This reality is one I feel so deeply. My kids are old enough to be relatively independent in the morning, but that still doesn’t stop the chaos! Something often worms its way in there to interrupt the one thing you REALLY need to start the day off right. My intended 15 minutes of Scripture reading turn into “Jesus, I love you. Help me to have patience today.” But if you’re like me, this doesn’t just happen in the mornings. All day long things come up that feel urgent and necessary and your prayer life keeps taking a backseat. That can often mean your kids’ prayer lives do too. Whether you stay home with your kids or not, finding a time to fit prayer in can often feel like a chore instead of the wonderful thing it really is: a conversation with the One who loves us most! And it's not just that prayer gets shortened — it's the guilt that creeps in afterward. That nagging feeling that you're failing your kids spiritually because today wasn't the day you modeled the "right" kind of prayer.

Well if any of this rings true for you, then don’t worry...My hope is that in sharing these “routine-based” prayers you will see that a 20-second prayer said daily forms a real, meaningful habit WAY more than a 20-minute prayer said once a month out of guilt. You see, we all get thrown curve balls, but when your kids see you offer up 20 seconds in prayer throughout the chaos of your day, well that speaks volumes.

Now I won’t sit here and give you a list of things that have made it hard for our family to have a consistent prayer routine, because the truth is, you can literally have NO plans for the night and it can STILL be disrupted: tantrums, forgot to buy a crucial ingredient for dinner, diaper blow outs, your sick relative needs you, a friend called, etc. Add in those unplanned events to the regular, but busy routines of most families and it can seem impossible to pray! Here is what I have found helpful: plan prayer into the moments of your day that you can always count on happening. For example, tooth brushing and a sibling quarrel are pretty much both guaranteed every day 😆 There's something almost sneaky-good about attaching prayer to something your family is already going to do no matter what. You're not adding one more thing to remember — you're borrowing a habit that already has momentum. Brushing teeth doesn't need a reminder on the fridge. Neither does a sibling squabble, unfortunately! So why not let those built-in moments carry a little prayer along with them?

Here are some more ideas:

Prayers for daily transitions (same cue, same time, every day — easiest to build into muscle memory)

Prayers for the moments that need them (triggered by a moment, not tied to a fixed time of day)

This list is not intended to start all in one day! In fact, I think you would quickly find yourself discouraged if you did - it’s a lot! Pick one from each list that you can visualize your family actually trying and benefitting from and go from there! Prayer does not have to be perfect, and often won’t be, but the effort means so much to our Lord.

And if you’re looking for a simple way to bring some of these ideas into your family’s actual morning routine, the Catholic Morning Menu can be a great place to start. It gives little ones a predictable rhythm of prayer, Scripture, catechesis, and hands-on Catholic learning without requiring you to plan something new every morning. Think of it less as “one more thing to do” and more as a ready-made structure that helps you make Catholic prayer and learning part of the routine you already have.

Last year I told my kids we were going to start school every day with the Morning Offering. Well it took about 2 days of interruption for us to lose that habit, and I completely forgot about that goal! Until my daughter (she’s the responsible one) said, “Mom it’s been weeks since we’ve done the Morning Offering.” 🤦‍♀️ She was right, though! It had totally slipped my mind! What made her comment sting a little was that I was the one who set this goal in the first place. I was so excited about it! I pictured us saying it together every single morning, and I really believed that this time would be different. And then... life. A late morning, a lost shoe, someone crying about breakfast. It's always something.

But that mistake on my part, turned into a beautiful conversation about how much joy she brought God that day for remembering to prioritize prayer, especially when it would be faster to skip it. I learned an important lesson in that conversation: it’s never to late to get back into the habit of prayer. If you've ever scrolled past a photo of a family kneeling together for a full rosary and felt a pang of "we could never," I want you to hear this: that's one moment, captured on a good day. Nobody posts the night the rosary turned into a wrestling match over who gets to hold the beads. Give yourself permission to build a prayer life that fits YOUR family, not the highlight reel of someone else's.

Since then we have picked things that feel realistic for our family routine. We try to pray at least a decade of the rosary every night, but some nights we fall short. And that’s okay as long as we keep on trying. So as you're heading into a new season with your family, ask yourself: what's one moment in our day that already happens, rain or shine? Start there. Let that one small prayer be enough for now — you can always add more later, or you can not, and that's okay too.

Prayer doesn't have to look like stillness and silence to be real. Sometimes it looks like a decade of the rosary mumbled through a yawn, or a "thank you God" shouted from the backseat between bickering siblings. God isn't waiting for the perfect moment from us — He's already present in the imperfect ones we actually have. My daughter still reminds me when we skip the Morning Offering. Honestly? I hope she never stops.

📋😋🍽️ Want to explore the Catholic Morning Menu? Find it here! Catholic Morning Menu