Come, Follow Me Study Tips for Busy Parents
Between soccer practice, permission slips, and a toddler who thinks bedtime is a negotiation, family scripture study can feel like one more thing you’re failing at. It doesn’t have to. Here’s what has actually worked in our noisy, ordinary house.
It was a Tuesday, which in our house means the older two have piano until 5:40, the middle one has forgotten a worksheet that is due Wednesday, and the baby has chosen that exact hour to refuse every food group except crackers. I had the Come, Follow Me manual open on my phone, a pot of pasta threatening to boil over, and exactly one coherent thought: we are supposed to be studying the scriptures as a family, and we are not doing it. Maybe you’ve had that Tuesday too. If you have, this article is for you — not as a lecture, but as a note from one parent in the trenches to another, about what has slowly, messily started to work for us.
I should say up front that I am not a scripture scholar. I’m a dad with four kids, a calling that eats two evenings a week, and a highlight reel of family scripture study attempts that would make you laugh. We once tried to read a chapter of Alma during breakfast and ended up in a ten-minute argument about whether syrup counts as a soup. So when I share what works, I’m sharing it from the floor of the minivan, not from a podium.
The Night I Stopped Trying to Re-create Seminary at My Kitchen Table
My biggest breakthrough wasn’t a new technique. It was lowering the bar — on purpose, and without guilt. For years I carried a picture in my head of what family scripture study was “supposed” to look like: everyone seated, scriptures open, a thoughtful discussion question, maybe a hymn, children raising their hands like a well-run Primary class. That picture came partly from my own childhood and partly, if I’m honest, from what I imagined other families in the ward were doing.
The problem was that the picture required thirty uninterrupted minutes and six cooperative people, and I have never once had both at the same time. So we would aim for the ideal, miss it, feel bad, skip the next night because it was already 8:15, and slide into a pattern where the manual sat unopened for weeks. The gap between the ideal and our reality wasn’t motivating us. It was paralyzing us.
What changed things was a simple reframe: the point of Come, Follow Me is not to perform a perfect lesson. The point is to bring the words of Christ into our home regularly enough that our kids absorb them the way they absorb everything else in family life — gradually, unevenly, and mostly by osmosis. A verse read aloud over a sink full of dishes counts. A question answered in the car on the way to practice counts. Once I actually believed that, everything else in this article became possible.
What “Study” Looks Like With Kids Underfoot
Here’s the honest truth about studying with children: it is shorter and louder than you planned, and that is fine. The current Come, Follow Me manual is built for exactly this. It isn’t a script you have to deliver start to finish. It’s a buffet. Each weekly reading offers several ideas, and you are explicitly invited to pick what fits your family. Parents of toddlers, that invitation is a gift — take it.
The ten-minute version
On a good night, our study looks like this: I read two or three verses out loud while the kids finish dessert or sprawl on the living room rug. Then I ask one question — just one — and let whoever wants to answer, answer. Then somebody (usually not me) says a two-sentence prayer about what we read. Done. Ten minutes, sometimes less. Nobody gave a presentation. Nobody colored a handout. And yet, over months, my kids have picked up an surprising amount of the actual story line of the scriptures, because we keep showing up.
The two-minute version
On a bad night — and we have plenty — the whole thing is one verse at the dinner table, or one verse texted to the teenager who’s at work, with a line like “this one made me think of you.” I’ve learned to treat the two-minute version not as a failure of the ten-minute version but as a legitimate option on the menu. The habit matters more than the length. A family that touches the scriptures briefly six days a week is, in my experience, better fed than a family that holds one heroic forty-minute session on Sunday and nothing the rest of the week.
Ten-Minute Ideas That Have Survived a Real Weeknight
Every idea on this list has been tested in our house under hostile conditions: homework deadlines, a meltdown in progress, a parent running on five hours of sleep. These are the ones that lived.
