Dear Josephine:

Concerning including your children in wording of prayers:

Yes, you can add ""and my children" to the Renunciation of Ancestral Sins prayer. You, as the parent, have the duty to speak for your children, on behalf of your children. Thus, any prayer, such as the Protection Prayers, if they do not already contain language to include the children, such phrases can be added.

As your children's mother, you have authority in prayer even when they are grown. Of course, when the children are grown, they are responsible for themselves and will make their own decisions. But, take a look at the perseverance of St. Monica who never stopped praying for her errant son. Her son, St. Augustine, eventually returned to the Church and became one of the greatest saints in history and a Doctor of the Church.

I would say, however, that once your children are old enough to understand and make decisions for themselves, they ought to pray the Renunciation of Ancestral Sin for themselves.

As to the phrase that "You, the Christ, became a curse for me when You hung on the cross":

St. Paul answers your question in Galatians 3:13-14

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us--for it is written, "Cursed be every one who hangs on a tree"--  that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

How Jesus died was a curse (hanging on the tree) so that we might be free from the curse.

The Navarre Bible Commentary, one of the best Catholic Bible commentaries available, explains:

Christ, who was innocent, wished to offer the Father perfect atonement and thereby blot out our sin. To this end he voluntarily turned upon himself the curse which the Law laid on its transgressors. He bore the curse of the Law on our behalf and thereby set us free from the curse. What was for our Lord punishment was for men salvation. As St. Jerome puts it, "the injury suffered by the Lord is our glory. He died so that we might live; he descended into hell so that we might ascend into heaven. He became folly so that we might be reaffirmed in wisdom. He emptied himself of the fulness and form of God, taking the form of a slave, so that this divine fulness might dwell in us and we might be changed from slaves into lords. He was nailed on the Cross so that the sin committed at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil might be blotted out, once he was hung on the tree of the Cross."

With our Lord's death, the world's redemption is achieved, God's promise is fulfilled and the blessing he gave to Abraham multiplies his posterity, making them more numerous than the stars of heaven or the sand of the seashore (cf. Genesis 15:5-6; 22:17).

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary