One Sunday in February 2008, I faced a dilemma. After being cooped up all week with a sick 9-month-old baby, I was desperate to get out of my apartment. I wanted to go to church. But I didn’t want to expose other children in the church nursery to my son’s germs. So I decided to bring him into the pew with me and my husband””only to learn that my church had chosen that Lenten Sunday for a very solemn service, full of soft chants and contemplative silences. You can guess where this is going. My baby made joyful noises at inopportune moments. An usher asked us if we would take him out. My husband brought him home. I spent the rest of the service in tears.
We all recovered soon enough, but the experience got me thinking: Should children be in church? This turns out to be a major topic of discussion in a growing number of churches.
This is a great article, and, in one way, goes to the heart of the problem of aging congregations.
When we go to church, we are bringing our children to meet Jesus. What is the New Testament model for helping children meet Jesus? He welcomes them, and doesn’t want adults to prevent them from coming to him.
I distinctly remember as a child being excluded from the main adult service, and being shuffled off to Sunday School. I really wanted to go to the main service with my mom. I was mad about it.
We have done this at our church, where the sunday school rejoins their families at the peace and stay up for the eucharist.
It has not gone over well. We have one or two (quite litterally one or two) who are vocal, and poisioning the well because it’s cutting into the children’s learning time downstairs. And then we have people complaining that it’s driving all the kids away, we don’t have as many kids as we used to etc.
This program isn’t changing under my watch, and if parishioners take their kids out because the kids are missing out of 15 minutes of sunday school time (we’ve timed it) we’ll wish them well with love, welcome them back if they return but we’ve already got a generation or two who haven’t been allowed to worship and pray, so why do people expect kids to be instant adults if they’ve never been raised to be worshipping adults?
Oh, and those parents who complain? I asked them how much praying they do as a family together I was told it was none of my business. So, there are a lot more problems here that people never even dreamed of.
But! As Christ shines his light on the dark areas, we can see what needs to be worked on!
Back in the olden days (1950’s) the Lutheran church my family attended had a ” cry room ” at the back of the church; a small but nice room with a couple chairs and a *large* glass window to the sanctuary (and a speaker in the room so the service could be heard). The parent/child could still participate in the service but the rest of the congregation wouldn’t be included in the ” listening process.” This solution probably reeks of discrimination and exclusion nowadays, sadly.
Some churches has solved this problem by having a nursury/kid’s room glassed in and speakered so that those inside can see and hear without, for example, a fussy baby disrupting quiet parts of the service. This includes our new little Anglican church plant rented headquaters. We provide baby sitting in the form of one paid sitter plus one volunteer. Parents with infants are glad for the relief and volunteer to help out on a rotating basis. They can still see their babies are safe through the glass. Amazingly, not all the nursury volunteers are young parents. We have reeled in a couple new families just on the strength of our nursery program.
School aged kids go for about half our service to Sunday School and return for the last half of the service. Seems to work out okay.
I love the beauty of solemn services with full choirs and the like. But are we putting on a theater piece or a worship service where all are welcome? I guess the advantage we have is that no one comes to a church plant for family history or social reasons. Everyone is there to worship and give thanks. Thanks be to God.
Well, first of all, as far as most Catholic churches go, I’ve never known one that didn’t have at LEAST two Sunday masses. (Mine has three plus the vigil mass on Saturday.) Typically one of these is formally or informally designated as the “family” mass. If you don’t want to be around a lot of little kids, avoid it. Every baptized child has the right to be in church. Of course parents have to be reasonably discrete — if your kid is shrieking his head off, you’re probably not getting much out of the service anyway. Personally, I view the “Children’s Liturgies” (Sunday School) programs as a gift for the parents who can actually listen to the readings and the homily without having to issue an endless whispered stream of “hush, no I don’t know where your toy is,” “here’s a pencil you can draw with, “stop doing that” etc. etc.
Maybe it’s because I am Catholic… but it never crossed my mind that babies and kids shouldn’t be at church. I attended services (Evangelical) with a friends family and I was totally thrown when the kids were sent off to ‘childrens church’.
I know that some parishes have ‘cry rooms’ but a priest I know calls them ‘baby jail’. He is of the opinion that everyone should be at Mass together. A crying (or laughing) baby is a sign that the Chruch is alive and the Church is young!
