THE HOME

The success of a good home is not a question of square footage. A thriving happy home does not take its joy from good insulation or a remodeled kitchen. Really four walls and a roof are all one needs. A home’s happiness depends not on its level of creature comforts and convenience but rather on intangibles: unconditional love, a spirit of unity and consolation, a lively faith shared and explained, and a culture of personal responsibility and freedom. Home is where the heart is, but the secret of the happy home is that mother and father, and at some point the children, know that home is where the heart comes from. The home is the place and community where the character of an individual is formed. Through countless interactions with father, mother, sister, cousin, or brother, a child absorbs his deepest beliefs and learns how to relate to others in accordance with those core beliefs. Everything from a spirit of service to a firm handshake takes root in a child because his home teaches him these things. Thus, the home, being the first and most lasting school, is important for any child who hopes to succeed in the adult world. He must prepare and be prepared in the home.

The responsibility of the home rests squarely on the shoulders of mother and father. Mothers and fathers—this cannot be stressed enough—need to spend time at home with their children. A model of the happy family put forward in pop-culture of late is one on the go with everyone cheerfully rushing out the door by morning and collapsing in a heap at the front stoop by night. Busy schedules filled with perfectly respectable activities and jobs can and do overwhelm families because there is no down time to talk, forge friendships, teach the faith, give advice, cooperate, share, laugh, and console one another. Parents must carve out time in the home for the family to enjoy family life. Sunday, the day of rest, if kept a day of faith and leisure, is a good way of doing just that. Another time tested tradition is the family dinner. Sports and extracurriculars may compete with a regular dinner hour, but if dinner together is the rule and not the exception many are the benefits: the child learns to speak and listen, he learns manners, grammar and diction, he learns from their parents a great deal about the larger world beyond the home and school, he receives the support, love and attention of the family in a daily way he can rely upon. The home must be the constant loving harbor for the child learning to navigate the choppy waters of school, work, friends, and whatever difficulties they are certain to face.

Formal education can be a great enemy or a trusty ally to parents seeking to make a good home for their children. Schools promote a flurry of well intentioned activities in the name of character formation: abstinence groups, drug-free associations, anti-drunk driving groups, health classes, school-wide rallies touching on a whole host of topics. These can often lull parents into a false sense that their child is getting all the character formation he needs at school. Truth be told, it is often the case that school, even while the child fully participates in these well meant programs, becomes more the proving grounds and less the training grounds for his character. Time in the foundational training grounds of the home is needed.

Responsible freedom always takes shape when a person limits his options. A man picks one spouse, excluding all others; a family buys one home forsaking other options, etc. In order for children to learn responsibility while at the same time carving out more family time, parents might suggest that their children pick only a few formal activities and do those few well. As much discipline as an athletic child might learn from three or four seasons of sports a year, how much more and lasting discipline might he learn if he is asked to choose one sport for the year, putting his heart more completely into it. Such a family rule would force a child to make good choices, tough choices—good training for his life beyond the parental umbrella in college and adulthood!

Wakeful hours not spent in school must be filled. Avoiding a flurry of extracurricular activities does not mean inactivity. There are books to be read, chores (hopefully) to be done, dogs and cats to be walked or fed. Every moment of everyday a child is learning something. Even without formal education a child is still informally educated. Movies, video and computer games, websites, comics, books, and television programs (cartoons included) all teach a child something, be it good or bad. Rare is the parent that kisses a child goodbye and sends him to the streets saying, “Find anyone and have them teach you anything. Good luck!” Yet, a child with the remote, the mouse, or the game controller, having no parent with an eye to the quality of the media he is swallowing whole, fares little better than that luckless child on the street.

