Sundays at Church with Little Kids

Little kids and church are rough.  Kids want to play and not sit still and parents want to listen to the speakers and often these things don’t mix, which can be very frustrating for everyone.  Over time I found a few things that were helpful to make Sundays in church a little more pleasant.  One of the things was to have a bag of quiet, small toys that they could only play with at church.  By not allowing them to play with the church toys any other time it kept their interest in the toy, it wasn’t the same thing they got to play with every day.  I also had a bag of Sunday toys that I would rotate every few weeks so they wouldn’t get bored with the same toys to play with every Sunday.  I also found the Friend magazines had fun stories or activities to do for some of my kids who were a little older, and since a new one came every month it was easy to rotate them.  At one point my kids were fighting over the crayons to use with the Friend so we went to just pencils for a while.  When I let them have crayons again they did much better but if it ever became an issue I gathered up the crayons and brought out the pencils, which weren’t nearly as much fun. If my kids acted out I would take them out to the foyer but they had to sit on my lap.  I didn’t allow them to run around.  I would remind them of this while we were still siting on the bench by telling them they could sit on the bench and look at the Friend or play with the toys, or they could sit in the foyer on my lap without any freedom or things to do.  Usually they chose freedom on the bench to having to sit on my lap in the foyer.  Of course sometimes they were so worked up that I had to take them out but I kept them on my lap until they calmed down and then gave them the choice to continue to sit there or go back to freedom on the bench.  Most of the time they chose to go back into the meeting. These simple things usually worked but sometimes nothing worked and I wondered why I even went to church some Sundays just to be out in the halls or foyer.  As my kids got older I realized that it was just a short time in their lives that this occurred and that establishing the pattern of going to church, partaking of the Sacrament and showing reverence or love for our Heavenly Father far out weighed the hassles and problems of younger kids in church.  It showed my kids that despite the frustrations that church was the place to be on Sundays.

https://www.lds.org/friend/1989/11/cookie-sunday?lang=eng

https://www.lds.org/ensign/1986/08/mormon-journal/our-familys-reverence-lesson?lang=eng