On the formation of Charity

Matthew Kelly’s Building Better Families (Lighthouse Catholic Media) offers an alternate view of family life to the one proposed by Amy Chua.  He advocates encouraging our children to grow up to be the best people God has designed them to be, but doing so by engaging them and dialoguing with them as they grow.  When we engage children morally, ethically, spiritually, he says, they develop and discover for themselves how to make good decisions, form good habits, which ultimately leads to the formation of good, Godly character.  “Decisions create habits, habits create character, and character is your destiny.”

He shuns the yes/no parenting Mrs. Chua prescribes because it produces children who lack decision-making abilities.  Teaching children how to make good decisions, engaging them in the day to day, showing them how we make decisions through prayer takes parents out of the role of “GOD” or an unjust dictator and puts The Almighty back in authority as He should be.  This talk was rich with parental wisdom, I highly recommend it to all of our readers.  If only Amy Chua too!

One nugget of truth Kelly passed on that touched me personally was the need for our family to simplify, particularly of material possessions that clutter and cloud our spirituality.  He challenged us to go from room to room and get rid of stuff.  Above all, we needed to involve our children.  Kelly proposed–“Get with your children.  Go to their bedrooms…  Get some big black garbage bags.  Fill those big black garbage bags up.  Take them down to the goodwill store…  Don’t take them for your children.  And don’t clean your children’s wardrobe out while they’re at school because you will rob them of the moral, ethical, spiritual opportunity for development.  When the bags are full, get them to drag them to the car.  It’s good to feel the weight of our material possessions.”  The next time they want something new, you can remind them of all the extra stuff you just took to charity.  Do we need it?  You’ve just involved them morally, ethically, spiritually in developing them and building character.  Simplify.

So I decided to give it a try.  Could my young, 5 and under crew handle giving up their possessions?  We were going to test it out.  The verdict: a resounding YES.  We started by taking all the toys out to the garage.  I brought the kids out there and we began making 2 piles–one to give away and the other, to keep.  The boys got trash bags and put the giveaway items in and set them aside.  Then we took more trash bags and went up to their room.  I was amazed by their generosity–were these my children?  At one point, my 4yo T stopped and said, “Mommy, I’m having a hard time giving things up.”  “You’re going to have to open your heart and ask God to help you be generous to those in need,” I replied.  “Okay, Mommy, I need 90 seconds.”  A minute later T returned, exuberant, “Okay Mommy, God opened my heart and I feel better about giving.”  Priceless.  Once they were in the spirit of giving, we soared.  We filled up another bag and took all of them to the car.  It was fantastic.  I was so proud of my kids.  I think they were really proud of themselves.  I didn’t have to order them to give anything away.  We talked through items that were more difficult to part with–some we kept, others we ended up giving away.  There was no protest when we arrived at the Goodwill truck the next day to give away our bags.  It was joyful.

If we are to challenge the Western way of parenting, let’s do so with high expectations for the precious souls God has given us and with sound parenting practices to help them develop into the Godly men and women we know they can be.