Help your child to be a better friend

• Teach eye contact and smiling. Naturally outgoing kids use eye contact with their peers and smile often. This reassures other children. If your child is more reserved, they may need to practice looking at people while they’re talking.

• Mind the manners. It may sound old-fashioned, but kids who use good manners make their friends feel valued. Teach your son to give a guest a drink before taking one himself; instruct your daughter as to how she can introduce you to her friends.

• Compliment. Kids have a certain amount of developmental self-centeredness and don’t always look for attributes in those around them. Teach your child to notice the work of others—a great art project; a well-read part in a play; a strong kick at soccer—and to comment on it.

By Annemarie Scobey, from the archives of At Home with Our Faith newsletter

Moms, dads, and the spiritual works of mercy

Parenting offers daily opportunities to live the spiritual works of mercy, based on Christ’s teachings and Christian practice since the apostles.

Counsel the doubtful: When we take time for a short heart-to-heart to build up the confidence of a child who is filled with doubts about herself.

Instruct the ignorant: When we teach kids a new behavior (“’Stupid’ is not a word we use”) or a better way of doing something (“how to clean a drawer”).

Admonish the sinner: By calling our children on the wrongs they do, when we’re tempted to just let them pass.

Comfort the sorrowful: When we offer a long hug after a bad day.

Forgive injuries: When we teach children how to say, “I’m sorry,” and use the words, “I forgive you.”

Bear wrongs patiently: When we teach kids the right way to live yet patiently accept the limits of their stage in life.

Pray for the living and the dead: When we whisper prayers for our living children and those lost to miscarriage or death.

By Annemarie Scobey, from the archives of At Home with Our Faith newsletter

Peace on earth begins at the kitchen table (part two)

Peace in the marriage: If the path to peace in oneself is spending some time in silence each day, the key to peace in a marriage is just the opposite—communication is vital. Spouses who talk well with each other will be effective co-leaders of their family and are more equipped to help the rest of the family communicate peacefully as well. The Handbook for Today’s Catholic Family (Liguori) recommends that married couples spend two hours a week in true dialogue. “My husband and I don’t spend anything close to two hours a week in real dialogue,” says Amy, mother of three school-age children. “But I do notice that when we take even 15 minutes to talk about anything beyond the immediate schedule—our future plans, or our faith, or something else that’s serious—I feel taken care of. And when I feel taken care of, I am better able to take care of our children. The whole family benefits when we talk more.”

 Peace in the family: “Pockets of peace” are most likely to occur when everyone in the family is present to the same event. Arguments are most likely to break out during times of transition—as some members of a family move from one activity to another. Building more small events into family life is one way of making room for peace. “We recently had a fire together on a Friday night,” says Anne, mother of three. “Everyone just enjoyed roasting marshmallows and talking outside. It was so simple—and everyone was so happy—as I was sitting there I wondered why we didn’t do more of this.”

 By Annemarie Scobey, from the archives of At Home with Our Faith newsletter.

Peace on earth begins at the kitchen table (part one)

Beth, a mother of four children ages 5 to 12, admits that her children may see her as June Cleaver. “I don’t know that they’ve ever seen me in my pajamas in the morning,” Beth says. “By the time they get up, I’m showered and dressed, with my makeup on.” Far from being an aspiring 1950s housewife, however, Beth explains that getting up an hour before her children is something she does for herself—not her kids.

“Once they get up, my life is crazy,” she says. “Taking the time in the quiet, before that first kid wakes up, gives me the peace I need to start the day.”

For parents, peace can be elusive. New parents struggle to have a thought or sleep for more than three hours without a baby interrupting. Parents with toddlers and preschool-age children can feel life has become a test of wills—from putting on shoes to getting in the car, suddenly nothing is easy anymore.

School conflicts snake their way into family life, and a once-close husband and wife can find that the sheer speed of life with children and teens can reduce their once-thoughtful conversations to barked instructions.

Yet amid the noise and the chaos, most families enjoy pockets of peace—those times when everything aligns—and we glimpse the family we’d like to be all the time. Upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was asked, “What can we do to promote world peace?” She answered, “Go home and love your family.”

If family peace can bring about peace on earth, as Mother Teresa says, we better figure out how to get there.

Peace within the parent: As my friend Beth intuitively understands, we cannot lead our children toward peace if we ourselves are feeling unsettled. When family life starts leaning towards the decidedly un-peaceful, our first instinct may be to look toward the child who seems to be causing the most problems—the 7-year-old who is incessantly tattling; the sulking teen.

