Resources to send home with families to enrich their faith life as the Domestic Church.
Family prayers for the month of July.
Birthdays can be an important time for individuals and families to mark new family relationships, honor the aging process, remember the birth parents, reconnect when there has been loss or cutoffs, and just have fun. Use this guide to create your own birthday rituals.
Use this guide to create rituals for your family when they experience a death.
Use this guide to create family rituals centered on leisure time.
Use this guide to create your own family rituals when someone gets married.
The family meal is a ritual through with families learn about many aspects of their relationships, including gender roles; boundaries around individuals, pairs, allowable topics for conversation; the range of permitted emotions; changes in family members; and the family as a whole. Use these ideas to jumpstart your own family meal rituals.
Use these ideas to mark school milestones.
Ritual ideas for when families experience divorce, retirement, or a geographical change.
Family members develop ritualized ways of saying good-bye when they leave each other to go to work or school, and of saying hello when they greet each other again after being apart. Here are some ideas to help you develop your own family rituals.
The Christian Church has a special way of welcoming and supporting the development of a child's faith life. This special way is Baptism. To help celebrate the reception of this sacrament, here are some favorite baptism celebrations that you might find helpful in expressing your hopefulness for your child and the newest member of the Christian community.
Use these ideas to create your own rituals for welcoming a new baby.
An in-depth look at families with adolescents.
A collection of ideas for families to celebrate mothers and fathers.
A prayer of parents for each other.
In every culture, parents create bedtime rituals for babies and young children to ease separation from the parent and the passage from waking state to sleeping state. The familiar repetition of such bedtime rituals marks and defines the parent-child relationship as one where comfort, reliability, and safety are available. Use this guide to create your own bedtime rituals.
A prayer for parents.
Family meal prayers for the summer.
Family prayers for the month of January.
Use these guidelines for media use in your home.
Gently invite parents to take on the baptismal role of primary catechist with a 15-minute family session designed to fit right into your regular catechetical program for children plus a take-home activity. These resources are designed to help faith formation leaders invite parents to take the first significant steps into the parish faith formation program.
Resources are designed to help families engage in shared prayer, faith sharing, service, and reflection about justice together.
This article explores ways to share faith in the young family. What values and beliefs need to be shared? It also discusses four challenges to parents for transmitting faith at home.
A simple handout with some tips to help households communicate more effectively.
This article exposes and dispels several myths about parenting young children and then suggest ten key beliefs and techniques for successful parenting and faith nurturing of young children.
Wonderful collection of ideas and strategies for sharing faith with young children.
This article explores some of the typical needs, struggles, challenges, and joys of families with young children.
Use these ideas in your family to help make meal time an important time in your home.
Use this activity to reflect on and thank God for the special qualities of your family.
Occasional conflict and disagreement are normal occurrences in family life. Collaborative problem-solving provides a means of handling the changes and disruptions that occur regularly in the family with adolescents.
Encouragement is a skill parents can learn to help children grow in self-esteem. Encouragement focuses on children's strengths and assets, and recognizes their efforts and improvements.
Families today come in different sizes, shapes and configurations. Many children and youth live at least a portion of their lives in blended families, sharing their home with one biological parent, a step parent and a mixture of biological and step siblings. Use these guidelines for easing the adjustment of parents into stepfamily life.
Help families share faith throughout the church year with this seasonal treasure trove of ideas and programs.
Studies show that healthy families communicate well. This fact, by itself, is not exactly a new revelation. Common sense tells us that effective communication is necessary for families to function in a healthy way. Use this process for setting up family meetings in your home.
Things that family members do together, like family celebrations and vacations, day trips and work projects, build their sense of what it means to be family and provide a reserve of good memories that can be drawn on for encouragement and support when family life gets hectic or hassled. Try these tips for creating new memories and keeping old memories young.
Use this five-step problem-solving method called SODAS to think more clearly and base your decisions on sound reasoning.
Parents and children often have different opinions on how family responsibilities should be shared or family policies enforced. A contract is simply a written statement of what your child agrees to do and what the consequences are if he or she accomplishes the goal.
This activity is intended to provide a way for families to gather, pray, and share their faith in order to deepen personal and family spirituality.
One of the key roles of parents is to encourage and enable the growth of their children. Parenting by encouraging builds self-esteem through focusing attention on the child's resources. Use these strategies for encouraging the growth of your children.
Families are so busy these days that they don't have the opportunity to be together on a regular basis. Encourage your family members to decide on an activity in which everyone can participate.
As children grow they develop a social calendar all their own. Trying to keep family calendars balanced and guarantee quality time for family relationships can be difficult. Adopt the tradition of special child nights as a way of building special parent-child time into your crowded family schedules.
This activity provides a framework for families to interact with each other and strengthen family ties.
During adolescence the parenting role begins to shift in major ways. As young people begin to take more personal responsibility for their own lives and grow increasingly independent, parents are faced with the task of restructuring their relationships with teens. Follow these guidelines to shift and strengthen a new relationship with your teen.
Rituals are essential for our family life. Family rituals give us a sense of permanence, the assurance that even the most ordinary of family activities are meaningful and significant. Use this guide to form your own family rituals.
Many important events go unmarked and uncelebrated in the life of an adolescent. Sometimes this happens because of shame or embarrassment or because accomplishments and changes have gone unnoticed. Marking these passages offer an opportunity to celebrate family values.
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