the homes that our children grow and live in. Look at the various spiritual development tasks they go through by Lawrence O Richards and Gary J. Bredfeldt and see if you can intentionally model for them and concretize the learning stages in their lives.