By Kristin Milner

Parenting young kids over the past two years has been difficult, stressful, and overwhelming at times. Most moms feel as though they can’t maintain structure because of the never-ending changes caused by the pandemic. 

With all the unknowns of our daily life and the future for our families, there is one thing we can rely on to remain consistent. God’s word and love for us. Even during difficult times, God never changes, and His love never fails us. 

There’s never been a more important time to teach this to our kids. 

Teaching our children about God often comes down to our own intentionality and self-discipline. When I am having consistent time with God, the thoughts of teaching our girls what I’ve learned comes to mind more easily.

As a pastor family with three young girls, we have endured a lot of trial and error in teaching our kids about God.  Below are the best ways we have found to stay consistent with teaching them each day.

How to Make an Impact With Our Kids

As a pastor family with three young girls, we have endured a lot of trial and error in teaching our kids about God.  Below are the best ways we have found to stay consistent with teaching them each day.

Read the Bible with them.

The best way to learn about God is to read his Word. We love reading the Jesus Storybook Bible to our girls. My goal is to read them one story each day- but I must admit it’s usually more like two or three times a week.

Our oldest was baptized last year, and she loves reading from this Bible by herself. It’s easy enough for kids to read and understand, but doesn’t seem too “little kiddish” for them.

Make the Bible relevant to their daily life. 

Some of my favorite books for young girls are The Bible Belles Series. They have several books made to help young girls understand how God can help them through tough things they might face at school or in their young life.

Pray with them.

I must admit, I (regrettably) yelled at my kids a few times during 2020. The stress of sudden homeschool during a pandemic was a little much to manage at times.

On days I felt grumpy or stressed (or those times I yelled), I always went back and apologized to the kids. I explained I wasn’t being grumpy because of them, and asked them if we could all pray together.

Going forward, this became something we began for anyone who had the grumpies or made a bad choice. It has softened my heart and my kids. It’s helped us all realize how loved we are (by each other and Jesus). Stopping to pray for each other has also helped us realize we all get the grumpies sometimes. 

Discipline them.

This might seem like it should say “disciple them.” That is very important as well. One thing I want is for our children to be obedient to what God calls them to do. While we could use some improvement in the area of discipling our own kids, one thing we keep in mind is the importance of teaching them to obey with a happy heart.

Obedience doesn’t mean having control over others. It means leading well and setting a good example (for kids and others in our life) to do hard things or mundane things which bring a positive. In our home this looks like cleaning up their toys before moving on to something else, helping with laundry, or not running around the house and stopping the first time we ask (which we are still working on).

Live by example.

For better or worse, we are leading our kids. We cannot teach our kids about God if we don’t know him. The hard part about leading is this- we must go first. When I fall into unhealthy habits regarding my own self-discipline, it shows around our home and with our kids behavior. I don’t ask our kids to clean their room and help with laundry if I don’t first clean mine. In the same way, we can’t expect them to lead a life pleasing to God if we aren’t.

What a perfect time to teach this to our kids. Teaching them God’s Word during hard times could have a huge impact on them forever. 

“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” Ephesians 6:4 (ESV)

Wife Step: Choose one idea from the list above, and commit to impacting your children by adding this to your family routine.

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