Our children’s holiness, not happiness, is our first priority

September is a divisive time. Depending on your personality, you either love it or despise it. Regardless of our feelings surrounding summer’s end and new beginnings, here September comes along with an opportunity to take stock of what worked and what didn’t.

For those of us with school-aged children at home, we find ourselves in the thick of planning. We are buying clothes and supplies and fighting all of the little personality battles that come along with making decisions for the school year. Will you sign up for the purgatory that is competitive gymnastics and hockey again this year? What about those overpriced brand name sneakers that “everyone will have”? Can this particular child handle this certain teacher or is it worth rocking the boat?

It is important in the thick of this logistical storm that we pause and take stock. We need to reorient our priorities. What exactly is the duty of a parent? Surely doling out money to “make kids happy” is not our chief function and purpose?

The education of our children is our “first responsibility,” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Hopefully this leads us to breathe sighs of relief as this statement is not meant to burden us further but to relieve us of the falsely assumed burden of “making our kids happy.” Our job is indeed not to make them happy above all else but to lead them to true freedom. True freedom is the ability to choose the highest good in the face of many lesser goods (e.g. hockey and vintage Nikes).

“The home is well-suited for education in the virtues. This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery—the preconditions of all true freedom,” the Catechism reads. “Parents should teach their children to subordinate the material and instinctual dimensions to interior and spiritual ones.”

This is a lofty calling for parents because it means we must take a look inside our own hearts and see where we’ve placed our treasure (for there our hearts lie also). Are our energies focused on “giving our kids the world” or on giving them heaven? Educating children in the virtues is an effort that requires ample thought and intention. Parents certainly have some powerful currents to swim against and each child is a different world unto themselves. To be sure, inculcating virtue is a daunting task. The one reprieve is that we need only begin with the education and formation of one person first: ourselves.

“Christian fathers and mothers,” St. John Vianney once implored, “if you wish to have pious, good children, you must first yourselves be God-fearing and lead good lives.”

A child’s early years are the best time to start education in the faith but the second-best time to begin is today. It is our mission to help build up faith in the world through fostering and nurturing a strong faith in our children. It does not take long to see the fruit of a solid education, worldly or otherwise. Our hierarchy of values will be mimicked. Let us make our lives worthy of mimicry!

When we teach a child to pray, we give the child wings to soar above their challenges and obstacles and learn to trust that the big picture is in God’s hands. May they learn to pray from the heart as they have seen their parents pray from their youth.

May we parents—someday with St. Paul—boast that although we have been “poured out like a libation” for our children, we have “fought the good fight, [we] have finished the race, [we] have kept the faith.” (2 Tm 4: 7-8)

Father, may our children grow to be blameless and pure; “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation among whom they will shine like stars in the sky.” (Phil 2: 14)

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