As my daughter and her husband anticipate the birth of their first child, we have been having some delightful conversations with them about how to raise children so that the children “catch” the faith in the process. No one has a perfect recipe for how to do it—free will being operative and all that—but we were discussing strategies. I offered my particular strategy: fiercely curating their books, toys, movies, and overall home environment—not to keep them from sin but to teach them to love beauty. My daughter laughed, “That’s why I’m a snob.” Joking aside, I told my son-in-law that it was actually a catechetical strategy.
I explained my philosophy to my son-in-law, which I will try to represent here in three pictures. As a catechist and a Montessorian, I had early on learned the importance of preparing an environment when you are teaching young children. And I had absorbed the lesson that the environment for learning should be beautiful. Since our home is the primary place of learning, that meant to me that I had to work seriously on beautifying our home environment. Obviously that meant we had to begin by creating a loving and respectful and cheerful home by being loving, respectful cheerful people—still working on that—but practically speaking, this meant the decor as well.
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