It’s always better to let your kid choose the faith that best aligns with their beliefs, but you can also help them take the right step in this journey. Faith is a tricky thing; you’d want to use it as a tool to teach your child about kindness and compassion while employing it as something that triggers their conscience.
It’s best to draw your child into your religion with the image of a loving and understanding God, but not too compassionate to condone all trespasses. It might be a continuous struggle, but you can help your kid realize their faith with proper guidance. Aside from religious materials, your actions might express your true intentions better. To pave the way towards your child’s faith, the suggestions below might help.
Make It a Family Affair
Children are impressionable beings. They’ll try to replicate whatever they see adults do. Instead of displaying bad practices, you can take this particular habit of theirs to your advantage by showing your strong faith.
For example, you can teach them to give thanks before every meal, say their prayers before bed, and read the Bible religiously. By incorporating it into your daily routine, these practices will also find a way into your kid’s days, and before you know it, they’ve already forged their own connection with the Creator.
Build a Community
Everything starts with you, but as your child grows older, they’d be affected by external factors. However, you still have a hand in giving your child the best environment to grow up in, like bringing them to church every Sunday. Sunday services for your kid shouldn’t be gloomy affairs filled with sermons directed to adults. Sunday schools give your kid plenty of enjoyable activities that make religion fun. Moreover, this class is also perfect for socializing with their peers.
You can expand their circle more with the help of the people around you. For instance, liaising with brands such as waterstonehc.com offers a great working environment where you can meet people with the same beliefs as you, widen your insights, and give your kid a broader view of the world. Once they’re older, having your kid join your bible study is also an excellent idea.
Give Them Exercise
As much as possible, it’s best not to make their journey to faith feel like a school assignment, but if it helps them understand religion better, it might be for the greater good. Like Sunday school, you can read the chapters in the Bible every day and ask them for insights.
For one, you can help them better express their opinions through drawings and different art projects. You can also instruct them to write a journal about what they’re thankful for or what they think about the new passages they’ve learned in the Bible first thing in the morning or right before bedtime.
Don’t Turn It into a Threatening Experience
Most parents use God as a way to set their child’s conscience into action. It might help in some way by giving your kid the frightening sense that God is someone watching them at every turn, ready to strike them with thunder at the first sin they commit. However, it’s possible to help them build a stronger relationship with their faith by using gentle and unthreatening methods.
Introducing them to a loving and understanding God who is also forgiving and willing to set them on the right path should they commit mistakes will give them the confidence to share their winning moments, worries, and other thoughts during prayer. It might even become their most prominent source of strength during the challenges they might encounter in their early years.
Raise Them in Compassion
Everything is possible with grace. However, how you raise your child significantly contributes to the kind of adult they will be in society. Just because you bring your child up in a religious household doesn’t mean they won’t lose their way in the future. As mentioned above, external factors come into play once your kid interacts more with others.
Instead of shielding them from things that can harm them, doing your best to explain why good and bad things happen in the world will give them a better understanding that some things occur, whether they like it, but to remain compassionate anyway. This part is not to say that compassion and kindness will solve every problem, but things will always turn out better if approached with an empathetic heart and a strong faith than one that chooses violence.
No manual features step-by-step instructions on how to raise your child, much less one that teaches you to draw them to faith. Still, despite the challenges you might encounter along the way, as long as you are confident in your religion, you can successfully help your child understand your beliefs.
