How to start reading the Bible with young kids

We all want our kids to know and love God, and to enjoy him in glory for ever. 

We all know that it’s through God’s word that our kids will hear about Jesus’ death and resurrection and what it means to follow him.

 We all know from our own experience that reading the Bible is sometimes hard, doesn’t necessarily produce spiritual fireworks, is easy to skip… and yet God uses it to show us the Lord Jesus and the beauty of his gospel. 

Put all that together and here’s the not-so-revolutionary, so easy-to-forget truth:

The best thing we can do today for our children is prayerfully to share God’s word with them.

That’s worth repeating: the best thing we can do today for our children is prayerfully to share God’s word with them. 

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We don’t know your family. But if it’s anything like ours, that will often not be easy. Days are busy. Routines get interrupted. Parents get (very) tired. Kids’ attention wanders. 

And maybe it’s been a long time since you last did this. Maybe you have never done this.

So here are three tips, each with some specific ideas, for how to get started (or re-started) with family Bible times: 

1. Make it manageable

• Start with small steps and be realistic about how long young kids can concentrate. If your children seem focused and eager for 10 minutes, brilliant! But three minutes with a 2-year-old is much better than nothing at all; and those three minutes will probably have turned into 10 by the time they’re 5.
• Think about ways to accommodate children of different ages. Very young toddlers are unlikely to engage as long or as attentively as an older sibling. Consider if you could enjoy a Bible time with them separately on different days, or at different times of day, or tag-team as adults.
• There are lots of resources aimed at different ages, so do some browsing or ask for recommendations. (At The Good Book Company, we produce Beginning with God for pre-schoolers, XTB for 7-10 year olds, and Table Talk for families with children ages 5-11.) But you can keep it as simple as working through a children’s Bible story (or as they get older, a book of the Bible, reading a short passage each time), and asking the question, “What do we learn about God in this story?” before turning your answers into a thank-you prayer.   

2. Make it fun

• Incorporate something you know your children will enjoy and respond to enthusiastically: A family chant/rhyme that signals Bible time or a special area where family Bible time happens.
• Fun responses (we encouraged our children to come up with ‘WOW!’ prayers – praise prayers that began with a loud and excited ‘WOW!’)
• End by asking one of your kids to draw what you’ve been looking at together on a chalkboard or dry erase board
• If sitting down calmly around a book sounds unrealistic, make the Bible time more physically interactive. Use toys/pictures positioned around the room as visuals for the story that children have to run to/jump on as they hear them mentioned. Give your child an action to do (touch nose/jump around/salute…) every time they hear a key name, word or phrase. Look for ways to enact some element of the story.
• Talk positively and enthusiastically about spending time sharing God’s word. Children take their cues from us—they ape our excitement or our negativity. So show them how much you love God’s word, and let them see you enjoying your own personal devotional times. 

3. Make it regular 

• Pick your time well, avoiding times when your kids are likely to be hungry and/or tired, and remember the best time will change at different life stages. Choose part of your day when you are already settled together: perhaps after a meal or as part of your bedtime-reading routine.
• Commit! And don’t panic when days are missed or your Bible time doesn’t feel like a ‘win’. Some days children will be unresponsive or monosyllabic, distracted or disruptive. But if children don’t seem keen, by persevering you are showing them the importance of God’s word, and that it is not something to open up only when you feel like it.
• Resources that you can keep cycling through are a great place to start. Repetition helps establish stories and ideas, and children gain confidence from familiarity.

One more thing: Bible times can last all day…

Beyond our “family Bible times”, there are lots of ways to make talking about and reflecting on Scriptural truth just a natural part of how we do life as a family. Here are four brief ideas:

1. Enjoy making crafts or baking recipes that lend themselves to sharing a related Bible story.

2. There are lots of great CDs that set Bible verses or stories to (really good!) music, such as Randall Goodgame’s Sing the Bible or Colin Buchanan’s Big Bible Stories.

3. Bathtime is good for acting out Bible stories featuring water. And what you see when you’re out and about (trees, rain, frogs, fish etc) can be a springboard to talking about Bible stories

 However you do it and however it goes, be praying. Be praying for the Spirit to be at work in your children to form and grow their faith, even on the days when it feels like a battle and not much seems to be sinking in. The Spirit is powerful enough to work through our efforts, and despite our flaws! 

The best thing we can do today for our children is prayerfully to share God’s word with them.

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