BTW, learning to sit totally still and keep my mouth totally shut notwithstanding my complete inability to grasp a single thing going on around me was without a doubt, while not the greatest, yet still a incredibly major benefit of attending church as a child. It has paid off over and over again! 🙂
This is a real dilemma, especially for parents who work outside the home and are separated from their children for much of the week. They might not want to come to church and the be separated from their children there, too.
I wonder at what age children should stay in the sanctuary for the entire sermon. I like the idea of the worship service being a family affair. It is also returning responsibility to the family to provide age-appropriate bible study in the home.
I think we have to keep an open mind and especially be sensitive to parents like the author who need support and compassion rather than hard looks and snide comments about their children.
My sister’s husband was one of four boys. One day the kids simply would not stop clowing around at mass — poking each other, whispering certain words under their breath that would set the others off in gales of stiffled laughter, etc. etc. Their father gave them repeated looks of death, but to no avail. When they got home he took four dining room chairs and lined them up in the living room and said “since you were unable to sit quietly for an hour at mass today, you will now sit silently here in the living room for an hour.” And they did. That’s the kind of training Catholic kids used to get! 🙂
The biggest problem with the “children’s church” concept is that when the kids are old enough to be integrated into the regular service, it is alien to them; they don’t understand it and often drop out of church as soon as possible. Churches have accepted this departure of kids after jr. high as something to be expected and accepted. The belief was that they would return when they establish a family. Unfortunately that was not often the case.
It is also valuble for children, from a very early age, to observe their parents at worship.
Jeff+
A church without the sounds of babies and children is a church that is not renewing itself. Therefore, the sound of constant silence in a church service is the sound of the death knell in a parish.
We had our seven-year-old nephew visit us at Thanksgiving this year. He has ADD and I know his mom was wondering how well he would get through a one hour+ service on Thanksgiving, but he really wanted to go with his older cousins (our sons). He came equipped with a fully-stocked backpack of quiet activities, and a lady sitting behind us got him a bag of coloring sheets, etc. that are available for all the children at our church, but he didn’t actually use any of them. He was quiet as a mouse and incredibly attentive to the whole service. As his mom commented later, the full liturgy really appeals to ADD people; there’s lots of cool stuff going on to see, smell, and hear, plus you get change your body posture a lot (standing, kneeling, getting up to go to the altar rail, etc.) instead of just sitting and sitting and sitting, as they do at her Presbyterian church.
Hursley’s wife
I’ve told this story before, but it fits here:
My mom was raised Baptist, my dad Catholic. After they married they kept intending to find a church they could attend together, but it got put off till they discovered I was en route. They tried Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, but at the Episcopal church a young mother started to take her fussy (though not screaming) baby out during the service. The priest stopped her, saying “we try so hard to get you here, please sit and I’ll talk a bit louder.” Thus, I was baptized Episcopalian.
At my current church they have “soothing rooms” like described above, where one can taking screaming babies. And there’s a “Children’s Time” just before the sermon where the kids from about 3 to 6 or thereabouts go down front, and the pastor gives a short lesson related to the sermon to come. The kids are then led away to Children’s Church for the duration of the sermon. I go back and forth about it myself. True, I didn’t get much out of sitting through the sermons when I was four (I remember sitting on the kneelers and using the pew as a table for my action figures), and they start sitting through the sermons when still pretty young. But it just feels odd.
I’ve wrestled with this as well. We have two under the age of five, and they usually spend church time in the nursery or preschool program because both of my children tend to talk during the entire mass. However, I have also worried about not exposing them to church early, and getting them used to regular attendance. So…I think that age 5 may be the time when the elder is going to start coming with me. They are old enough to sit still and pay attention, old enough to understand the “death stare,” and don’t need quite the amount of distractions that younger children seem to need. Adults also don’t get as distracted around the older children, as they do with babies in church. Now ask me in a few months how my “plan” is working… 🙂
[blockquote]the full liturgy really appeals to ADD people; there’s lots of cool stuff going on to see, smell, and hear, plus you get change your body posture a lot (standing, kneeling, getting up to go to the altar rail, etc.) instead of just sitting and sitting and sitting, as they do at her Presbyterian church.
[/blockquote]
I agree heartily. That’s one of the things I miss about TEC. But my wife is solidly Methodist, so I think I just have to get used to the sitting. 🙂
An eon or two ago when I was a college student in Morgantown WV and attending a morning Sunday service an infant was having some difficulty being quiet or still or whatever. The priest, an elderly man, left the pulpit, came to the mother and asked if he could hold the child. She assented, he did, and then continued his sermon while walking up and down the main aisle carrying and soothing the child … who cooperated nicely. Not necessarily recommended, but it is a thought and sight that I have carried with me for over fifty years. Kids belong in church, just like the rest of us do. Nothing wrong with a ‘short’ Sunday School for them during the sermon (which at my Anglican parish tend to be anything but short) but they return for communion with their family and the extended parish family.
