A prayer for my children
The prayer
Lord, I did not make them alone and I will not manage to keep them alone.
Keep their bodies, which I can no longer reach. Keep their hearts, which I reach even less.
Where I got it wrong, mend it along the way. Where I got it right without noticing, carry on.
Give me patience for what is still being formed and silence for what is no longer mine to decide.
And if today they are far from me, let them not be far from you.
Amen.
In short
This is a prayer for your children, written for this site and signed. It works for a small child and for a grown one who no longer lives here. It is not remote control: it asks for keeping, for patience, and for whatever can still be repaired.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 5 min read
When to pray it
At their bedroom door after they are asleep, before school, before a hard conversation — and on the days when praying is the only thing left, because they are already out of your reach.
The prayer above deliberately avoids the request that appears most often in the prayers of parents: that the child make the right choices. The wish is not a bad one — the problem is that it turns prayer into a remote control, and no prayer works that way. Praying for someone does not cancel that person’s freedom, and a page suggesting otherwise would be selling influence over another human being’s life.
That has a consequence that matters for anyone who arrives here in pain. A child who has walked away, got into trouble, or stopped speaking to you is not proof that you prayed too little or prayed badly. Proverbs 22:6 is a proverb, and the genre observes what tends to happen rather than guaranteeing an outcome. Read as a warranty, it becomes an accusation against parents who did what they could with what they had.
What the prayer asks for is modest and possible: keeping for what you cannot reach, patience for what is still being formed, and silence over what is no longer your decision. The third is the hardest to mean, and it is the one that changes a relationship with an adult child — most of the fighting in families with grown children starts with advice given at the wrong moment, not with a shortage of love.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared Written for Faith Flame in 2026
The oldest prayer for a child in the Bible does not ask for the child to stay. Hannah asks for a son, receives Samuel, and hands the boy over to the temple — a scene we would now read as loss is told there as the natural end of the request. It is an uncomfortable beginning for a tradition of mothers’ prayers, and an honest one: anyone praying for a child is praying for somebody who is going to leave.
There is no fixed traditional formula for this, which is why this prayer was written for this site and goes out signed. What the Christian tradition does have is the blessing laid on a child — the hand on the head, running through the Old Testament, surfacing in Mark 10 when Jesus takes children into his arms, and surviving in the ordinary gesture of a parent blessing a child at the door.
It was written to work at both ends of a child’s life. A baby and a forty-year-old who has stopped answering the phone do not ask for the same thing, but they ask for the same verb: keep. That is why the final stanza is there — it is the only part of the prayer that works identically for the parent with a child asleep next door and the parent who does not know where their child is tonight.
Little-known details
The first prayer for a child in the Bible ends with the mother giving him away
In the edition published here, the famous verse about raising a child announces itself as a proverb
What the passages say
27I prayed for this child, and the Lord granted to me my petition, which I asked of him.
28Because of this, I have also lent him to the Lord, for all the days when he shall be lent to the Lord.” And they adored the Lord in that place. And Hannah prayed, and she said:
The passage behind this page. Watch the structure: the asking is recalled, the receiving is acknowledged, and the very next clause is the handing over. Hannah does not keep what she prayed for, and the narrator presents that as consistency rather than heroic sacrifice.
3Behold, the inheritance of the Lord is sons, the reward is the fruit of the womb.
Children are called an inheritance and a reward — both words for something received rather than achieved. Read it inside the whole psalm, which opens by saying that a house built without the Lord is wasted labour: the praise of children arrives after a warning about anxious overwork. (Psalm 127 in Hebrew-numbered Bibles.)
13And they brought to him the little children, so that he might touch them. But the disciples admonished those who brought them.
14But when Jesus saw this, he took offense, and he said to them: “Allow the little ones to come to me, and do not prohibit them. For of such as these is the kingdom of God.
15Amen I say to you, whoever will not accept the kingdom of God like a little child, will not enter into it.”
16And embracing them, and laying his hands upon them, he blessed them.
One detail usually slips past: the people keeping the children away are the disciples, and they are the ones Jesus takes offence at. The closing gesture — embracing them, laying hands on them, blessing them — is the devotional root of a parent blessing a child with a hand on the head.
6The proverb is: A youth is close to his way; even when he is old, he will not withdraw from it.
The verse parents quote most and the verse most often used against them. In this edition it opens by calling itself a proverb, which is exactly the right warning label: read as a guarantee, it implies that every child who went astray had parents who failed, and the text says nothing of the kind.