Following the conversion of high schooler Marsha Carter to Christianity, she led sister Wendy and friend Peter Jacobs to Christianity. Later, Russ Stevens joined. Following the release of their first album, Marsha Carter married Russ Stevens.

The thought that Christian music could sound like popular "secular" music was a radical innovation that would ultimately launch a revolution in liturgics unparalleled by anything since Reformers introduced congregational singing in the sixteenth century. But Children of the Day did not seem to know, or care, that they were innovators. They don't appear to have studied the works or thought of Ralph Carmichael or others who had tried for years to accomplish what they did in weeks. There was no intention or design. They weren't assembled by any record company or culled from the ranks of a Gospel choir. They were just four kids who had been revived by personal encounters with Jesus and who, like Peter in Acts, could not "keep from speaking of what (they) had seen and heard" [4:20].

They could not help but speak of it and, since they were musicians, they could not help but sing of it. And--since they were teenagers--they could not help but sing and write songs in the musical idioms most readily available to them, the California sounds that they heard emanating from their transistor radios and 8-track tape players. The music seemed to bubble up from the depths of their souls and just spill out, as though they had very little to do with it themselves. Witnessing such a phenomenon inevitably touched the hearts of the curious and the questing, with profound results. Musically, they and their peers [especially Love Song] provided some of the single most authentic moments in American music of the early '70s. No one else in the decade that followed the '60s really believed that their songs might--probably would--change the world. Indeed, no one in Christian or secular music seems to have thought so since.
 
They will always be best remembered for one incredible song: "For Those Tears I Died," released in 1971 and first found on The Everlastin' Living Jesus Music Concert compilation LP. An absolute masterpiece, written by a 16-year-old Marsha Stevens, it expresses adolescent piety as well as any other Christian song ever written--and yet does so in language that evokes imagery of baptism and liberation that even theologically mature adults can appreciate: "Jesus said, Come to the Waters / Stand by my side / I know you are thirsty / You won't be denied / I felt every teardrop / When in darkness you cried / And I strove to remind you / That for those tears I died."

They then released With All Our Love in 1973, Where Else Could I Go in 1975, Christmas Album the same year for Marantha! Music. They would release two more albums with the Light Records label; 1977's Never Felt So Free and 1979's Butterfly, after which the group disbanded.

 The group took its name from 1 Thessalonians 5:5. A true ensemble, all four members wrote songs and all four sang and played. They were integrally related to the ministry of Costa Mesa's Calvary Chapel ("ground zero" for the Jesus movement)The group even borrowed $900 for Pastor Chuck Smith to record their debut masterpiece at Abbey Sound Ltd in LA. It was engineered by Buck Herring (2nd Chapter of Acts). [ Excerpts taken from The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music, posted on CD Baby ]