The Devotional I Made For My Anxious Four-Year-Old

She was four when the worry started showing up as stomachaches.

Not real stomachaches. Well — real to her. That's the thing about worry in a small child: her body cannot yet tell the difference between "I am scared" and "I feel sick," so the fear shows up as a hand on the belly and eyes that will not meet mine. This was before Tomás was born, so my daughter had all my worry-radar attention, and I still nearly missed it.

The trigger was, of all things, the weekly library visit. She loved the library. And then, over about three weeks, she started asking if we could skip it. Then she was fine at the library, but crying in the car on the way. Then she was fine in the car, but couldn't sleep the night before.

I sat on the edge of her bed one night, and she said — I remember the exact sentence — "Mommy, what if the library people don't like me anymore?"

She was four.

What preschool anxiety actually looks like

The thing I did not know, and wish someone had told me before that stomachache season, is that anxiety in preschoolers rarely looks like anxiety. It looks like a stomachache. Or a sudden refusal of a food they used to eat. Or an intense need to know exactly where I am in the house at all times. Or a very specific, very small, very repetitive worry that seems out of proportion to anything — the library. The neighbor's dog. What if the sun goes away.

If you have a four-year-old (or a three-year-old, or a five-year-old, and I have now walked with both my kids through versions of this) doing something that feels newly clingy or newly avoidant or newly rigid, and it's persisting for more than a week or two, it might be worry. It's very often worry. And most Christian parenting books, God bless them, will hand you a verse and a prayer and pat you on the head, when what you actually need is a repeatable six-minute practice you can run at bedtime.

So here is what I built, after three weeks of stomachaches and one very long conversation with a Christian counselor whose name I will not share because she is worth her weight in gold and I do not want to lose my slot with her.

The six-minute practice

You will need: a bed. A small child. A verse. And your voice.

The verse I used, and still use, is 1 Peter 5:7: "Turn all your worries over to him. He cares about you" (NIrV). It is short enough for a four-year-old to remember. It is concrete — turn over is a verb a small child can picture, like handing something across a table. And it does not lie to her about the world. It does not say she will never worry again. It says there is a Somebody to hand it to.

The practice has three steps and it takes six minutes if I do it slowly.

Step 1 — Name it (two minutes). I sit on the edge of her bed and I ask, in the exact same words every night: "What was the biggest worry in your body today?" Not "did you have a worry" — the answer to that is "no" from a defensive four-year-old. "What was the biggest worry in your body." It presumes the worry exists. It asks her to locate it.

She names something. Sometimes it is the library. Sometimes it is that she thinks her friend at preschool is going to move away (this one is real; the friend actually is moving). Sometimes it is a worry so small I would have missed it: "I couldn't remember if I put my mitten in the bin."

Step 2 — Hand it over (two minutes). I hold out my open palms and I tell her: "Okay. Put the worry in Mommy's hands." She does. She actually pretends to lift the worry from her stomach and place it in my palms. I know how that sounds. I know. But she is four, and four-year-olds are literal, and it works. Then I close my hands around it and I say: "Now watch. I'm going to give it to Jesus."

I lift my closed hands up. Not dramatically. Not performatively. Just up. And I say the verse: "Turn all your worries over to Him. He cares about you." And then I open my hands, palms down, like I am gently emptying them.

Step 3 — Replace it (two minutes). This is the step most Christian devotional practices skip and it is the one that actually matters. Because a small child cannot hold "empty." She needs a replacement, or the worry crawls right back in.

I put my hands back on her belly — where the worry was — and I say: "Now Jesus is putting something in the same place where the worry was. Something soft. Something warm. What do you think it is?"

And she names it. Peace. Sometimes she says "a blanket." Sometimes she says "a bird." Once she said "a very small horse," and I nearly laughed out loud, but I did not, because she meant it.

Why this works

I am not a therapist. I want to be careful about that. If your child's anxiety is intense or persistent, please, please find a good Christian counselor. This practice is not a substitute for that. It is a bedtime supplement, and it is calibrated for the ordinary run of small-child worry that most preschoolers pass through and out of.

But there are reasons it works, and they are worth knowing.

It externalizes. Small children can't reason with a worry that is inside them, because they don't yet have the internal architecture for that. But they can hand a worry across a table. They can put it in Mommy's palms. Externalizing is the whole ballgame with kids this age.

It gives Jesus a job. Not an abstract theological role. A concrete task. He is the person who takes the worry when Mommy hands it up. Small children understand jobs. They do not yet understand omnipresence.

It replaces. Emptiness is worse than fear for a four-year-old. The peace-in-place-of-worry step is what actually settles her body enough to sleep.

It is repeatable. The same verse. The same three steps. The same words. Children this age are pattern-detectors. They do not want novelty at bedtime. They want the sequence.

What I want you to know

The library thing resolved in about six weeks. Not because of the bedtime practice alone — the friend at preschool situation shifted, and I also had a longer conversation with the librarian, who was lovely and had never disliked my daughter. But the practice gave my daughter a place to put the worry every night in the meantime. And it gave me a way to walk with her that was not "shush, don't be silly, there's nothing to worry about."

There was something to worry about. She is four. Everything is worth worrying about, from a four-year-old's angle. My job was not to convince her the world is safe. My job was to teach her, before she was old enough to articulate it, that there is Somebody to hand it to.

She is five now. Tomás is three, and he has just started, in the last month, showing his own tiny version of this — worrying about whether his shoes are on the right feet, of all things. We are running the same practice, adapted for a three-year-old (shorter verse, simpler hands, we do it with a stuffed bear). It works.

The verse still works. It has been working for two thousand years.

Come sit with us

I've been writing a small newsletter and a book of 100 devotionals for kids ages 3–8, and this six-minute practice is one of the specific ones in the book. But you do not need the book to try this tonight. You need a bed, a small child, and 1 Peter 5:7.

If you want more like this, godslittlesprout.com is where I keep the writing. There's a free weekly note. That's it. No hard sell — you and your kid are the point.