Raising Children In The Catholic Church

Children are gifts and parents become co-creators of God as stewards.

Being stewards, parents are tasked to extend moral education and spiritual formation (CCC, 2221). “The role of parents in education is of such importance that it is almost impossible to provide an adequate substitute.” The right and the duty of parents to educate their children are primordial and inalienable.

Since children are gifts from God, parents have the responsibility to fulfill their being as children of God and treat them with respect as human persons.

Parents are the first teachers, the first models in witnessing by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity and disinterested service are the rules (CCC, 2223).

They have the responsibility to create a home well suited for education virtues.

The home is the first church of children and parents should teach their children to subordinate the “material and instinctual dimensions to interior and spiritual ones.”

It is where charity is first lived. It is in the home that charity or love is showered to their children by being good examples; by knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them:

As the saying goes, “He who loves his son will not spare the rod. . . . He who disciplines his son will profit by him.” (Sir. 30: 1-2)

The parents are the first evangelizers to their children. It is a responsibility and a privilege to initiate their children at an early age into the mysteries of the faith of which they are the “ first heralds” for their children.

Teach them to pray and have a relationship with God. Bring them to church and ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten them and be given grace to know God. The same way that parents show their children to acknowledge the love of God, the same respect and devotion will they be able to carry within themselves when they grow up.