Uh oh — one of my hot buttons.
[Enter Mrs. Danvers stage right, darkly gliding through the room with ominous expression.]
I am fine with kids being in church as long as they are moderately well-behaved.
But I don’t want them anywhere at all near me if they are not.
It’s interesting that the writer points out The Bad Old Days when families were in church together — and the kids were supposed to be civilized and quiet. And then there are the Bad New Days when the kids are off in kid-jail.
Wonder why that happened?
In the old days — a mere 60 years ago — back when it was assumed that parents with children were responsible for their children’s behavior, and when their child misbehaved were responsible for eliminating that child from the public sphere until such time as the child behaved, we didn’t not have a whole lot of wringing of hands about banished children. And society seems to have been far more mixed generationally as well.
I can deal with a child cooing or cackling in a church service. But fierce, intense, outraged, extended shrieking means that the baby is “not ready” to be in civilization — perhaps for good reason. Perhaps his diaper needs changing, or he needs feeding or watering, or a lie-down.
As nearly as I can determine, though, many parents believe that it is *their right* to enter the public sphere without trained or civilized children — children who kick and destroy, for instance, the bookshelf on which the coffee display is resting in the coffee shop. Somehow all other persons must bow before their badly behaved or loudly-behaved child — because the parent has decided that he or she *must* be in some public place to the inconvenience and discomfort of *all other persons* in that public space.
But as society’s standards and civility decline in the public spaces, and as families continue to be more fractured and chaotic, the inevitable result is more uncivilized, out of control children, more banishing, more solitude, more narrowing, more isolation for all.
That’s what happens when one loses a civil society.
It’s not simply with children either. It’s many other things — like the cell phone conversation in movie theaters [during the movie] and in restaurants [next to your table] or the dog chasing [and biting] a runner in a State Park, off leash with the owner calmly calling after the fleeing runner “he chases people who run”– that cause people to say “you know, I think I’ll stay home tonight or invite a few friends over rather than all of us go out to a movie or restaurant.”
The fact is the more uncivilized a society, the more people erect some nice gated communities or the equivalent thereof, wherever they are, keeping out the barbarian hordes. The more civilized a society, the more able that society is to be open and free.
As a side note and for the record, I was required to sit silently in the service — and be bored bored bored to tears for what was an eternity.
Which taught me an important lesson.
Life Is Very Hard.
At my church we have a children’s liturgy; we have a box of toys and books; and we are blessed with many, many children, for which we thank God. But every Mass there is bad behavior from children. The difficulty is not the children themselves, but the lack of good example from some parents. Children running around for instance – none of you have mentioned that. I have pleaded repeatedly with parents not to allow this, not least for safety reaons. Too often it falls on deaf ears.
The only time I had any trouble with my daughter (now 36) being noisy in church was when the lady in the row behind us
started with the kitschy-kitscky-koo stuff, dangling her keys and her necklace over the back of the seat.
My eight month old, who usually entertained herself quite nicely playing with her fingers, ate up the attention of course and cackled so loudly and so often that I lost all my concentration on the service. I took my daughter and left.
So, it is not just the young people who need to learn how to behave in church
during worship.
In my opinion it is impossible for an infant to disturb a service. Whether they coo or cry, I count it a blessing.
The infant’s parent, however, may have another opinion.
It’s up to the parish leadership, lay and ordained, to set the tone in order to insure that the church is perceived as family-friendly. In that light, I loved the striking story that john m told (#16) about the preacher who help the agitated child when pacing up and down the aisle during his sermon. Talk about sending a message loud and clear; it doesn’t get any louder or clearer than that.
All sorts of reasonable compromises are possible, but I tend to agree that what underlies the undeniable challenge that unruly kids pose in today’s church is that so many parents are reluctant, or unable, to keep their kids sufficiently still and quiet. That’s the real problem, and there’s no quick fix for that breakdown in parenting.