- One verse, one question. Read a single verse from the week’s chapters and ask, “What do you think this means?” Younger kids will say something wild; let them. Teens will shrug once and then, if you wait five seconds, often say something real. The waiting is the technique.
- Read it in the car. We keep a set of scriptures in the glove box. Ten minutes of captive audience on the way to practice is worth more than thirty minutes of fighting bedtime at home. The driver reads nothing — a passenger does.
- The “tell it back” game. I retell the scripture story in sixty seconds, badly, with intentional mistakes. The kids compete to correct me. They have never once failed to pay attention to this, because correcting Dad is the finest sport in our family.
- Draw the verse. For littles: read one short verse, hand over crayons, ask them to draw it. You get three to five quiet minutes and a fridge full of surprisingly theological art.
- One person, one takeaway. Go around the table and each person says one thing they noticed in this week’s reading — or, if they haven’t read it, one thing they noticed about how life is going. It keeps the door open for the kids who won’t admit they didn’t read.
- Scripture of the week on the fridge. Write one verse on an index card, tape it up, and mention it once a day. By Friday, even the six-year-old has it memorized without anyone trying.
- Audio while you cook. Play the week’s chapters from the Gospel Library app while making dinner. The kids pretend not to listen. Weeks later they quote it back at you.
- Bedtime verse with the littles. One verse, read at the little kids’ bedside, becomes part of the bedtime routine alongside teeth brushing. Routines you already have are the easiest places to attach scripture study.
- Text your teen. A verse and a sentence, no follow-up demanded. It doesn’t look like family study, but it is — and some of my best gospel conversations with my oldest have started in a text thread at 9:47 p.m.
- Sunday five-minute preview. Glance at next week’s reading Sunday evening and mention one thing to look forward to. It makes Monday’s ten minutes easier to start, and starting is always the hard part.
The habit matters more than the length. A verse over a sink full of dishes counts.
Toddlers, Teens, and Everyone in Between
The single biggest mistake I made early on was trying to run one lesson that worked for a three-year-old and a fourteen-year-old at the same time. It can’t be done, and attempting it frustrates everyone. What works better is letting different kids participate at different depths in the same moment. Here’s how it breaks down at our house.
| Age | What actually engages them | Realistic goal for the week |
|---|---|---|
| 0–3 | Being held, hearing your voice, one repeated phrase (“Jesus loves me” while reading a verse about the Savior) | They associate scripture time with warmth and attention |
| 4–7 | Stories told aloud, drawing the verse, being the one to hold the book or turn the page | They can retell one story from the week’s reading |
| 8–12 | Questions with no single right answer, “what would you have done?” scenarios, marking their own copy of the scriptures | They read or listen to part of the assignment themselves, once |
| 13–18 | Being asked their real opinion, connecting verses to their actual lives, one-on-one conversations (often in the car or late at night) | One genuine exchange about the reading per week, on their terms |
Notice what the goals are not. The goal for a toddler is not doctrinal mastery; it’s a warm association with scripture time. The goal for a teen is not attendance at a family lecture; it’s one real conversation a week. When you size the goal to the child, you stop failing all the time, because the goals are suddenly reachable.
A word about teenagers specifically, because this is where I see parents in the ward get most discouraged. My oldest went through a stretch where he would physically sit with us and contribute absolutely nothing — eyes on the ceiling, answers of one syllable. I took it personally for months. What helped was stopping the public push and switching to side-by-side moments: a verse texted after a hard game, a question asked while we were both stuck at the drive-through. The family circle time stayed short and low-pressure, and the real study with him happened one-on-one. He came back around. Most of them do.
When You Miss a Week (or Three)
Let’s talk about the thing nobody mentions in the comments at church: skipping. Every family I know skips weeks. Travel, illness, a new baby, a brutal work season — life knocks the habit over, and then the habit stays down because picking it back up feels like admitting you dropped it.
