Praying for Your Children (with Simple Prayer Cards)

There are so many things I want to give my children.

I want them to grow up in a stable home, feel loved, have a fun childhood, have great friends from families with similar values, and someday find a great spouse who loves them dearly and sincerely. I find myself wanting so much for their present and their future, but also worrying a lot about what and who they will be.

As parents, we need to be praying. And I am preaching to the choir here. This is absolutely an area where I need to be much more intentional. Most of this blog is me thinking through and encouraging myself to pray more often—just full disclosure!

We need to pray because we, as parents, need our cups filled with the love, knowledge, and grace of Christ. We need to pray because our children need someone advocating on their behalf. There are a lot of arrows from the enemy coming at our littles from every direction.

And as much as I want to guide, protect, teach, and prepare my children for everything that might come their way, there is so much that I simply cannot do. So I keep coming back to prayer.

Prayer is a gift from God, an opportunity to talk to Him and share with Him our joys, fears, sorrows, hopes, and dreams.

As we talk with Him, read our Bibles, and meditate on Scripture, we get to know Him more and more. And if there's something worth knowing, I would say our Creator takes the cake.

Psalm 139:13–14 says:

“For you created my inmost being;you knit me together in my mother’s womb.I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;your works are wonderful,I know that full well.”

He knows us best.

If you want to master something or understand it better, you typically spend time reading a manual or book or research a subject matter expert. So it would make logical sense that if we want to better understand ourselves, our kids, and what is best for all of the above, we would spend time with the Creator.

Many times, I find it hard to let the Type A portion of my brain enter into prayer for what it is.

I like my lists. Clearly, this is a blog about a prayer list 🙂. I like outlines. I like knowing what needs to be done and then doing it.

While prayer is a discipline of the Christian faith, moving from the discipline and habit-setting part of prayer into the joy and fulfillment of prayer can be a challenge.

Before children, I honestly found prayer more enjoyable because I had time. Now, as a mother, like most things, I'm still trying to figure out how it fits into my semi-routine schedule.

I keep coming back to Psalm 37:4:

“Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

Motherhood is a season of learning new ways to “delight yourself in the Lord.”

One of the deepest desires I have—and I think many Christian parents have is to raise and mother my children in a way that draws them toward God.

And the more I know God, the more I want Him to shape even that desire. I don't just want Him to accomplish my plans for my children. I want to know Him well enough that what He desires for my children increasingly becomes what I desire for them, too.

I think my wake-up call for really needing prayer in motherhood came after my second child was born.

She had a few health issues that concerned me but didn't seem to concern the doctors, so I felt very alone trying to figure out how to help her without much guidance. As she grew older, some of those same concerns continued, and she also developed a strong-willed personality, nothing like my husband or me.

Between the health concerns and her completely different outlook on life, I felt like I lost a lot of control that I thought I had. My firstborn? Such a typical firstborn mother hen.

And while I probably shouldn't have been surprised that we ended up with a spunky second-born, I just didn't think that was a possibility coming from two Anabaptist-raised kids who were both fifth-born in their families. We are go with the flow kinda people.

The more I complained to my mom and other family members about how hard it was to parent this child, the advice I kept receiving was:

“Well, you've really got to be praying for that child.”

I hate to say this, but I didn't like that answer. I wanted straightforward answers! Give me Kevin Leman's Have a New Kid by Friday. Give me the instructions. Tell me what I'm supposed to do, and I'll do it. I think Kevin Leman is a great Christian author with an awesome understanding of kids and parenting. But he doesn't know my children.

But who does…God. Who knows her future…God.

So this has been part of my journey in heeding my wise mother and father's advice and learning to pray over my children. If there is anything I can attest to from my childhood years, it is that my parents prayed.

My mom was up most mornings in her office praying, reading her Bible, studying God's Word, and praying over her family. My dad, a pastor, was also in prayer. If there was a prayer meeting, he was there—and, of course, as the pastor, he was often leading it.

I watched and heard my parents pray together numerous times, too. I truly believe the fact that all five of my siblings continued to follow the Lord has far more to do with the fact that my parents prayed than with them being perfect parents.

My dad has shared with us kids multiple times a prayer he has prayed over our family many, many times:

“Lord, let my children love You not because of me, but in spite of me.”

What a humbling prayer. But also, what a freeing thought.

We as parents are absolutely accountable for how we love our children and how we raise them. Not to be dramatic, but Jesus said it first:

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”—Matthew 18:6

I brushed over that verse until I became the parent of a toddler, and WOW, the weight of that verse sits heavy now.

Especially four kids in. And especially at 4:30 p.m. when I'm trying to cook dinner and three out of four kids are apparently starving. Leading by an example of love and compassion isn't always what's on my mind in those moments.

