Prayer for My Son and My Children: A Catholic Father’s Prayers

A prayer for my children

Many prayers for children online carry no author and no date. This one has both. It is printed as A Prayer for Parents in Father Aegidius Hennemann, O.S.B., A Manual of Prayer (1869), a book compiled, as its title page says, “from various books of Catholic devotion.” It asks less for the children than for the man raising them.

Read it slowly once and you will notice what it is really about: correct them out of love, but not in passion; do not make them worldly great; do not hand them troubles at home they will go looking to fix somewhere worse. It is an examination of conscience for a father, written as a prayer. The line to keep when you have no time for the rest is the hinge of it: be thou a Father to them, and supply by thy goodness whatever is wanting in me.

Fathers in Scripture who prayed for a son

Scripture does not give a father one formula for his son. It gives four men, and each one prays at a different hour of a father’s life. All four are quoted from the Douay-Rheims.

David: for a son who will carry what you built

Near the end of his reign, with the offerings gathered for the house his son would build, David blessed the Lord “before all the multitude” (1 Paralipomenon 29:10) and prayed for Solomon:

And give to Solomon my son a perfect heart, that he may keep thy commandments, thy testimonies, and thy ceremonies, and do all things: and build the house, for which I have provided the charges.

1 Paralipomenon (1 Chronicles) 29:19, Douay-Rheims — drbo.org

David does not ask for Solomon’s success. He asks for his heart, and the success follows from it. Pray it with your son’s name in it, especially when he is starting something: a school, a job, a marriage.

Job: for sons who may have sinned without telling you

Job’s sons were grown and feasting in their own houses. He did not police them. He prayed for them, early, every time:

Job sent to them, and sanctified them: and rising up early offered holocausts for every one of them. For he said: Lest perhaps my sons have sinned … So did Job all days.

Job 1:5, Douay-Rheims — drbo.org

Notice for every one of them, and all days. One by one, by name, and before the day started.

The father at the mountain: for a son you cannot help

In Mark 9 a man brings his boy to the disciples, and they fail. When Jesus asks how long the boy has suffered, the father says, “From his infancy”, and then the plea every father of a sick or struggling child has prayed: “if thou canst do any thing, help us, having compassion on us.” Told that all things are possible to him that believes, he answers:

And immediately the father of the boy crying out, with tears said: I do believe, Lord: help my unbelief.

Mark 9:23, Douay-Rheims — drbo.org

Note that he says help us, not help him. A son’s suffering is the father’s too. And the Lord answered a prayer that admitted its own unbelief: He cast out the spirit, and “taking him by the hand, lifted him up; and he arose” (Mark 9:26).

The ruler at Capharnaum: for a son in danger

A ruler whose son lay sick at Capharnaum, “at the point of death,” went to find Jesus at Cana. The words the Gospel gives him are these:

The ruler saith to him: Lord, come down before that my son die.

John 4:49, Douay-Rheims — drbo.org

Jesus answers, “Go thy way; thy son liveth”, and the man believed the word and went. When he learned the fever had broken at that very hour, the Gospel says “himself believed, and his whole house” (John 4:50, 53). When the call comes from the hospital or the police, this is the prayer. It is short enough to say in the truck.

When he leaves home

The Book of Tobias gives a father something rarer than a prayer: what a father said to his son when he believed he was about to die, and the blessing he gave when he sent the boy on a long journey. The elder Tobias calls his son and begins, “Hear, my son, the words of my mouth, and lay them as a foundation in thy heart” (Tobias 4:2). The centre of his counsel is one line:

And all the days of thy life have God in thy mind: and take heed thou never consent to sin, nor transgress the commandments of the Lord our God.

Tobias 4:6, Douay-Rheims — drbo.org

Then, when the boy is ready to set out with his travelling companion, the father blesses them:

May you have a good journey, and God be with you in your way, and his angel accompany you.

Tobias 5:21, Douay-Rheims — drbo.org

When the boy’s mother weeps, the father answers her with what he believes: “the good angel of God doth accompany him, and doth order all things well that are done about him” (Tobias 5:27). Say Tobias 5:21 out loud at the car door on the day your son leaves for college, basic training or his own first apartment, and teach him the Guardian Angel prayer long before that day comes.

A king’s letter to his son

St. Louis IX of France wrote down, for his eldest son, the later Philip III, what he wanted the boy to know. (The Fordham Medieval Sourcebook, whose text we quote, notes that there have been some questions about its authorship.) It opens like this:

To his dear first-born son, Philip, greeting, and his father’s love. Dear son, since I desire with all my heart that you be well instructed in all things, it is in my thought to give you some advice this writing. For I have heard you say, several times, that you remember my words better than those of any one else.

