Home Life

(Found here)

(Some of these are easier said than done! May God help us all!)


Someone has suggested the following “Slogans for Happy Home Life”:

1. Always appear before your family in a good humor. Nothing is so depressing for the rest of the family as a father or mother out of sorts. See that the family never has to suffer because of your attack of nerves or your irritability.

2. Never weary in cheering your family with your smile: It is not enough to avoid depressing the family; that is purely negative. You must brighten them up, let their spirits expand. Be especially vigilant when the little ones are around. You must give them the alms of a smile, hard though it be at times. What a pity when children have to say, “I don’t like it at our house.”

3. Tell what you may tell openly: If something must not be told, then don’t tell it. If you may share it then do so. We ought to let others profit by our experience, above all, the family.

4. Amiably show the greatest interest in the least things: The problems of family life are generally not affairs of state. However, everything that concerns the persons we love most in the world should be worthy of interest: the baby’s first tooth, the honor ribbon won at school, the entrance of one of the little ones into the Holy Childhood Association.

5. Banish exaggerated asceticism from your life heroically: If your home is Christian and each member of the family is learning to carry his cross, then it is essential to avoid making others suffer by a too ostentatious or inopportune austerity. Besides there is abundant opportunity for self-renunciation in devoting oneself to procuring joy for others. Marie-Antoinette de Geuser used to sacrifice her great longing for recollection and her taste for a simple life by accompanying her brothers to evening affairs for which she wore dresses that she said “made her look vain.”

6. Be very attentive to treat all alike. Nothing is so disrupting to home life as the evidence of favoritism for one or the other child. The same measure for all!

7. Never think of yourself but always of them in a joyous spirit:

Henry the Fourth used to crawl around on all fours, with his children on his back, to enliven the family get-togethers. Louis Racine, the son of the famous Racine, relates of his father, “My father was never so happy as when he was free to leave the royal court and spend a few days with us. Even in the presence of strangers, he dared to be a father; he belonged to all our games. I remember our procession in the garden in which my sisters were the clergy, I was the pastor and the author of ‘Athalie’ came along carrying the cross, singing with us.”

8. Never begin an argument, always speak prudently. Discussion should not be banned unless it develops into bickering or argument. A free habit of exchanging ideas on a broadening subject cannot but be profitable; the children should even be encouraged and led into it to develop in them a wise and discriminating mind and a habit of suspended judgment. Unsavory and disturbing subjects as well as those beyond their depth ought naturally to be avoided.

9. Act patiently always, answering graciously always: That it takes the “patience of an angel” to rule vigilantly over the little world of the family is beyond question. I must apply myself to it affably.

10. By good-will you will gain hearts and souls without exception:
Love much—that is the key to it all.

These slogans for a Happy Home Life are not marvels of prose but they do express a precious rule of wise family discipline.

~Raoul Plus (from Christ in the Home, 1951)