Reported EssayFaith & Family
If Your Children Left the Faith, Don’t Give Up on Your Grandchildren Yet
You watched your kids walk away from God, and somewhere along the way you decided the faith was ending with you. I believed that too — until I read forty years of research that says it can skip straight past a generation. And that the person it lands on is usually the grandmother.
I need to tell you about the moment I realized I’d been hiding my own faith from my grandchildren.
We were at the dinner table — my son’s house, all of us together, which doesn’t happen as often as I’d like anymore. The food came out, everyone reached in, and I felt that little pull to say grace, the way we always did when my kids were small. I looked around. My son doesn’t pray anymore. Hasn’t in years. And I could feel it — the way the whole table would go quiet and polite if I said anything. So I didn’t. I picked up my fork like everyone else.
And I realized I’d been doing that for a long time. Choosing my words carefully around my own grandchildren. Not mentioning church. Not mentioning God. Softening myself so I wouldn’t cause tension in a family I love more than my own life.
If you’ve done that — if you’ve caught yourself going quiet, keeping the peace, watching your grandchildren grow up without ever hearing you talk about the thing that’s carried you through everything — then you already know the ache I’m talking about. The one that shows up at every unsaid grace.
Because underneath it is a fear most of us never say out loud: I think the faith is ending with me.
I raised my children in church. Sunday school, youth group, all of it. And they left anyway. For years I did the quiet math on where I went wrong — what I should have said, what I didn’t do, the prayer I must have missed.
If that’s you, I want to say something plainly, because someone should have said it to me years ago: it was not your fault.
We raised our children in the exact decades the ground shifted under every Christian family in this country. We were the last generation to hand our kids a childhood without a supercomputer in their pocket — a device built by the smartest people alive for one purpose: to hold a child’s attention longer than any parent or grandparent ever could. Nobody was handed a fair fight. Not you. Not me. This was never a story about a faith that failed or a parent who didn’t try hard enough.
But here is the part I didn’t know. The part that changed everything for me.
What forty years of research foundA few years ago, a researcher at the University of Southern California published something he’d spent nearly forty years working on. He’d followed more than three thousand people across four generations of the same families, asking one question: why does faith survive in some families and vanish in others?
He expected the answer to be the church. Or the youth program. Or the parents. It wasn’t any of those.
The strongest thing he could measure was the warmth of an older person who loved the child and stayed close. And then he found something I have not been able to stop thinking about since.
In his data, grandchildren carried their grandparents’ faith — even when their own parents had let it go. The pull of a grandmother on a granddaughter was the strongest of all. Whole families where the middle generation walked away, and the grandchildren came back around to what their grandmother believed.
Read that again if you need to, the way I did.
The line you thought was broken was never broken. It was waiting for you.
I sat with that for a long time. Because it meant I wasn’t a bystander watching the culture take my grandchildren. It meant I might be the most important person in their spiritual life — and that the years I have left, however many they are, actually matter enormously.
But it also came with a warning I couldn’t ignore. The research is blunt about the window: the drift starts before a child even turns fifteen. And right now, every single day, a screen is quietly pulling them the other way.
The tell
Even Jonathan Haidt — the man leading the whole fight against children’s screens — understood you can’t out-shout the thing. This year he released his message for kids as a comic book, because that’s the one format a screen-raised child will actually pick up.
Which left me with one question. While a machine fights for my grandchildren’s attention every waking hour — what was I putting in front of them?
And the honest answer was: nothing that could compete.
The Bible I grew up on — the beautiful leather one, the tissue-thin pages, the walls of text — I’d given one to my granddaughter two Christmases ago. She’s read maybe three pages of it. It’s not that she doesn’t love God. It’s that I kept handing her the greatest story ever told in the one format built to lose.
So I went looking for one that wasn’t.
What I found is a book called Bible Wisdom.
The oldest story, in the one format they’ll actually read
It takes the twenty-eight stories at the heart of Scripture — Noah and the flood, David and the giant, the life of Jesus — and tells them the way my grandchildren’s favorite books are already told. Full color. Panel by panel. The kind of book a child picks up on their own and doesn’t put down.
Built for ages six to twelve, it does the one thing the leather Bible couldn’t: it turns their screen-time habit into a story-time habit.
- How the Bible’s big story fits together
- Courage in tough times
- Honesty and strength of character
- Peace in the middle of chaos
- Kindness and helping others
- Faith that holds when life is hard
There’s something I couldn’t do with my own children that I can still do now.
A tablet can’t be inscribed. An app can’t hold your handwriting. This can.
I wrote my granddaughter’s name inside the front cover. Which means that long after our visits end — long after, one day, I’m no longer the one at the table — it’s still there. In her hands. In my voice. Pulled off a shelf years from now by a grown woman who runs her thumb over my handwriting and remembers exactly who first told her these stories.
That’s not a gift. It’s an inheritance.
“A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.” — Proverbs 13:22
I can’t go back and redo it with my kids. I’ve made my peace with that.
But I don’t have to give up on my grandchildren. And neither do you.
You couldn’t choose faith for your children. You can still choose what you put in your grandchild’s hands — and you can be the reason the line doesn’t end with you.
From grandparents who’ve given it“My daughter left the church years ago and I’d made my peace with it. But I can still give this to my granddaughter. I wrote her name in the front. It’s the most important gift I’ve ever given.”
“My grandson never once opened the children’s Bible I gave him three years ago. This one he read cover to cover the first weekend — then asked me to read the David story with him. I cried in the kitchen.”
“They fight over who gets to read it next. I never thought I’d see grandkids argue over a Bible instead of an iPad.”
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Put Bible Wisdom in Their Hands
You couldn’t choose for your children. You can still choose what you put in your grandchild’s hands — and be the reason the line continues.
The window is smaller than it feels, and it only closes one quiet grace at a time.
This is an editorial advertisement. Research referenced includes the University of Southern California’s Longitudinal Study of Generations (Bengtson et al.), Pew Research Center, and Barna & Lifeway research on youth faith formation; screen-use reporting references The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. Scripture from Proverbs 13:22. Bible Wisdom is published by FaithfulRoots / TIKBOOKS. © FaithfulRoots.