Struggling with the family rosary with the little ones?

Via Pixabay (2016), CC0 Public Domain

I'm really excited to share something that has helped our family significantly with praying the rosary with the little ones.

My children range in age from 9 to 6 months. We started off years ago trying to pray the whole rosary every night together but it was such a battle!

It starts off being pleasant family bonding time, and the kids are enthusiastic for the first decade or so . . . and then we lose them. They get tired. They get bored. They start being needy and start fighting over who gets to sit on our lap, etc.

So in order to keep family prayer time something that our kids look forward to and somewhat peaceful, we decided to keep it at one decade and that's how it's been until I found this solution!

A few months ago, I watched this short video of an interview with Jason and Chrystalina Evert. They mentioned that when they say the rosary as a family, they play YouTube videos of the mysteries to keep the kids' attention!

https://youtu.be/wNzBHCRpASM

I loved that idea and thought it could totally work for us. So I started searching for rosary videos on YouTube but I couldn't find the right one for us. The ones I found were very long or didn't keep our kids' attention.

However, last summer, our family attended Family Fest, an Apostolate for Family Consecration event in Bloomingdale, Ohio

They have a huge amazing gift shop, the kind you could spend hours in!

I found this rosary dvd there and thought I would give it a try.

We tried it out the first night after we got back home and it was awesome! We all gathered up in our living room with our rosaries.

The kids were excited to watch the dvd and they loved it! They were quiet and content and super engaged with the dramatization of the mysteries on the screen.

Even our little 2-year-old was quietly sitting and watching, making it the most peaceful family rosary we have ever done! We've been praying all 5 decades ever since :-)

This is such a blessing because I've been praying about figuring out a way to pray the family rosary AND make sure it's a happy time for the kids so they don't ever correlate prayer with anything negative.

It's been quite some time since we started doing this and it's still working so I thought I should share!

[tweet "Strategies for making family #rosary time a positive experience"]

A couple of things that evolved since the first time:

1. Each of of our kids get a turn turning on the tv and dvd and clicking the right mystery to pray for the day. (A nice perk to this is that the younger ones have now memorized what days are for which mysteries! Before this, my oldest was the only one who knew them.)

2. Each one of the kids get to lead a decade. So before each mystery, we hit the pause button and one of the kids will say the intentions for the decade and lead us through it.

3. Now that the kids are used to sitting for the amount of time it takes to pray all 5 decades, we can now sometimes pray the rosary without the video playing as well.

I hope you find this helpful! If you have found any other visual aids to help with rosary time, please share! I would love to be able to have a few videos to rotate through. Any other ideas on prayer time?

Copyright 2017 Sheena Lukose