Padre Pio Parish Glenmore Park

Your children came with no instructions when you took them home from the hospital but there are so many good practices that I have learnt from listening to the mistakes some parents have commonly made. In order to assist you I have developed a more positive approach to parenting which works on avoiding certainly unhealthy practices. I want to share these with you.. If you have come up with any good ideas of your own I would be interested in hearing them. Perhaps I can keep developing this document as nothing ever stays the same.

Yesterday (12 March 2008) I spoke with a father of a 17 year old girl who tells me that she had not come home for two nights. As you can imagine the father was distraught. He cried as he told me, “I don’t know what we did wrong?” The main problem for his mind to grasp is “How did my beautiful baby, given a name that recognised that she was a gift from God, grow up in the same house as his other children, eat the same foods, go through the same upbringing and end up hating and wanting to hurt the parents who love her?”

Another parent in our parish recently told me how her daughter locks herself away in her room and doesn’t talk to her anymore but prefers just to “chat” on the internet rather than interact with anyone else in the home.

These parents and many others are asking me to advise them as to what to do.. I have been asked the question hundreds of times but it is like asking how do I put milk back into a broken bottle. The horse has bolted, but you don’t shut the gate. All you can do is keep the gate open and hope it comes back home.

After 15 years of listening to family problems and dealing with watching from the sidelines as I see parents making glaringly obvious mistakes in bringing up their kids I dare now to suggest my basic tips for “Bringing up Catholic kids”.

It is one of the most difficult pastoral problems for a priest dealing with Catholic families when I have had little contact with their teenage kids. Especially, asking me to speak to them when I don’t know them. Some parents do suggest I come for dinner and speak to troubled teenagers but I am realistic enough to admit that you can’t build the sort of rapport needed in one meal, and I haven’t got the free time to develop that sort of relationship with one problem child.

We started Catholic youth groups specifically to prevent this kind of situation arising. Parents who don’t support the Youth Groups by not encouraging their kids to go, are missing an opportunity for their children to build a closer relationship with the Church and ultimately with other families who share your ideals. This is more especially true for families where only one parent (usually the mother) is Catholic or attending Mass.

HOW DO YOU KNOW YOUR KID IS HAVING PROBLEMS?

Most parents who are so absorbed in their job or career whilst trying to raise a family hardly notice that there is a problem until it’s too late or too difficult to resolve. Many parents protest that they are only doing all this (working late and long hours) for their kids. But kids need their parent’s time. Paying the mortgage off in a minimum amount of time or purchasing an investment property is hardly sufficient justification for a 12 year old whose priorities are much more immediate.

One of the saddest incidents I heard of was of a couple who had an ‘on the phone argument’ with a teenage daughter while they were on a weekend away for a bit of “couple-time”. Whatever the problem was, the child felt that the parent’s demands of her were unreasonable. Her reaction was to go and sit on the railway tracks near their home and wait for a train to take all her perceived problems away. Her suicide in inexplicable and will never be justified. Life does get complicated for teenagers and their problems are the biggest in the world.

Once, as a young priest I was giving the sacrament of Anointing of the Sick to an elderly lady in Westmead hospital and when I was finished the lady in the opposite bed motioned for me to come and speak to me. She told me she was a Catholic and wanted to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession).

This lady told me that this happened 30 years ago but not a day goes by when she does not regret her lack of responsiveness to her daughter’s tears. She cautioned me to make sure I warn parents to always listen to their kids, no matter how petty we think their problems might sound to us.

In most cases, by the time a problem is recognised the child is old enough and big enough to take flight. Pressure applied to a teenager to suddenly follow rules that were never given from the outset will give just enough motive for the kid to leave the authority of their parents or rebel in other ways (usually by changing their physical appearance by dying their hair, wearing black or getting into gothic type clothing and/or body piercing and tattoos). All these are forms of external rebellion where a child feels powerless to express this rebellion verbally. Other signs of resistance to be coerced into conforming to parents’ standards are staying isolated in their room, listening to offensive music or watching of violent DVDs as well as constantly wearing their earphones and listening to music.

YOU HAVE A LOT OF OPPOSITION FROM SATAN AT THIS TIME

Satan is intent on destroying love and the family is the most vulnerable when it comes to his hunting happy grounds. The division in family has to be the handiwork of the devil. That is why kids confess “I said some really bad things to my parents and I don’t know why I want to hurt them. I do love them but I end up saying things that don’t show that”. This inexplicable dichotomy is indicative of the evil influence that is being expressed by child-parent animosity.

Parents are also not helped by the parents of their kid’s friends who readily believe that the real parents are not doing a good job of understanding their own child. They may even allow your child to stay at their place and make more obvious their opinion that “your parents just don’t understand you!”

Let me tell you what I think worried parents should do:

Firstly for many teenagers it is sadly too late. All you can do now is continue to express your love and trust your upbringing that the kids will be OK, so keep praying for them and keep the door open.

But if your children are still small, you have some strategic planning to do if you want your child/children to stay Catholic..