It should be. I would love for it to be. But it's a work in progress. My children's walk with God will certainly be shaped by my mothering. There's no doubt about that.

At night, when my mind is racing, I think of all the ways I could have loved them better, talked a little more graciously, or responded a little kinder when they asked me to peel the third clementine in a row in the middle of making dinner—when they fully know how to peel one themselves.

But in the moment, my flesh takes over, and I respond as a human requiring constant grace and renewal through Jesus. As much as my mothering is a part of how I help position their hearts before God, God is also writing a story in my children's hearts.

God has them on their own journey, with their own minds and their own thoughts. I hope the way we bring them up puts them in places where they experience genuine, tender love. I hope they experience gracious, fatherly love from my husband and a nurturing, kind mother who is compassionate toward them.

So when I pray for my children, I'm really praying two ways.

• I pray that God works in me so I can parent them faithfully.
• I pray that God works in them in a way I never can.

I pray that He captures their hearts at such a young age that nothing can take them away. That their minds are, in a way, hedged in. That they may see things to the left and the right that tempt them, but they don't go.

I pray that His Shepherd's crook is so strong in their lives and that the nudging of the Holy Spirit is so strong that it continually leads them back onto the straight and narror path.

That's my prayer for them constantly. It's a prayer for me—to mother them, guide them, and guard them.

It's a prayer for them—that when things come their way, they have a foundation. That they know God is their refuge and that He will be with them. That they find their hope, their joy, and their restoration in Him rather than seeking those things somewhere else.

So, a little somber. Let’s move onto the Prayer Cards….

But this is really part of the reason I made these prayer cards.

I'm a journaler. That's how I like to sit down and pray. In my mind it's:

Okay, got my journal, got my Bible, got my coffee. Now I can pray.

And, of course, that's not always how it works as a mom.

You sit down to do all those things, and inevitably, the morning you wake up at 5 a.m. to have that quiet time, somebody else wakes up at 5 a.m.

And it is go time.

There is no amount of telling everyone to go back to bed that is going to work because then you have screaming kids. Now you're angry or frustrated or impatient, and suddenly it feels almost impossible to sit there and pray.

So I made these prayer cards as a quick way to pull something out and have a reminder of how I can pray for each individual child.

They give my husband and me something we can use to pray for our children before we go to bed at night, in the morning, or whenever we have a few minutes. There's a verse to guide us in our prayers and space to write a few specific prayer requests for that child.

They're small enough that I can tuck one into my Bible, tuck it into my purse, and take it anywhere with me.

I personally laminate mine and use a wet-erase marker. That way, as prayers are answered or new prayer requests come up, I can erase something and write in a new one. If there's a Scripture on one card that I want to meditate on and pray over a different child, I can do that too.

And when we see a prayer very clearly answered, that's something I can sit down and write about in my actual journal and capture as a memory.

These cards are for those in-between moments. Sometimes all you have time for are those short prayers, those 5 or 10 minute moments to pray for your kids and your family.

I personally chose to laminate mine so that I can use a wet erase marker on them. The wet erase stays much better than a dry erase maker. I make these on 5x7 Desktop Publishing Company paper but they are also compatible with Avery

95348. The paper I use are already perforated so it’s easy to cut fold and tear the cards. I also use laminating pouches. With homeschooling I have enough projects and systems that my laminating system makes sense for me but you absolutely can just print these out on copy paper or cardstock and cut them out- use however you want! I’ve linked my items here if you are interested in laminating too.

I like using some good, hunky Scripture on my prayer cards because I need that focus.

I need some very direct language from Scripture to help me slow down, focus my thoughts, and understand how I'm praying for my child rather than staring at a blank page trying to figure out where to begin.

That's what these cards are designed to provide: Scripture to guide your prayers and a simple place to write the specific prayers you're carrying for each child.

They aren't meant to create another perfect morning routine or another thing we have to check off our list. Just simply something to pull out when we have five minutes, ten minutes, or a quiet moment before bed.

And I am constantly reminded that my prayers for my children may be one of the greatest gifts I can give them as their mom, because prayer allows us to be transformed, too.

As I pray for my children, I'm asking God to transform me as their mother—to shape my heart, give me wisdom, and teach me how to love and parent them faithfully. At the same time, I'm praying prayers of protection, guidance, and wisdom over my children so that they, too, can walk in the transforming power of Jesus Christ.

I can guide them. I can guard them. I can teach them Scripture and put them in places where they experience genuine love. I can apologize when I get it wrong and ask God for the grace to do better tomorrow.

There is a work in their hearts that I simply cannot do. So I pray. I pray that God works in me. And I pray that God works in them.

Maybe that's one of the beautiful things about praying for our children—as we ask God to work in their hearts, we are continually inviting Him to work in ours, too.