How Grandparents Can Share Faith With Your Kids

Grandparents Day falls on Sunday, September 13 this year, which means sometime that afternoon your mom is going to call. She will ask about school. She will ask whether the soccer thing got sorted out. She will not ask about the prayer your seven year old has been praying every night for three weeks, the one where he adds his own line at the end about the neighbor’s dog.

She would love that story. She is not going to ask for it, because nobody has ever told her it is hers to ask about.

Most of what grandparents can share of their faith with grandchildren goes unsaid for exactly that reason, and it is usually the parent, not the grandparent, who can change it.

Why grandparents wait to be invited

There is real research on this, and it is gentler than you might expect. Sarah Holmes of Liverpool Hope University, writing in Review of Religious Research in 2022, studied how Christian grandparents understand their part in passing on faith. What she found was not indifference. It was hesitancy. Many grandparents, she reports, “lack confidence in informal scenarios,” meaning the ordinary unplanned moments where faith actually gets handed down, the car ride and the kitchen table.

The pattern across her data was grandparents as “passive agents with background involvement,” treated as “minor contributors at the periphery of the team.” And churches were not helping: grandparents “were not integral to church strategies, being rarely mentioned, resourced or empowered.”

So the silence on the phone is not disinterest. It is a person who has never been handed a job, and who is quietly worried that saying something about God to your child would be overstepping into your territory. Most grandparents are more afraid of intruding than of being asked.

You are the one who can fix that, and it takes about one text message.

Give them something specific to do

Vague invitations do not help a hesitant person. “Feel free to talk to him about faith stuff” puts the whole burden of deciding what and when back on them. Specific ones work.

• Ask for one story from their own life. Not a Bible story. Theirs. “Would you tell Ellie about the year Grandpa lost his job and what you prayed about?” A grandparent who feels unqualified to teach doctrine is completely qualified to tell you what happened to them.
• Hand them one prayer request, by name. “Micah is scared about the bus. Would you pray for that this week, and tell him you did?” The second half matters more than the first. A child who learns that someone far away is praying for the specific thing has learned something no lesson delivers.
• Let them field a hard question. The next time your kid asks something you do not have an answer for, try “that is a really good one, ask Grandma on Sunday.” It signals to both of them that the older generation is a resource and not an audience.
• Say out loud that they are welcome to. Some grandparents need the permission stated plainly. “I want them to hear about God from you too” removes a fear you may not have known was there.

Distance is less of an obstacle than it used to be. A three minute voice memo of a grandparent telling one story gets replayed by a six year old more times than you will believe.

What Paul thought was worth naming

Near the end of his life Paul wrote to a young man he had mentored, and when he wanted to account for where the faith came from, he did not start with a church or a teacher. He started two generations back.

“I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first dwelt in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and I am convinced is in you as well.” (2 Timothy 1:5)

Lois gets named first. Whatever she did was ordinary enough that scripture records no detail of it, and lasting enough that Paul could still trace the line.

If the grandparents in your child’s life have died, or are not in the picture, or do not share your faith, the same invitation works for whoever the older people around your family are. A great aunt, a neighbor, someone from church who has known your kids since they were small. The role is not strictly biological. It is somebody older than you who thinks your child is wonderful.

This Sunday

Send one text before the call, so it is not sprung on anyone: “When you talk to Sam today, would you ask him about his bedtime prayers? He has a lot to say about them.” Then get out of the way and let the two of them have it.

Bedtime Bible Stories tells each of its 82 stories four separate times, once per age band, so a grandparent reading over video call can pick the version that fits the child in front of them without doing any translating on the fly.