St. Louis’ Advice to His Son, 1–2, trans. Munro and Sellery (1910) — Fordham Medieval Sourcebook

The son remembers the father’s words better than anyone else’s. That is true in your house too, for good or ill. Most of the letter is about governing a kingdom, but its first counsel is for any son: “the first thing I advise is that you fix your whole heart upon God, and love Him with all your strength.” It asks him to go to confession often and to choose confessors who “may dare confidently to reprove you and show you your faults.” And it ends with a father’s blessing worth borrowing whole:

In conclusion, dear son, I give you all the blessings which a good and tender father can give to a son, and I pray our Lord Jesus Christ, by His mercy, by the prayers and merits of His blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary, and of angels and archangels and of all the saints, to guard and protect you from doing anything contrary to His will, and to give you grace to do it always, so that He may be honored and served by you.

St. Louis’ Advice to His Son, 36 — Fordham Medieval Sourcebook

Write your own version. One page, by hand, for each of your children, sealed until a birthday you choose.

When he has left the faith

Many fathers reach this page because a grown son no longer goes to Mass, or says he no longer believes. Two pieces of the tradition speak straight to that.

The first is the father in the parable of the prodigal son, who does not chase the boy into the far country, and does not wait on the porch with a lecture either:

And when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and running to him fell upon his neck, and kissed him.

Luke 15:20, Douay-Rheims — drbo.org

He saw him a great way off because he was looking. Keep the door open and keep watching the road.

The second is advice a bishop gave Augustine’s mother when she begged him, in tears, to argue her son out of his errors. Augustine records that the bishop refused:

But leave him alone for a time, says he, only pray God for him; he will of himself, by reading, discover what that error is, and how great its impiety.

St. Augustine, Confessions III.12, trans. J. G. Pilkington (1887) — New Advent

When she kept pressing, he sent her off with this: “Go your way, and God bless you, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.” It was said to a mother, but nothing in it is only for mothers. Stop arguing. Keep praying, by name, every day. Keep going to Mass yourself, and keep going to confession for your own part in it.

If your son is in danger — addiction, violence, talk of harming himself — that is not first a prayer problem. Get him help today, call your local emergency number if anyone is in danger, and talk to your parish priest about where to turn. We are a formation site, not counsellors, and nothing here is advice about your family’s situation.

What the Church asks of a father

Praying for your children is not an extra devotion. The Catechism puts it inside the job itself: “Through the grace of the sacrament of marriage, parents receive the responsibility and privilege of evangelizing their children” (CCC 2225), and “Parents have the mission of teaching their children to pray and to discover their vocation as children of God” (CCC 2226). You cannot teach a son to pray if he has never seen you do it.

It also tells a father something about his own failures: “Parents have a grave responsibility to give good example to their children. By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them” (CCC 2223). St. Paul says it from the other side: “And you, fathers, provoke not your children to anger; but bring them up in the discipline and correction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4, Douay-Rheims).

And it tells you where the prayer ends. Your children are not yours to keep: “Parents should respect this call and encourage their children to follow it. They must be convinced that the first vocation of the Christian is to follow Jesus” (CCC 2232). That is why the prayer at the top of this page ends the way it does. A father who prays for his son long enough eventually prays for the son to belong to God more than to him.

The Church gives a father a patron for all of this. Leo XIII wrote that “Fathers of families find in Joseph the best personification of paternal solicitude and vigilance” (Quamquam Pluries, 1889). Our prayers to St. Joseph page has the texts.

Every day, in five minutes

1. Morning, alone. Before your phone, name each child once, oldest to youngest, the way Job offered for every one of them. One sentence each: what he or she needs today.
2. Once a week, the long prayer. Pray the 1869 prayer for parents above on a fixed day. Sunday after Mass is easy to keep.
3. At bedtime, the blessing. A thumb on the forehead, a small cross, and a short blessing. The words and the how-to are on our Catholic family prayer page.
4. Out loud, sometimes. Let your children hear you pray for them by name at grace or at night prayers, so they know what their father asks God for them.
5. Pray with their mother. Praying for the children is a natural first prayer for a couple. If you have never prayed with your wife, our prayer for my wife page shows the first steps.

Keep it small enough to survive a bad week. This is the work the free Priest of Your Home program walks with you for thirty days, and what we mean by the priest of his home: not Holy Orders, but the priesthood of the baptized, a father leading the prayer of his own house.