100 Ways To Teach Your Child About God Karyn Henley

What You Actually Get When You Pick Up This Book

Karyn Henley's 100 Ways To Teach Your Child About God Karyn Henley is exactly what the title says it is — a list of 100 practical activities, habits, and conversation starters for parents who want to weave faith into everyday life rather than treating it like a once-a-week obligation. It is not a theology textbook. It is not a curriculum you have to teach in order. The chapters are short, usually two or three pages each, and each one focuses on a single idea: reading scripture together, praying before meals, talking about creation on a walk, answering hard questions honestly, volunteering as a family, and so on. I spent about six months working through this with my daughter when she was around nine. The way I used it was simple. Every Sunday I picked one or two of the suggestions and tried them during the week. Some worked. Most did not. That turned out to be normal.

100 Ways To Teach Your Child About God Karyn Henley — Where to Get It

You can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Christianbook.com, and most major online retailers. It is typically priced between $10 and $14 depending on whether you buy paperback or digital. I bought the paperback because I needed to write notes in the margins. The Kindle version works fine too if you prefer searching for specific topics quickly. The biggest problem people run into is that the book assumes a level of consistency that most families simply do not have. You come home tired. You have dinner to make. Kids are arguing. The last thing you want is another item on the checklist. I hit that wall within the first two weeks and almost stopped using the book entirely. My workaround was to pick five activities and ignore the other ninety-five until I felt ready to move to the next set. The book is not designed to be completed linearly. Each section stands alone. Picking five and revisiting them over several months worked better for us than trying to cycle through all one hundred in a single month and burning out.

Another practical detail that is worth mentioning is timing. Some of the suggestions work best in the morning — a short prayer before breakfast, reading a psalm together in the car. Others fit naturally into evening routines, like going through the day's events and thanking God for something specific. A few require an out-of-house commitment, like visiting a homeless shelter or spending time at a community garden. Knowing which category each activity falls into helps you schedule them realistically instead of dropping them on a Saturday afternoon when you are already behind.

What Makes This Approach Different from Other Resources

Most parenting books on faith either lean heavily into doctrine or they turn spirituality into a series of crafts and games. Henley's approach sits somewhere in between without leaning too far in either direction. The activities are grounded in actual spiritual practices — prayer, scripture reading, service, gratitude, honesty about doubt — rather than in entertainment value. That means the exercises will not keep a restless eight-year-old occupied for forty-five minutes. They are meant to be short, repeated, and woven into normal family life. One counter-intuitive insight from using this book is that the hardest part is not coming up with ideas. It is letting go of the idea that your child needs to perform faith in a certain way for it to count. A lot of the suggestions involve conversations where the parent does not have all the answers. The book encourages you to say "I do not know" and explore the answer together. That approach builds trust faster than any perfectly delivered lesson ever will, but it also requires you to sit with uncertainty, which is uncomfortable for a lot of parents who are used to being the authority figure.

Specific Situations Where This Method Falls Short

Here is what the book does not handle well. If your child is older — twelve or above — and has started asking skeptical or theological questions, some of the activities will feel too young for them. The language and framing are geared toward younger children, roughly ages five to ten. Teens need more depth, even if they still benefit from the habit-building structure. If you have an older child, you will likely use this book for the younger siblings and supplement it with something more discussion-based for the teen. Another limitation is that the book assumes a traditional two-parent household with reasonable flexibility in the daily schedule. Single parents, parents working multiple jobs, or families with highly irregular routines will find that some suggestions are genuinely difficult to implement without major adjustments. The ideas are still useful, but you will need to adapt them rather than follow them verbatim. I also ran into an edge case that the book does not explicitly address. When a child experiences something painful — a illness in the family, the death of a pet, a move — the standard gratitude or praise-oriented activities can feel tone-deaf if introduced without acknowledgment. In that situation, I stopped following the book's suggested activities for about a week and switched to simply talking about what was happening. Faith conversations during hard times need a different cadence. The book can guide you later, but in the immediate aftermath, presence matters more than practice.

The Activities Themselves — What They Actually Look Like

The activities break into several general categories. Prayer exercises include things like keeping a prayer journal, praying together before meals, creating a prayer corner in the house, and teaching children to pray using the Lord's Prayer as a framework. Scripture engagement suggestions cover reading a story a day, memorizing short verses, drawing pictures while listening to a Bible reading, and discussing what a passage means in plain language. Service-oriented ideas include donating toys together, baking cookies for neighbors, volunteering at a food bank, and writing letters to missionaries or soldiers. Conversation prompts are probably the most useful section for parents who do not know what to say. The book gives you actual questions you can ask at the dinner table or in the car. Examples include asking what your child thinks God might be saying about a situation, discussing how a biblical character would handle a modern problem, or talking about why some things in the world are hard even though God is good. These are not scripted responses. They are conversation starters that require you to listen more than you speak. Some suggestions are seasonal — celebrating Advent, discussing Easter stories, giving thanks during harvest-time activities. Others are year-round habits. I found that mixing seasonal activities with daily habits created a rhythm that felt natural rather than forced. Children pick up on routine faster than they pick up on occasional lectures.

A Few Details People Miss on First Read

One thing that is easy to overlook is that the book includes notes for parents who do not come from a strongly religious background. Henley acknowledges that not every reader has the same baseline knowledge or comfort level with scripture. The activities are written in a way that allows someone to learn alongside their child rather than requiring expertise upfront. That is intentional and it matters. Another detail is the pacing. You do not need to complete one hundred activities in one year. I knew parents who stretched it over three years and never felt rushed. The value is not in completion. It is in consistency of intention. A parent who does ten activities well over the course of a year and discusses them honestly will have more impact than a parent who rushes through fifty activities mechanically. If you are looking for measurement or tracking tools, the book does not include extensive worksheets. It is intentionally light on structured tracking. That is a design choice, not an oversight. Some parents prefer that freedom. Others wish there were a progress chart or a reward system built in. You can create your own tracking if that helps your family, but the book leaves that blank on purpose.

Bottom Line

The book is useful. It is not exhaustive. It works best when you treat it as a reference library rather than a to-do list. The best results come from picking a small number of activities, repeating them, and staying honest with your child about what you believe and what you are still figuring out. If your situation is non-traditional or your child is older, expect to adapt the suggestions rather than follow them exactly. That adaptation is normal and expected. Search for 100 Ways To Teach Your Child About God Karyn Henley on any major bookseller and you will find it available in multiple formats. Start with whatever feels doable this week. Adjust as you go. The book will still be there next month when you are ready for the next batch.