Why Grandparents Matter in Families of Faith
Grandma and grandpa play an outsized role in leading grandchildren to faith.
What parents do at home matters more than almost anything else. Christian Smith’s research is unambiguous on this point. His team measured the influence of parents against every other factor — peers, media, teachers, pastors, youth groups — and found that parents are, by far, the single most powerful influence on whether a child embraces faith into adulthood. Not the most convenient influence. Not the most visible. The most powerful.
Parents who regularly talk with their children about faith — what it means, why it matters, why they care — during ordinary days and ordinary moments see the greatest long-term impact on their children’s spiritual lives. But there’s an important nuance: the research shows that the most effective faith conversations are not parent-led lectures. They’re child-centered. The parent creates a safe, normal environment for talking about God, and then lets the child ask the questions, do most of the talking, and explore at their own pace. The parent listens, follows up, and offers honest wisdom when the moment is right.
But family life moves fast. Between school schedules, sports, screens, and the general chaos of getting everyone fed and out the door, it’s easy for meaningful conversations — let alone meaningful conversations about faith — to fall through the cracks. That’s the exact gap Scripture Union’s CONNECT Family Prayer & Bible Guide is designed to fill.
Why It Matters
According to Barna Group, nearly three out of four U.S. parents — 73% — say they are concerned about their children’s spiritual development. Seven in ten worry their children may eventually walk away from the faith they were raised in. And among practicing Christian parents, that concern runs even deeper: 58% say they are “very” concerned about whether their children will stay true to the faith.
“Grandparents are often looking for a way to connect with their grandchildren around something that matters. CONNECT gives them that — a reason to sit down together, read the Bible, and talk about what God is doing in their lives.”
Gail A. Martin, President of Scripture Union-USA
The desire to raise children who know and love God is alive and well. But desire alone isn’t getting the job done.
While 85% of parents say they believe the responsibility for their child’s spiritual formation falls primarily on them — not the church, not the school, not the youth group — most are not acting on that conviction. Barna’s research reveals that fewer than 10% of Christian parents have any spiritual development plan for their children. Most have no training in nurturing faith at home. No tools. No goals. And no one asking them how it’s going.
Why Grandparents Matter More Than You Think
There’s another finding in the research that deserves attention — one that may surprise you.
Vern Bengtson’s Longitudinal Study of Generations is one of the largest and longest-running studies of religion and family ever conducted. Over 35 years, Bengtson and his colleagues followed more than 350 families — over 3,500 individuals spanning four generations — to understand how faith is passed down from one generation to the next.
One of his most striking findings was the outsized role of grandparents.
Bengtson discovered that grandparental warmth — emotional closeness between grandparent and grandchild — was the single highest predictor of whether faith would be successfully transmitted across generations. Not church attendance. Not doctrinal instruction. Warmth.
And perhaps even more remarkably, Bengtson found that in families where a parent was absent, disengaged, or had drifted from faith, a faithful grandparent could step into the gap and become the bridge that kept the chain of faith intact. The presence of a loving, faith-filled grandparent could, in effect, replace the spiritual influence of a missing or distant parent.
This is an extraordinary finding — and it has real implications for how we think about a resource like CONNECT. This isn’t just a tool for parents. It’s a tool for grandparents who want to be intentional about how they spend time with their grandchildren. A grandparent who sits down with a grandchild, opens CONNECT, reads a passage of Scripture together, and talks about what it means is doing exactly what the research says matters most: building warmth and modeling faith in the context of a real relationship.