David Handy+
I have two special needs children and am immensely grateful for the opportunity to turn my children over to other people so that I can worship and focus on the service. My six year old son is autistic and has an aide provided by the church so that he can participate in the kindergarten Sunday school class which I consider a huge blessing. Every moment he spends with scripture and songs, even if he isn’t participating, is good for me. I also want him to spend that time working on his socialization skills since the time he spends with neurotypical kids isn’t large. And my daughter who is barely 3 but emotionally about a year behind can’t hold still for anything. If they were sitting in church with me, they would never be quiet and never hold still and I would feel responsible for disturbing others. We do spend time in the cry room during the first half of the service with the six year old and once in a while, try him in the service again, but I am hyper-conscious of his effect on others. Needless to say, we don’t go out much. We’ve missed the past 2 family Christmases in California (we live in NJ) because I am convinced no one wants to be on an airplane with my daughter (especially me). So while I love my church already, I am completely on the side of sending children out of the service because I (perhaps selfishly) don’t want my children with me for that blessed hour.
I think this is a no-brainer really. If any child is disruptive enough to prevent people around them from being able to hear the service, the parent should leave with them. As Sarah said, a bit of cooing and other occasional soft sounds are not a problem.
It’s where my children learned how to behave in church. It was amusing on how they viewed things. The cross on the cover the Hymnbook was a Doe Doe my son informed me. I asked “Why?”. He said because people picked it up and went “Doe-Doe, da Doe-Doe, …..” I guess I needed to enunciated better, eh?
I grew up in the LCMS and brought up my four children (I had four under the age of four) at home to know when to be quiet. All it took was to touch one of them and lay my finger noislessly to my lips. There was no nursery in our church, only a “cry room” where one might take an unhappy child to be changed or fed as needed before returning to the nave. The children stood when the congregation stood. When they were beginning to learn to read, my finger lead their eyes in Bible or Hymnal. We talked about the sermon at home. That’s just the way it was. We sat in one of the front rows so the short little kids could see what was happening during the service. By the time the youngest was four he could chant the entire communion liturgy along with our pastor…not missing a syllable or a note. I have two grandchildren who grew up the same way and their children are having the same experience.
I have attended black churches in the south where children sit quietly in the parent’s lap through a 3 hour service.
What’s the big deal?
Frances Scott
There is a wonderful story about Bp. Fulton J. Sheen. As he was preaching, a child started screaming. The mother got up to take the child out. Bp. Sheen told her that the child was not bothering him and the mother replied, “yer, but you are bothering him.”
Don’t mothers stock their purses with Lifesavers and little drawing pads and pencils or crayons anymore to get young children to behave in Church? I managed to become comfortable with church ritual while sucking on “butterrum” and sketching faces during the sermon.
It seems to me that services that are “family friendly†(where children are present during the sermon) would limit the topics preached on, and that some topics (especially THE ONE that we reasserters are so fixated on) might never be addressed. How does a parish handle that if there is only one service? Or is it customary that these topics are better suited to be discussed/ preached on in an adult education class?
In the TEC parish I sometimes frequent, THAT TOPIC (along with any other form of sin) is never preached on. There is no Sunday school (children or adult) so no one is hearing any godly counsel on how to deal with these issues.
In the Southern Baptist Church where my children and I regularly attend, children ages 10 and above generally stay through the sermon. I have never heard THAT TOPIC preached on there either. I must confess that on one hand I am relieved, so that my kids don’t hear about things they may not be developmentally ready for. But on the other hand, if they are not hearing preaching on the difficult topics from the pulpit, where will they hear them?
29, It never hurts to hear the Gospel preached, it never hurts to hear about Godly marriage, it never hurts them to hear sermons on the meaning of each of the Ten Commandments; then there is stewardship of goods and time, keeping Advent, keeping Lent, etc.
seems to me there is ample material in Scripture that, if faithfully preached, would make anything else mighty unattractive. Maybe children need to be taught about “difficult” topics by their parents at home and at appropriate times.
Frances Scott
I’m with Br_er Rabbit:
In my opinion it is impossible for an infant to disturb a service. Whether they coo or cry, I count it a blessing.
And wholeheartedly agree with Jeff+ Thimsen.
My parents took me to church as a child- it was Presbyterian and I sat through the sermons, sometimes catching at something the preacher said and trying to hang onto it all the way through, sometimes distracting myself mentally. But I learned something valuable that many of my friends who did not go to church back then never have learned – that on Sundays I was supposed to be in church, worshipping the Lord to the best of my understanding. As a small child, I saw how important it was to my parents, to the elderly church members and to whole families. It was a good start that I wouldn’t trade for any crying rooms or children’s churches.