Yet if we first check for peace in our own heart, we may find that fear, stress, or anger have taken up residence there instead. Peaceful parents can better build a peaceful household. “I find that just lighting a candle on the kitchen counter and praying for a few minutes in the morning sets a completely different tone for my day than when I don’t make time for it,” says Carol, a mother of four.                                                                …continued next week

 By Annemarie Scobey, from the archives of At Home with Our Faith newsletter

January 2010 Moms’ Night Out discussion questions

Download the January 2010 Moms’ Night Out discussion starters here.

Don’t be scared of Halloween

Angelo Stagnaro explains the Christian origins of Halloween in his U.S. Catholic article, Don’t be scared of Halloween. “We couldn’t have arranged a more perfect synthesis of devotion and festivity had we tried,” he writes. ”When you get to the core of what the holiday is, you find an overwhelmingly Catholic Christian holiday. It should be recognized and celebrated as such-warts, spider webs, and all.”

Readers’ comments follow the article.  I do have to agree with the reader who wrote that what she’d most like to change about Halloween is: “That parents wouldn’t turn their kids into pimps and whores to treat-or-treat.” I’ve seen one too many pimp costumes coming to my door, along with pre-adolescent “French maids” in fishnet stockings and little aprons.

What do family dinners have to do with faith?

GA Catholic sends this comment:  ’Without questioning the value of sharing meals together as a family, what in the world does this have to do with ‘Handing on the faith?’”

This comment refers to the post mentioning Family Day – A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children, celebrated on September 28, brought to you by the folks at The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA). 

 Great question, GA Catholic.  

1. One of the ways we Catholics talk about Mass is as a meal.  If our kids rarely experience meals eaten with others in a family setting, without the TV on, how will they ever be able to recognize the connections between family meals and the Mass?

2. One of the best vehicles to hand on the faith is the family dinner table discussion.  I often ask my kids, “Tell me some stories about your day.” (This proved much more successful than saying, “How was school”?) Answers to this question tell us a lot about their friends, their teachers, their ethical dilemmas, their attitudes toward people and things.  We can weigh in with a faith perspective on these topics.  On Sundays you can ask kids what they thought about a particularly challenging story you heard at Mass that day: the prodigal son, the laborers in the vineyard, Abraham and Isaac, Noah and the Ark. Kids have opinions, questions about many of these stories if you give them the chance to express them.

3. Never eating dinner together is a sign that something in the family is out of whack.  Priorities are skewed.  Kids’ sports commitments may be running the family schedule, for example.  (Few families would say, “Our kids sports are the most important thing in our family life,” but our schedules might say something different.)  “A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children”  is an invitation to look at our family priorities and whether our schedules match our priorities. How do you schedule in “handing on the faith” if you never eat dinner together?  Here’s a great interview on family priorities from U.S. Catholic magazine.  

4. Joseph Califano and his researchers at CASA say that eating dinner with your kids regularly is one way to keep them off drugs.  I assume anyone wanting to hand on the faith to their kids would of course want to keep them off drugs, especially when the method involves something as easy, cheap, and noncontroversial as macaroni and cheese.  

5. Family meals are a great opportunity to pray together.  Let the kids take turns praying spontaneously for the needs of the world, their friends, your family members.  It’s good to give kids opportunities to pray with and in front of others.

I could go on and on…

November Moms’ Night Out

Download the November 2009 Moms’ Night discussion starters here.

A new concept: Dinner with your family

Stock up on mac & cheese or whatever is your kids’ favorite dinner in preparation for Family Day – A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children, which will be celebrated across the country this Monday, September 28.

Family Day is brought to you by the folks at The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA).   CASA Chairman Joseph A. Califano, Jr. says, “If I could wave a magic wand to make a dent in our nation’s substance abuse problem, I would make sure that every child in America had dinner with his or her parents at least five times a week.”

And while you’re at it, check out CASA’s research on raising drug-free kids.

Phillies fan dad rates a homily

Check out this great homily for Sunday, Sept 19 by Fr. Austin Fleming, which took off from the popular You Tube video of Steve Monforto, the dad at the Phillies game who caught his first foul ball, handed it to his 3-year-old daughter, and then watched as she turned and tossed the baseball over the railing.  The look on his face  and his reaction to his young daughter as he realizes what’s happening is a homily unto itself.   Fr. Fleming blogs regularly as A Concord Pastor.