Centering Children’s Voices
Children’s Sabbaths places children at the center. In this section, you’ll find their words, prayers, and reflections—voices that carry wisdom, utter joy, and truth.
These voices extend an invitation because when children speak, they remind us of possibility, honesty, and wonder. Listening deeply to children is an act of discipleship and justice. It resists the all too common silencing of young voices and challenges us to reimagine the world through their eyes.
Children’s Sabbaths also beckons the voices of our own inner child—the tender, curious, playful parts of ourselves that still long to be heard. Honoring children means honoring the child within us, remembering the truths we once knew before the world tried to quiet them. On Children’s Sabbaths weekend, we let both speak: the children in our midst and the child within, together calling us into joy, freedom, and Beloved Community.
If you make the world better for kids, you make it better for everybody.
Robby Novak (also known as Kid President)
How to Use This Section
- Begin planning by centering children’s contributions — their stories, art, and ideas — as the seeds of the program.
- Incorporate children’s quotes into bulletins, slides, worship services, and sermons.
- Use prompts to invite children in your community to share reflections in worship, Sunday school, or intergenerational gatherings.
- Share children’s artwork, prayers, or poems alongside their voices. Display them in gathering spaces or fellowship halls.
- Play recordings or videos of children’s voices during worship or small group time.
- Host a listening session (see below) to hear directly from children and families.
- Encourage adults to reflect on what they hear from children: What challenges do their words raise? What joys do they reveal? What action does their truth call us to take?
- Carry children’s voices beyond your Children’s Sabbath by weaving them into ongoing worship services, education, advocacy, and community life.
Why Center Children’s Voices?
Children’s voices remind us of joy, honesty, and possibility. Faith traditions across the world affirm the sacredness of children, yet too often their voices are silenced or dismissed. To listen with care is to resist this silencing. It is to confess that we need their wisdom, their laughter, their questions, and even their frustrations to shape us into a community that reflects God’s justice and love, to reflect Beloved Community.
Centering children’s voices is also a womanist, trauma-informed practice. It acknowledges the particular harm that children—especially children of color, queer and trans children, children with disabilities, and children experiencing poverty—may face, and it insists on honoring their dignity, safety, and agency.
Practicing Trauma-Informed Care with Children
Trauma-informed care is essential when engaging children in faith spaces. Social work practice reminds us that trauma can profoundly shape how children think, feel, and interact with the world. Trauma-informed approaches emphasize safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment (SAMHSA, 2014). When communities adopt these practices, they help children feel secure and respected, which allows their voices to emerge more fully.
Why this matters:
- Many children carry experiences of trauma—whether through systemic racism, poverty, family stress, or community violence.
- Trauma affects brain development, emotional regulation, and the ability to trust adults.
- Without trauma-informed care, faith spaces risk re-traumatizing children rather than supporting their healing.
How to be trauma-informed in faith settings:
- Safety: Create physical and emotional environments that feel secure.
- Trustworthiness: Be consistent and clear about what will happen in gatherings.
- Choice and consent: Allow children to decide if and how they participate. Respect “no” as a sacred boundary.
- Collaboration: Involve children in decision-making.
- Empowerment: Affirm children’s strengths and leadership.
CDF Children’s Sabbaths Manual and Design: Trauma-Informed Approach
A trauma-informed approach is an invitation to consider the psychosocial needs of individuals, groups, and systems. It challenges us to embody values of safety, freedom, wholeness, and wellness. Implementing trauma-informed practices should occur with intentionality, not haste.
According to SAMHSA, a trauma-informed approach is guided by six key principles:
- Safety
- Trustworthiness and Transparency
- Peer Support
- Collaboration and Mutuality
- Empowerment, Voice, and Choice
- Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues
Re-Imagining a Trauma-Informed Approach: A Womanist Model
Thema Bryant-Davis and colleagues (Pepperdine University) advance a model rooted in womanist psychology, centering the voices and lived experiences of Black women and children. Traditional trauma-informed models often fail to account for the distinctiveness of Black women’s trauma and cultural differences, unintentionally perpetuating cycles of harm.
As you imagine and design your Children’s Sabbaths service, ask:
- Whose voice is missing?
- Who are you freeing?
- Who are you centering?
- Who are you leaving behind?
Developing Trauma-Informed Content
Content should encourage paths to wellness, wholeness, and freedom. Trauma-informed content responsibly integrates care and awareness of trauma, seeking to heal rather than trigger or retraumatize. When children offer prayers or art, be mindful that creative expression may surface difficult emotions. Trauma-informed practices equip leaders to respond with compassion and care.
A Womanist Ethic
Alice Walker’s definition of womanist calls us to audacity, courage, and a commitment to survival and wholeness of entire communities, including children. Theological womanism unmutes silenced voices and dismantles barriers that hinder flourishing. Katie Geneva Cannon reminds us that womanism requires urgent attention to moving from death to life, studying past errors so trauma is not repeated.
With care and freedom, Children’s Sabbaths weekend is designed in a trauma-informed way through a womanist lens. This toolkit equips you to do the same.
May the words of children root us in wonder.
May their laughter open us to joy.
May their questions call us into justice.
May their dreams guide us closer to Beloved Community.
May the words of children root us in wonder.
May their laughter open us to joy.
May their questions call us into justice.
May their dreams guide us closer to Beloved Community.
Learn more about the National Celebration of Children’s Sabbaths Service.