Our parents had civilized my brother and me, though – we knew we had to sit still and try to listen and understand. No coloring or playing with toys. It would not have occurred to us to get up and wander around or start bawling. I sure did look forward to the hymns. 🙂
I must say this brings back bad memories of about 15 years ago when my husband and I decided to take 4 preschoolers (all well-behaved I think but still preschoolers) to church on Good Friday. The Minister decided to try a new thing — a 20 minute guided meditation ….. ie 5 minutes of silence 30 seconds of him talking 5 minutes of silence.
I can tell you now — three preschoolers and a 20 minute guided mediation don’t mix!!
Somehow we have yet to get up the nerve to go back to a Good Friday service — even though the kids are all now in their late teens and we go virtually every other Sunday and holy day of the year.
I took my son to church when he was one week old, that was the most behaved that he was for the next two years. i assume that the moment he starts fussing that we’re out in the narthex, but still there. how are kids going to practice participating unless they actually participate? by age 3 he was a genius at staying quiet, crossing himself (not usually in the right direction, though) and doing what the adults were doing. kids sunday service is a cop out and ought to be sent back to the 70s mass where it started.
There are probably several issues here. I am of the catholic view that all of God’s children belong in God’s house as the people of God worship. That includes screaming babies, restless children and snoring old folks. Church should be no different than the family dinner table. (Although admittedly parents do send misbehaving children away from dinner so that they quickly learn to behave.)
In the previous comments, there are two populations. One, babies, who simply have no idea that they shouldn’t cry and that disturbs grumpy adults who simply don’t like babies or who have some exalted idea of “spirituality” which has no room for crying children of God. I really have no solution for this problem other than for the adults to grow up and stop being childish!
Then there are older children who don’t cry and scream. They probably have some idea that they are supposed to “behave”, but find it difficult to sit more or less quietly for an hour or an hour and a half. They may fidget, whisper, giggle or whatever. And some may find that distracting.
I have started attending an OCA church which has no pews. There are a fair number of youngsters who attend. They do not have to sit; they can wander around the church and even go outside for a while. After all, the adults are doing the same thing! And those services rival anything in TEC when it comes to length. And when it comes time for that Great Vigil that goes on all night, we end up with children sprawled out sound asleep on the steps in front of the iconostasis. So maybe get rid of the pews!
The other two things–teach those youngster to sing.
And the sermons are generally too long–even for adults!
The comments on this thread are fascinating, and helpful, to me. As a church planter, we had to ask and answer these questions explicitly before we launched. We came to the following conclusions: 1) give parents an option – if they want their 3 year olds and babies in the nursery, we provide one, with talented caregivers and a Christian educaton curriculum (yup, we sing to 6 month olds); 2) 4 year olds to 5th grade have a Litrugy of the Word of their own (but are welcome to listen to me preach if they wish); 3) older students serve as ministers during the Liturgy of the Word for the younger ones (but are welcome to be with the adults); 4) all come in for the Liturgy of the Table (but babies may stay in the nursery). There is adult and child Sunday School before Worship.
Some of my fondest memories are of a little one, 4, singing the Sanctus louder than me; of a 3 year old telling his mother to pay attention during the Word of Institution; and of the 2nd grader who comes to receive the bread, but stops, crosses himself, and prays before walking up to me.
Volume from children has simply not been an issue for us. Cell phones, on the other hand, . . .
One of the more memorable moments for me was when the ritual actually “penetrated” to my four year old who normally occupied herself coloring quietly in the pews until communion time. Usually she just took the bread and wine without comment but one day:
Priest “The blood of the Lord”.
K.: (Softly) “Huh? Blood?”
Priest: “Yes, The blood of the Lord”
Me (in undertone) “Yes Sweetie, take a sip”
K.: (slightly louder) “Real blood?”
Me (in undertone) “No, not real…Uh…Well actually, yes real…sort of real…Uh…Yes….Uh…Yes actually but never mind, go back to your pew, I’ll explain it later”
K: (loud enough to be heard at the back of the church, while going back to her pew) “Eww! Yuck! Gross!”
Loud comment from my five year old going up to communion with me (after watching Indiana Jones with his older brother.)
“Is that the Holy Grail??”
[Of course, he doesn’t actually receive from it until he goes to First Communion Prep for a year and makes his formal First Communion.]
After leaving the altar rail, my son says “That salvation stuff sure tastes sour.”
Grady