Here’s the rule we live by now: never catch up, just come back. If we miss two weeks of the reading schedule, we do not attempt a triple-length marathon to “get current.” That way lies misery and resentment. We simply open the manual to whatever this week’s chapters are and start there. The scriptures will still be there next year — Come, Follow Me cycles back around — and the skipped chapters can be picked up in personal study someday if I want them. My kids will not remember that we covered every verse of the Old Testament in 2026. They will remember whether the scriptures felt like a burden or a friend.
There’s a teaching in the Gospel Topics entry on scripture study that I lean on here: the goal is to feast on the words of Christ, not to complete a checklist. Nephi’s invitation to feast (2 Nephi 32:3) says nothing about finishing on schedule. A feast you return to gladly beats a checklist you abandoned in March.
One practical trick for re-entry: restart on a Sunday, not a Monday. Sunday has natural momentum — church, quieter schedules, the new week’s reading beginning. Trying to resurrect the habit on a Wednesday night after a long break is fighting uphill. Give yourself the easy ramp.
Using the Manual Without Letting It Use You
The manual is a tool, and like any tool it can quietly become the boss of you if you let it. A few things that have kept it in its proper place at our house:
Read the manual yourself before you teach from it. This sounds obvious, but for years I tried to teach straight off the page in real time, and my kids could tell. Ten minutes of my own reading on Sunday — just me, the manual, and a pencil — makes the weeknight version ten times better, because I’m sharing something that actually struck me instead of reading bullet points aloud. Kids can smell the difference.
Choose one idea per week, not all of them. Each weekly outline contains several teaching suggestions. Early on I tried to cover everything and produced rushed, shallow lessons. Now I pick the single idea that fits my kids that week and ignore the rest without a flicker of guilt. The unused ideas aren’t assignments I failed; they’re options I declined.
Let the kids hold the manual sometimes. Handing the weekly outline to a ten-year-old and saying “you pick what we do tonight” has produced some of our best sessions — and it quietly teaches them that the manual belongs to them too, not just to Mom and Dad.
Use the media, skip the prep. The videos and images linked through the manual and the scriptures online are a busy parent’s best friend. A three-minute video does more for a wiggly eight-year-old than ten minutes of my lecturing, and it requires zero preparation beyond tapping play.
Building the Habit So It Survives You
Everything above depends on one unglamorous foundation: a time and a trigger. Habits that float freely in the day do not happen; habits attached to something that already happens, happen. Ours is attached to dinner. Not every dinner — nobody has that — but dinner most nights, roughly, and the rule is simply that before anyone leaves the table, we do our verse or our ten minutes. The table is the trigger. We don’t rely on remembering; we rely on the fact that everyone has to eat.
Your trigger might be different. Families in our ward attach study to the school run, to pajama time, to the commute to early-morning activities, to the Sunday evening lull. I’ve stopped believing there’s a right answer. The right answer is whichever moment in your family’s day already happens without being scheduled.
And protect the habit from perfectionism, because perfectionism is what actually kills family scripture study — not busyness. Busy families with modest, flexible habits keep going for years. Families waiting for the perfect evening quit by February. Aim for most days, briefly, with love. That’s the whole secret, and I wish someone had told me ten years ago.
What I’d Tell the Parent Who Feels Behind
If you’ve read this far and your main feeling is “we’re so far behind it’s embarrassing,” let me finish with you in mind. Behind is not a real category in family scripture study. There is no scoreboard, no one auditing your progress against the ward’s, no finish line you’re failing to cross. There is only tonight, and a verse, and the people at your table.
Start smaller than you think you should. One verse tonight. One question. One prayer, however short. Do it again tomorrow, or the day after, and don’t apologize to anyone — including yourself — for the size of the effort. The Lord who fed five thousand with a few loaves is not limited by your ten minutes. Give Him the ten minutes, regularly, and let Him do the multiplying. In our house, that has been more than enough.
This article reflects personal experience and study, not an official statement of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sources: the current Come, Follow Me — For Home and Church manual, the Gospel Topics entry on scripture study, and the scriptures online at ChurchofJesusChrist.org (links verified August 2026).