“Your Best” Catholic Parenting

Cardinal George once made the observation that Catholics in America are “Catholic in piety but Calvinist in worldview.”  Why?  Primarily because families are the crucibles of culture and Catholic parents keep turning to Protestant and secular parenting experts to learn how to create their family culture.  Then we wonder why our kids–who were taken to Mass, and served at the Altar, and went to Catholic school, and said the rosary, and did all those other pious, Catholic things–grow up and toddle off to the First Evangelical Church of the Big Box or don’t go to church at all.   It’s largely because Catholic parents teach our kids Catholic piety, but raise our kids according to the values and worldviews espoused by protestant and secular parenting “experts.”

Love God and the Church First The Do What You Will 

The point is, Catholic parents are certainly free to parent however they want.  But by buying into the “we all have to do what works best for us” line, too many Catholic parents raise kids with a vision of family life that is almost completely antithetical to the Catholic vision of self-donative love we are all called to be examples of.  Doing so, we pay the price by creating families that don’t look any different than our neighbors’ families and by raising kids who wonder what all the Catholic fuss is about when our home doesn’t actually function differently than the neighbors’–except for how many more rules we have.

So yes, by all means, choose those parenting methods that “work best for you.’  But be sure that what you mean by “works best” is “helps me create a family that does the best job possible living out the Catholic vision of self-donative love” and not, “helps me get through the day with the least effort possible.”

Editor’s note: this article was first published at Patheos and is reprinted with kind permission

image: Shutterstock

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Dr. Gregory Popcak is the Executive Director of the Pastoral Solutions Institute, an organization dedicated to helping Catholics find faith-filled solutions to tough marriage, family, and personal problems.

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