Family Rosary - How to make it work

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mmmike

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We’ve been praying a family rosary pretty consistently for about a year. It seems that 90% of the time, I have to discipline one of the kids (ages 2, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15) for goofing around, causing distractions or looking at each other the wrong way.

It’s very disheartening!
  • One of the kids decided to sing the Our Father in a disrespectful crazy voice and had to be place in the corner.
  • The older ones will get sent upstairs because of giggling distractions.
  • They like to argue over who’s going to announce the mystery of the rosary.
  • The two year old might start to swing around his plastic rosary then scream when we have to take it away.
  • The other night… I caught one of them praying the rosary with their toes!
The list goes on and on!

Does ANYONE else have similar experiences? Is this normal? Any hope?
 
2, 5, and even 7 are tough ages for kids to sit through the whole Rosary. When I pray the Rosary with my kids (6, 3, 1), I shorten it to 3 Aves for each decade. If I were you, I’d pray a shorter Rosary with the small ones and the full Rosary with the older ones. You don’t want to make it into a torture session for them, it’s something you want them to learn to love.
 
Thanks!

I’ve been struggling with my 6 & 7 year old. Both Boys. The 6 year old does better than the other one. The older one sees it as a chore while the younger sees it as a way to talk to God, but overall, they both start losing it after the 2nd mystery, and it’s usually a mess during the 3rd and I end up sending them to bed and finishing the rosary by myself.
 
Your kids sound just like mine! Except add lots of giggling when somebody farts, or the toddler ties the rosary around his stuffed dog to take it for a “walk”, or somebody else decides to wear the rosary like a necklace and then can’t get it off, or someone else needs to URGENTLY go to the bathroom and winds up being in there for the entire time, assuring us that she can still hear us! And she’s praying on the pot!

We do an abbreviated rosary- sometimes just one Hail Mary per decade or we do one mystery per night. The latter is kind of nice because we can spend a little more time on the story, which the younger kids get into a little more. It works a lot better for our very active kids.
 
mmmike said:
We’ve been praying a family rosary pretty consistently for about a year. It seems that 90% of the time, I have to discipline one of the kids (ages 2, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15) for goofing around, causing distractions or looking at each other the wrong way.

It’s very disheartening!
  • One of the kids decided to sing the Our Father in a disrespectful crazy voice and had to be place in the corner.
  • The older ones will get sent upstairs because of giggling distractions.
  • They like to argue over who’s going to announce the mystery of the rosary.
  • The two year old might start to swing around his plastic rosary then scream when we have to take it away.
  • The other night… I caught one of them praying the rosary with their toes!
The list goes on and on!

Does ANYONE else have similar experiences? Is this normal? Any hope?
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There are two possibilities:

    • This is completely normal. Or…
    • Your kids and my kids are weird and abnormal, while all other Catholic families have perfect kids who never misbehave, especially not during prayer time.
    For your sake and for my sake, I hope that #1 is the correct answer. 🙂

    Seriously, yes, we have had many of these same experiences during family prayer times, and especially on those few occasions when we have tried to pray the rosary together with all the kids. (We have four boys, ages 3 to 10.) I will give you some limited advice based on our experience:
    • Don’t have any expectation of good behavior from anyone under the age of 5, and especially not from a 2-year-old. Just give the 2-year-old a kid-friendly (i.e., not easily breakable) rosary to play with, and let him or her wander around and do whatever, as long as he or she isn’t bothering anyone. If the 2-year-old is still a distraction, just let him or her play or watch TV in another room. There will be time to involve him or her in the family rosary in the coming years.
    • Maybe just start with one decade of the rosary at a time, until the kids show that they can handle that much without misbehaving, or without driving you crazy. Or, dismiss the two youngest kids after the first decade, then dismiss the next youngest one after the second decade, then dismiss the next youngest one after the third decade, and keep the two oldest all the way to the end. Of course, the understanding would be that as each of the kids gets older, he or she has to stay for more decades, until eventually each kid is old enough to stay for the whole thing.
    • Try praying the rosary at a time when you are all driving somewhere together. That way you have a captive audience. They know they can’t go anywhere, and they are already bored anyway, so they may be more receptive to praying the rosary without causing trouble. Do you make a weekly trip somewhere as a family, that is at least a 20-minute drive? Perhaps a trip to see the grandparents every Sunday, or something like that? If so, turn that trip into a weekly family rosary time.
 
PietroPaolo said:
2, 5, and even 7 are tough ages for kids to sit through the whole Rosary. When I pray the Rosary with my kids (6, 3, 1), I shorten it to 3 Aves for each decade. If I were you, I’d pray a shorter Rosary with the small ones and the full Rosary with the older ones. You don’t want to make it into a torture session for them, it’s something you want them to learn to love.
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I like the idea of shortening each decade to three Hail Marys (or even just one Hail Mary), at least for the younger kids. That’s something worth considering.
 
My mom used to have us write letters with things and people we are praying for. We put the papers behind a statue. It kind of increased our connection to prayer. Let them write their own if they can, to increase their connection. And yeah, we had it all: the sleepiness, complaints, jokes, problems, wangles and tangles.
 
My mother tells the story of how when they were younger (they prayed the rosary every night during Lent on their knees) her and her sister would try to pray the rosary in an increasingly soprano voice without getting “caught”: for being disrespectful.

When my children were younger they had a bracelet rosary and we prayed one decade which even at times was a challenge.

Mary.
 
I really love the responses to the post esp. the one of the little one counting on toes.
 
Wow, what wonderful families 🙂 I just wanted to add that I had to make a rule that everyone bow their head and *close their eyes. *Greatly reduced the problems (He’s looking at me!!!) altho messed up my concentration as we went through the “training period.”

For little ones, we would all start the Rosary together, and the younger ones would quietly kiss us goodnight when they were sleepy (or we indicated that their behavior was showing us they needed to go to bed!). We made it a sign of maturity to be able to stay longer.
 
mmmike said:
The list goes on and on!

Does ANYONE else have similar experiences? Is this normal? Any hope?
Click to expand...
I’d say it’s completely normal. I don’t punish my kids for goofing off or not participating fully when we pray the Rosary. I will stop and tell them we’re not going to continue until they calm down, but I don’t turn it into a negative experience. I don’t want them to look at family prayer as a drudgery or punishment.
 
I also try to correct the children (12 and 9) during the Rosary, but the corrections themselves become a distraction pretty quickly. One thing my daughter really enjoys is a little comic book that sets out each mystery in comic book form - each Hail Mary is a comic book panel in the story. She’ll sit and pray along with the book in front of her and she probably has better focus on the mystery that way than I do.

Here it is: christianbooksbibles.com/product-p/9780819864796.htm
 
Thank you all for the great suggestions! We’re going to try them out this week.

I’m so glad to hear that we are not the only ones out there!
 
Great ideas! I have unfortunately made prayers time a drudgery with the grumpiness.

Loved the comic book idea, some things are easier when they have s visual to go by. After all, that’s what our sacred art is for. 🙂

Will apply the praying for intentions as corrective measures.

St. Joseph, please pray for me to receive the Grace of Charity to patiently teach my children which God entrusted to me. Amen.
 
My stepdaughter is 9. For the Rosary, usually we will say one full decade, and dedicate 2 Aves to each mystery.
 
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