Kids Worship
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Praise-and-worship music recorded for children — simplified, repeatable lyrics, bright uptempo arrangements, kid choruses, hand motions, and often costumed or animated characters — made for Sunday school, children's church, the family minivan, and now YouTube. It spans character-driven story albums, budget-priced classics collections of songs like "Jesus Loves Me" and "This Little Light of Mine", and kid versions of modern worship anthems cut by the megachurch worship brands. The format's constant across four decades is participation: every arrangement assumes a room of children singing and moving along.
History
Ernie and Debby Rettino's The Kids Praise Album! (Maranatha! Music, 1980) introduced Psalty the Singing Songbook and effectively invented the recorded kids-praise album, spinning off a decade-long series of story-driven sequels; Benson's Cedarmont Kids series (launched 1993) industrialized the lane, selling over 21 million units of children's classics, and in the 2000s the worship brands arrived: Hillsong Kids' Jesus Is My Superhero (2004) was Dove-nominated, and Bethel Music Kids' debut Come Alive (2015) topped the iTunes children's chart with kid-sung versions of "You Make Me Brave" and "This Is Amazing Grace"; Yancy's Little Praise Party series and YouTube-native channels like Listener Kids moved the format to streaming video, where it remains a working corner of church children's ministry.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- "The Kids Praise Album!", Wikipedia (Maranatha! Music, 1980), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_Praise_Album!
- Cedarmont Kids company history (21 million units since 1993), https://cedarmont.com/
- Hillsong Music, "Jesus Is My Superhero — Live Worship for Kids" (2004), Discogs
- JesusWired, "Bethel Music Releases First Kids Album, Come Alive" (2015)