Introduction
You worry constantly about the safety, choices, and future of your children in a dangerous world. Forces beyond your control pull them toward trouble, and human effort alone cannot protect them from every hidden threat. Stormie Omartian argues in The Power of a Praying Parent that you must partner with God through intentional intercession to secure your children's lives.
Parents who do not consciously cover their children in daily prayer leave their children's lives entirely to chance.
The book outlines a practical path to spiritual parenting across four core areas. You will learn how to release your child, establish divine protection, guard their environment, and build their faith.
- How do you surrender your anxieties to God?
- How do you break generational patterns in your family?
- How do you protect your children from peer pressure and addictions?
1. Becoming a Praying Parent and Releasing Your Child
Stormie Omartian realized through personal desperation that human efforts fall short. Through regular intercession and prayer groups, you activate spiritual authority that changes outcomes over days, weeks, months, or years.
Parents who do not consciously cover their children in daily prayer leave their children's lives entirely to chance.
The author has been continuously praying for her children for the past 25 years and has hosted regular home prayer groups where participants witnessed countless answered prayers.
You can begin this transformation immediately with intentional steps:
- Submit yourself to God and acknowledge human parenting limitations
- Invite God to heal, deliver, change, and mature you as a parent
- Commit to praying daily for every aspect of your child's life
Releasing the Child to God
Holding onto a child out of fear imposes human will rather than allowing God's divine will to operate. Releasing the child means trusting God's control, protection, guidance, and counsel instead of relying on unreliable and ever-changing worldly methods of child rearing.
Releasing your child into God's hands removes fear and aligns your family with divine protection.
You must surrender your anxieties and let go of tight control. God loves your children far more than you do.
True release requires specific personal choices:
- Give the child to God and acknowledge that He alone knows what is best
- Identify and surrender areas where you continue to hold onto the child
- Pray for God's will to be done rather than your own will
Establishing this spiritual foundation protects the hedge around your family. You replace worry with trust as you hand over every daily burden.
2. Securing Protection and Resisting Rebellion
You can secure divine protection from physical, mental, and emotional harm by praying for a spiritual hedge around your children. Intercession can specifically target protection against accidents, disease, injury, abuse, and evil influences. By maintaining obedience to God's ways, children remain under the protective umbrella of God's refuge.
Intercession establishes a protective spiritual hedge and stands against rebellion, ungodly strongholds, and poor companions.
You must lift the child up to God to place a hedge of protection around their spirit, body, mind, and emotions.
- Lift the child up to God to place a hedge of protection around their spirit, body, mind, and emotions
- Pray specifically for protection from accidents, disease, injury, and abuse
- Ask that no weapon formed against the child will prosper
Securing Protection from Harm
You invoke the shadow of your wings to keep your family safe from unseen dangers. This active shield guards every physical movement and emotional response throughout the day.
Resisting Rebellion and Honoring Parents
Rebellion, pride, and disrespect in children must be actively identified and resisted through spiritual authority and prayer. Secret or unseen rebellion can take root in a child's heart, leading to destruction and death. Parents must stand against ungodly traits like idolatry, stubbornness, and disrespect, guiding children to cultivate a sweet and humble spirit.
You must confront ungodly strongholds before they dictate your family's future. The spirit of truth exposes hidden defiance so you can address it directly.
- Pray for God to shine light upon any secret or unseen rebellion in the child's heart
- Stand against wiles of the devil, idolatry, rebellion, and disrespect in Jesus' name
- Teach the child to honor both father and mother
Attracting Godly Friends
Children require discernment to choose godly friends and avoid ungodly influences that can corrupt their character and lead to destruction. Companionship with foolish or angry people acts as a snare for the soul. Parents should pray that God removes ungodly influences, comforts the child during friendship losses, and sends wise companions who encourage their God-given identity.
You recognize that a companion of fools suffers harm when peers steer them away from truth. Godly friends and role models provide essential anchors during vulnerable developmental years.
- Ask for Holy Spirit-inspired discernment in guiding the child's selection of friends
- Pray that ungodly influences are either removed or transformed into God's likeness
- Teach the child the meaning of true friendship and how to be a good friend
3. Guarding Speech, Rooms, and Family Heritage
Learning to Speak Life
The words children speak carry the power of life and death, requiring a spiritual guard over their mouths and speech. Because speech reflects the contents of the heart, children must be guided away from profane, negative, cruel, or obscene language. Guarding the tongue protects the soul from adversity and brings justification through wholesome words.
Children require spiritual guarding over their speech, their physical rooms, and deliverance from generational family bondages.
You can intercede to shape what your child says. Author Stormie Omartian urges parents to teach children how to speak life and guard their mouths and tongues against destructive patterns.
