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How to Help Your Child Grow Spiritually Through Play

How to Help Your Child Grow Spiritually Through Play

Last updated on: March 2, 2024 at 5:07 pm by Joy Wendling, MA

How to Help Your Child Grow Spiritually Through Play 2024-03-02T17:07:16-08:00 Joy Wendling, MA

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A blonde mother playing blocks with her two blonde daughters.

Play adds joy and relevance to children’s spiritual development. | Photo by Ivorymix.com.

Kids who grow up to continue to walk with Jesus need to take ownership of their faith. You, Christian parents, are the best people to help them do that. You are with them the most, you know them the most, and they trust you the most. One of the best ways to help your child take ownership of faith and grow spiritually is through play.

Owning Their Faith Series

This post is the third of a series on equipping you to help your child own their faith. We have already talked about:

Now, let’s talk about the way your kids want and need to process what they are learning to find purpose and relevance in God and the Bible for their lives: PLAY!

How Does A Child Grow Spiritually Through Play?

Play is the way that God designed kids to learn. Through hands-on experimentation, creation, and exploration, children repeat over and over things that engage them, make them curious, and bring them joy. This joy-sparked repetition creates neural pathways in their brains and, aha, they have learned something. Read more about this in last week’s article.

Quote by Fred Rogers "Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning, but for children play is serious learning."

How Can Parents Bring Play into Discipleship?

It is much easier than you might think. There are two easy ways to help your child grow spiritually through play:

Add faith to play. – This means observing what your children are already doing or talking about in their play and scaffolding (or asking questions and having conversations that gently take your child to the next level of learning) that play and those conversations. For example, your child is playing with a boat. You might say, “Did you know that God once used a boat to save all the animals in the world?” or “That’s a cool boat. Did you know that there is a story in the Bible where Jesus fell asleep on a boat during a storm and his friends got really scared?”
Add play to faith. – This is where we start with discipleship and add play to it. You can do that by reading a story together, listening to a worship song, praying or having a faith conversation that you add play to. It might be art, a play invitation, baking, or dancing with musical instruments. But, it needs to be voluntary for it to be play.

“In your presence is abundant joy.”

Psalm 16:11 CSB

Are Bible Cartoons Play?

No, while Bible cartoons or any other Christian show may be fun, it is not play. Shows are entertainment. Play is active and entertainment is passive.

Active activities lead children to do great things and have great thoughts. Passive activities do not typically facilitate that deep thinking.

“O Lord, what great works you do!

And how deep are your thoughts.”

Psalm 92:5 NLT

Quote by Joy Wendling, "Play is not the same thing as entertainment, especially in kid's discipleship."

Episode 91 of my podcast, Playfully Faithful Parenting, talks about the difference between play and entertainment. But, one quick test is to ask, “Who is creating the fun?” If you are creating the fun, that is entertainment. If the kids are creating it, it is play.

3 Tips to Help Your Child Grow Spiritually Through Play

Here are 3 simple ways to get started incorporating more play that kids want into your family discipleship:

Observe your child and see how they enjoy playing. How can you use their interests to bring play and faith together?
Plan the environment and tools, but let them decide what and how to play.
Open-ended, process art is a much more productive type of art for faith development than product art. Process art does not have an expected finished product. Product art are craft kits and coloring pages that show the kids exactly what their art is supposed to look like. There will be more on this later in the series.

I’m Trying But My Kids Don’t Know How to Play without Direction

If you try this once or twice and your children look at you like “Ok, what am I supposed to do?” That is okay! There is nothing wrong with you or your kids. Sometimes children have learned to follow directions and grow out of their creativity, but it can be developed and re-learned.

Quote by Fred Rogers "Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning."

Keep trying, be patient, and model some creative ideas out loud, “Oh, look! We have some blocks and some animals, what do you think we could do? Let’s name a few Bible stories with animals to decide what we might like to play.”

Invite the Holy Spirit to bless you with creativity and over time, you will get there. Also, feel free to reach out to me in an email and we can brainstorm together.

Play not only helps your kids learn, but you will enjoy family discipleship more which will make it easier to do more often!

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About Joy Wendling, MA

Enthusiastic. Passionate. Profound. Joy Wendling is a family pastor, writer, speaker, podcaster, certified parent coach, and founder of Created to Play. She has over 20 years of experience in children, youth, and family ministry, as well as a Master’s in Youth, Family, and Culture from Fuller Theological Seminary. Her idea of relaxing is gazing at the mountains from her island home with an ice-cold Diet Coke and a good book. Joy lives in the Pacific Northwest and enjoys laughing and playing with her five daughters and husband. Get to know her better at CreatedtoPlay.com and on her podcast titled Playfully Faithful Parenting. You can read more about the author here.

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