Should I take my restless kids out of the liturgy, or is there a better way?

It's tremendously important that they receive Holy Communion. Children are in a very purified spiritual state. And also, what are we trying to teach our children in church? We are trying to teach our children how to pray. Now, this is a little bit of an uphill battle when they're two and three years old, but by the ages of four, five, six, and seven, they should have a sense that they are in the liturgy. When we pray in our home in the morning and in the evening, our children understand that the Divine Liturgy is an extension of that. And so praying in the church is what we want to cultivate. The idea of removing our children from the liturgy or from the church services so they can go do something else is completely foreign to the church. In fact, our old Archbishop Peter would not allow churches to be built that had cry rooms with the glass where the parents could look out, because then they were viewing the liturgy through another room. The norm was that if your children are restless, need to nurse, need to get a diaper change, whatever else, you would simply take them out of the liturgy and take care of them, and then come back into the liturgy, because the children need to learn how to pray with the whole community of believers. Again, so often what we experience in our culture we think is the norm, but when we look back historically, or even when we look at other cultures, we quickly realize this is not normative. This is just our culture. What is the church's culture? The church's culture is that everyone prays together, old and young, male and female, everyone prays together. And yeah, of course, it's an adjustment. It really is an adjustment, and it can be very difficult for mothers. I'm extremely sympathetic of this as a priest who's been serving for twelve years. Lord have mercy. My wife has been in and out of church services the entire time that I've been a priest, taking care of kids and juggling them, and I'm certainly sympathetic to the mothers who are praying with their feet. They are there in the services, but they're not able to be there in a complete way. But that doesn't diminish the spiritual benefit of being in liturgy. They still need to be there and bring the kids and struggle through all these things. It is still a tremendous blessing for them.