Do you wish you knew more about your faith?
Most parishes offer ongoing adult formation classes—but don’t stop at your own parish’s offerings. Neighboring parishes might offer the programming you’re looking for, and programs are always open to those outside the parish.
Do you wonder if you’re passing your faith to your children?
Choose just one child in your family for a month at a time. Each day of that month, sit down with that child for five minutes and write a prayer to God together, each of you taking every other line. It can be a litany of thanks or a discussion of problems. In either case, you are teaching your child to go to God with joy and sorrow.
Do you want to increase your church attendance?
First, determine why you are not going. If it’s just scheduling, make the necessary adjustments to give Mass priority. If it’s something deeper—a dissatisfaction or an apathy with the Mass, unpack these feelings and take the measures you need to in order to feel more connected.
Allow your child to teach you
Emma and Sam, parents of three children under 8, always sing their grace before dinner. Once, while out at a restaurant, the children requested they sing their grace before eating. “Sam and I were embarrassed and didn’t want to sing grace to the tune of Yankee Doodle at this trendy restaurant,” Emma says. “But what is that lesson? Pray when it’s convenient? The kids knew better, so we sang (maybe a little more quietly) the way we always do.”
A child’s comment about who to pray for or when to pray can move us as parents to reconsider the parameters we place around prayer. “When the planes crashed into the twin towers, I told my son Noah, who was then 4, that we needed to pray for the people in those buildings,” says Carol, mother of four. “And he looked at me and said, ‘I think we need to pray for the people who did this, too.’ ”
Create traditions around prayer.
Children learn what we value by noticing traditions—if we do this all the time, it must be important. Parents who build in time for daily prayer at meals and before bed and who take time for prayer themselves elevate the importance of prayer.
As the child grows, he or she is more likely to try to figure out prayer’s place in his or her own life. “As a child, I mostly just asked God for things when I prayed,” says Josh, now a young adult. “But as I got older, I thought of how my parents belonged to prayer groups, and how my mom would go to daily Mass sometimes—I knew there must be more to prayer than asking for things. I joined campus ministry in college and really started exploring types of prayer.”
—by Annemarie Scobey from the pages of At Home with Our Faith, Claretian Publications’ print newsletter for parents on nurturing spirituality in the home. Winner of the 2012 Best in Class award from the Associated Church Press, as well as the 2010 and 2011 General Excellence awards from the Catholic Press Association.