- Pray for a spiritual monitor over the child's mouth to reject profane and cruel language
- Teach the child to be quick to listen and slow to speak
- Enable the child to speak words of hope, health, and encouragement
Praying Through a Child's Room
A child's physical room can be spiritually dedicated, protected, and cleansed as a holy habitation for God's presence. Parents can invite the Holy Spirit to flood a child's bedroom with light and life while crowding out dark manifestations such as fear, depression, anger, doubt, anxiety, and rebelliousness.
You can walk through the physical space with intentionality. By treating the area as sanctified for Your glory, you establish a peaceful sanctuary.
- Proclaim God as Lord over the child's room and invite the Holy Spirit to dwell there
- Ask for discernment to identify and remove any unacceptable items or influences brought into the space
- Pray for complete protection so that evil cannot enter the room
Destroying Family Bondage
Unresolved family bondages and inherited behaviors can threaten a child's life unless actively rejected as sin. Through Christ, the old passes away, allowing children to inherit the kingdom rather than family dysfunctions.
Generational bondages and family sins can be broken through confession and Christ's redemption so they are not passed on to children.
You must confront the inheritance of family bondage before it takes root in the next generation. Refusing to address past patterns leaves children vulnerable to a yoke of bondage that Christ already defeated.
- Confess family sins and personal shortcomings to God, asking for forgiveness and cleansing
- Specifically reject ungodly behaviors seen in yourself or your family that you do not want passed down
- Claim the freedom provided by Christ to prevent entanglement in past yokes of bondage
4. Avoiding Addictions, Immorality, and Growing in Faith
Satan uses substances and sexual immorality to destroy lives through the lure of the flesh. Purity protects emotions from the soul fragmentation caused by premarital sex. Spiritual discipline helps children choose life over paths that seem right to man but end in death.
Spiritual strength protects children from addictions and sexual immorality while cultivating a personal, resilient faith.
Avoiding Addictions and Immorality
Children need spiritual strength and discernment to reject alcohol, drugs, addictions, and sexual immorality. You must intercede daily so your children recognize moral boundaries before crossing them.
- Pray to keep the child free from addictions to alcohol, drugs, and harmful substances
- Ask for a Holy Spirit alarm or inner warning system when moral boundaries are approached
- Pray for lifelong sexual purity and a commitment to stand against sexual immorality and premarital sex
Growing in Faith Independence
Stormie Omartian emphasizes that a child's relationship with God must eventually supersede all else. This ensures that the child remains steadfast and immovable even after you are no longer on earth.
- Pray that the child's relationship with God supersedes all else
- Pray for a faith strong enough to keep the child steadfast and abounding in the work of the Lord
- Pray that the child takes the shield of faith to quench the fiery darts of the wicked one
Referencing Matthew 17:20, the text reminds readers that even a tiny measure of genuine faith has the power to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Having faith even as small as a mustard seed enables one to command mountains to move and makes nothing impossible.
Conclusion
The core concepts of spiritual authority, daily intercession, and releasing your children into God hands fit together to form a complete lifestyle of parenting. You protect your children not through human control or worry, but through intentional prayer that covers every area of their lives.
To live out these principles and maintain a consistent prayer life, follow these practical rules.
- Commit to daily prayer time where you intercede specifically for the spiritual, emotional, and physical needs of your children.
- Surrender your anxiety by releasing your children to God instead of trying to control their choices through human effort.
- Guard your home and your speech by speaking life-giving words over your children and removing negative influences.
- Stand in spiritual authority against rebellion, fear, and ungodly strongholds by claiming God promises over your family.
- Model a resilient, personal faith so your children witness the power of a dedicated relationship with God in your daily actions.
10 Key Ideas
- Parents who do not consciously cover their children in daily prayer leave their children's lives entirely to chance.
- Releasing your child into God's hands removes fear and aligns your family with divine protection.
- Intercession establishes a protective spiritual hedge and stands against rebellion, ungodly strongholds, and poor companions.
- Companionship with foolish or angry people acts as a snare for the soul.
- Children require spiritual guarding over their speech, their physical rooms, and deliverance from generational family bondages.
- A child's physical room can be spiritually dedicated, protected, and cleansed as a holy habitation for God's presence.
- Generational bondages and family sins can be broken through confession and Christ's redemption so they are not passed on to children.
- Spiritual strength protects children from addictions and sexual immorality while cultivating a personal, resilient faith.
- A child's relationship with God must eventually supersede all else to ensure steadfastness after you are no longer on earth.
- Having faith even as small as a mustard seed enables one to command mountains to move and makes nothing impossible.