Faith on the Couch
What are your chances your children will own their faith? Answer these 5 questions in my inaugural post in the National Catholic Register!
For the Catholic parent, there is no more important task than communicating our faith to our children. That doesn’t just mean teaching our kids Catholic prayers and rituals. It means teaching them how to have a meaningful and personal relationship with God. How to think and act morally. How to love rightly and intimately. How to celebrate and live life as the gift that it is meant to be. And, ultimately, how to be saints — living witnesses to a life of grace.
As critical as this mission is, it’s understandable that many parents feel overwhelmed about the undertaking. In our newest book, Discovering God Together: The Catholic Guide to Raising Faithful Kids, we take some of the mystery out of the process and reveal recent studies that expose the science behind passing on the faith. The book goes into many more ideas but let’s cover a few of the bigger findings here. Answer the following questions to see how effectively you are sharing the faith in your home.
1. Do your children experience your faith as the source of your warm, family relationships?
The Christian life is a call to deeper relationship with God and others. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that children are much more likely to “own” their faith when they experience it as the source of the warmth of their family relationships. When children of faithful parents experience no difference in the quality of the relationships in their homes relative to the quality of the relationships in their non-Catholic or non-believing friends’ homes, they come to see faith as either a hobby they can take or leave or, worse, as a fraud. This is especially true when faith is experienced as a collection of restrictions and rules instead of the source of the family’s sense of joy and togetherness. To this end, (CONTINUE READING)
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