So what is to be done? Parents should try to promote the healthier activities of reading and the outdoors. Often whole afternoons and evenings are dominated by the more absorbing and inactive computer or television. Parents have to take the time to know the media their child ingests. Some suggest that this is a tremendously time consuming ordeal and, therefore, impossible. Perhaps a few commonsense suggestions, which parents may already know, are worth repeating here. A quick flip through comics is all that is required to establish its worthiness for your child. Books may require asking a trusted educator, a trusted friend who has read the book, or reading the book oneself. Movies do have ratings, but they are broad and usually fail to live up to standards parents set for their children. There are a number of websites that accurately explain any and all even remotely questionable themes in new release films. Video and computer games have a fairly descriptive and accurate rating system on the packages themselves, detailing violence and any sexuality. If a child wants a game, one can check the rating and maybe even flip through a gaming magazine at the grocery store to see some of the visuals (and story lines) the game presents to the child. The Internet is a difficult proposition because more often than not the child knows more about the hardware and software than the parents do. Nonetheless, parents have a responsibility to be on top of the technology they introduce into the home. Most Internet providers have “parental controls” with passwords that allow parents to limit a child’s freedom on the web. Pornography comprises a large part of Internet websites and their salesmanship is aggressive. A child, even innocently exploring the web, is hard-pressed to avoid graphic pornography unless safeguards are in place. “Parental controls” are advisable but pornographers, pedophiles, and even the child’s computer genius classmate will know how to get around them. Putting the computer in a high traffic area of the house—not in the child’s bedroom—where parents can monitor content informally may be a sensible precaution. This same advice can be given with respect to television. TVs in bedrooms are difficult to monitor. Some families require the child to get out the TV guide and show the parents what they want to watch. Only then can they receive permission to turn on the set. The rule of thumb for all of these examples remains the same. The parents must be one step ahead of the child, all the while providing new media for the child to absorb that is both acceptable and formative. Parents are the primary teachers and as such are responsible for what goes on in their classroom, the home.

Despite the long list of media outlets above, the child is not likely, nor encouraged, to collapse on the couch and exclusively stimulate himself with movies, computers, comics, and books. The child will want to see more than the inside of his house. The weekend is a good time for the family to harness this desire. Parents can strengthen the family bonds by planning outings to parks, museums, and historical sights. Family chores such as raking leaves are good times to happily teach the child a sound work ethic. Community service as a family, or something as simple as a restaurant dinner, can serve to strengthen the bonds of love and support lived out in the home.

Another dimension of the child’s mobility and freedom is friendship. He will make and have friends. Parents ought to respect their child’s freedom in personal relationships but by the same token they have a responsibility to meet the friends their child makes. They can also actively search for good friends and social groups for their child. Friend-making does not have to be blind luck. Children often enjoy the company of friends with similar morals, friends their parents have introduced to them. Both to meet new friends the child has made and to introduce good friends to the child an open home is indispensable. The child should feel comfortable and encouraged to bring friends over to the house. His home should be a pleasant place to be. Therefore, the home ought to be neat enough to make guests comfortable spending time there. Parents, who often seek peace and quiet, should happily tolerate the extra “chaos” of a few young friends about the house now and again. The child should feel free to bring a friend over anytime without too much fanfare.

All these issues, examples, and elements of the home will vary in usefulness depending on the family and the individual personalities of parents and child, but regardless of all that has been said the most important aspect of the child’s formation has yet to be addressed. Parents teach, and the child learns, by example. The child’s idea of what he should become, of what a man is, comes from everything you do. The virtues parents hope to instill in the child must be lived out in front of him. Otherwise, he will not take them seriously, nor will he know how to live them out. Parents must set a tone of unity and self-giving amongst themselves. As humorous as the old saying is, “Do as I say and not as I do” is an unsuccessful parenting technique if any lasting formation of character is to take root in the child. Setting a good example, as with all the advice in this brochure, requires that parents spend a lot of time at home. It is better for a working parent to bring work home with them than to be away for lengthy amounts of time. In this way a parent can be with their child and at the same time set a good example by allowing the child to see their father or mother working diligently. Example is crucial for a child to mature into a virtuous adult.

The parents’ job is made easier by examples of responsible virtuous freedom outside the home. When a child sees other men and women living out and promoting those virtues they have learned in the home, he sees his education in the home verified by others in the world. Tenley Study Center’s supplemental programs do not compete with the home, but rather they serve to reinforce things necessary for a thriving culture in the home—character, virtue, responsibility, loyalty, obedience, and the like. The programs offered to both parents and children are coordinated to help them better fulfill their responsibilities in the home. In short, Tenley programs are not just more activities in the modern day whirlwind. They are an aid to building and sustaining a happy home and a good life for your son.