Helping Your Child Become Prayer Warriors, by Ann Marie Gosnell, is a 145-page soft bound book ($19.47) filled with wisdom, encouragement, and practical advice on prayer for parents everywhere. The first two chapters are How to Teach Your Child to Pray and How to Teach Your Child to Pray Scripture. The first chapter reminds you to teach your children that prayer is simply talking to the Lord and how to encourage the habit of prayer. The second chapter tells of the need to use scripture to pray and how to do so. Steps include changing the pronouns in scripture, including the names of people in scripture, and praying the scripture in your own words.

The next twenty-one chapters each concentrate on one area of prayer. Chapters range from topics such as teaching our children to pray for family or needy people, to teaching them to pray for the desire to obey or for forgiveness. Each section begins with a scripture relevant to the topic and them tells why the topic is important to our children. An example of this would be world events. Because our children live in a fallen world, they see and hear things that are hard to process at younger ages. We can help them fight the fear that often comes from that knowledge by seeking the Lord’s wisdom. As Ann Marie states, “…this allows our kids to take their focus off of prayers and place it on to the One who can do all things.” By working your way through each chapter in order, you are giving your children scripture to cling to throughout their lives and in any situation.

Following these chapters are the heart of the book–scripture cards. There are 4-28 cards for each topic, 4x4 in size, to help you pray, along with a title card for organization. You can flip to the back of the book to reference the cards or cut them out and laminate them for easy use.

Our family of 6, with kids ages 11-24, has been using this book in our devotion time for about two months now and we love it! Once a week we read a chapter aloud and discuss it. We then read the scriptures that Ann Marie provided, and a family member then chooses one to pray in the method of their choice. Several more times throughout the week we choose a different verse and pray it. The first few times we did this, we had to go back and review the three ways Ann Marie teaches on how to pray through scripture and it seemed awkward at first to several of us. Now, with several months behind us, we have become more comfortable and our prayers have moved from basic please and thank you prayers, to more carefully thought out and scripture centered prayers.

We are living in a world full of harsh realities and hurting people. For many, prayer is the backbone of their faith and what allows them to face each day. I fully believe that, armed with Helping Your Child Become Prayer Warriors, you can better equip your children to be ready to pray prayers of scripture to help in any and all situations.

Product review by Michele Pleasants, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, February 2019