1)      Never argue with one another (as mother and father) in front of your child. Always keep a united front as far as possible. Agree with each other about decisions. When a child senses a weakening on one side, they will play to that weakness.

2)      When they are small talk to them about why your family is different from others. For example:  Why you go to Church and why others don’t. Why your parents are staying married and why some other break-up.

3)      You need to pray daily with your children. The day that prayer becomes less of a priority than that show on TV is the day you stop getting God’s help with your kids and you are doing it alone. In my experience the cliché is true: “the family that prays together stays together”.

4)      Plan regular family activities. These might be holidays, camps, picnics, trips to the zoo or beach. The kids will look forward to them and in the future look back on them as happier times. They will be the child’s reference point when they are searching for their last “happy family” experience to renew a troubled child’s relationship with parents. It is the absence of these “happy home” reference points that makes my job difficult when I am trying to re-establish a family link.

5)      Talk to your child every day about school or whatever they did. As artificial or forced as this may be, you will notice the day your child doesn’t want to talk to you anymore or has something to hide or is ashamed of. In my experience, children will always speak to and trust the parent who is interested and proud of them and their achievements or supportive in their academic or social struggles.

6)      Know their friend’s names and try to meet their parents. You need to know the people who are having a formative effect on your child’s interests and experiences of life.

7)      Set boundaries for your children. You have to be able to say “No” to your kids when they want to do something that you don’t approve of or want to discourage without having to give an explanation. My parents had a “..because I said so” answer to many of the things they denied. I had no court of appeal, so acceptance of my parents’ standards was not negotiable. Parents who strive to negotiate or feel the need to make compromises with their kids should never be parents. You will be doing more long term damage to your kids than you realise. The world doesn’t make compromises with criminals or explain why this or that is banned – it just is! And that is life.

8)      Remember you are a parent not a friend to your child. You are their moral compass. The priority that you give to your children will be the ones that they will be imprinted with throughout their adult lives. Most problems that adults experience in later life can be traced back to maladjusted childhoods. Bad parenting leads to immature adults. Our society currently is reaping the harvest of past bad decisions made by adults in relation to how they ‘brought up’ their children.

9)      Remember that children mimic and will imitate you. The see what you do and will copy you. SO be more concerned by what you do in front of your children than with what you say. They will copy what you do before they practice what you preach.

10)   Understand what your role is as a parent. If you feel inadequate in how you make decisions for your children they get help. Parenting classes are available.

  There are some practical examples of non-negotiables with parenting I would suggest are:

1)      Don’t ever allow kids to listen to I-pods when you are in a car travelling somewhere. It is harder to break this habit if it is already allowed. But if you establish it early it becomes the norm. Make the travel time in the family car a time for bonding, talking and asking questions of your kids.

2)      Don’t allow your children to sleep-over at friend’s houses. Many of the adults who were sexually abused as children told me that it happened while they were with adults that their parents’ trusted them to stay with. Often it is not the parent of their friend – but a brother, uncle or trusted friend. You will never know that this happened until much later but sexual abuse mostly happens with people known and trusted by the family.

3)      Take the mobile off the kid before he/she goes to bed. There are  a lot of theorists who say that one of the reasons kids are angry and irritable and hitting out at other kids is because they are tired. They lack sleep during those hours that they need it. Most teenagers need 9 hours sleep a night and some are operating on less than that and what they do get is interrupted by text messages. They lie in half-sleep waiting for their next message.

4)      No internet in bedrooms. You wouldn’t let your kids have strangers with them alone in their bedroom, so why allow the world in “virtually” through the Internet? Keep the computer that is connected to the Web in a public place so that all can see. Tell them, “If you are not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.”

5)      Everybody in the family goes to Mass together. Worshipping God is a community action. Do not fall into the trap of breaking up the family to attend different Masses. This will weaken the “family that prays together stays together” promise. There is no such thing as “Kid’s Mass”. The Mass is a community celebration. At a particular time the focus may be on the Youth but it’s still a family based Mass. This point reveals one obvious flaw in ‘services’ in protestant churches. Any attempt to have a “young people’s service” is just an attempt to market religion, and Jesus opposed this. (John 2:16)

6)      Establish family rules. Kids do operate better with clear boundaries. With these boundaries have to come suitable punishments for transgression. Children do need and want rules. They need to learn right and wrong. But if these rules are not enforced, then they are merely guidelines. Children work better with black and white than shades of grey so try to stick to your decision if you do make one.

7)      Try not to allow your children to talk you into changing your mind once you have made a ruling. Children need decisive parents to help them to grow up with moral certainty. If you are unclear or uncertain in your parenting children easily pick the flaw and play to it.

8)      Remember your children are entrusted to you by God so you are responsible for their moral upbringing as well as academic and physical development. Love them and they will respond.

There should be no reason to use violence or threatening language to make your children obedient if these principles are employed. We obey God because we love Him and want to spend eternity with Him. In a similar way, children will obey parents that they love and want to be living in harmony with (even if they cannot articulate this concept).