By: Thomas Lickona

What is “Catholic character,” why does it matter, and what can we do as parents to develop it in our children?

The best way to answer those questions is to begin with an even more basic one: What is the meaning of life? Scripture and the Church teach us that we have three divinely ordained purposes that give our lives meaning:

1. Build a loving relationship
Time together. Kids will care about our values when they know we care about them. Emotionally intimate time is especially important for helping our children feel loved and for maximizing our influence on the kind of person they are becoming.

Emotionally intimate time is especially important for helping our children feel loved and for maximizing our influence on the kind of person they are becoming.
Love as communication. The quality of our love often comes down to the quality of our communication. To create quality dinner discussion, for example, try having a topic: “What was the best part of your day?” “What is a way you helped another person?” “Who has a problem the rest of the family might be able to help with?”

Love as sacrifice. Says one mother: “The most important thing parents can do for their children is to love each other and stay together.” In a major shift from a generation ago, both secular and religious marriage counselors are now urging married couples having problems to do everything possible to work out their difficulties and save their marriage. Catholic parents can strengthen their marriages by drawing constantly on the graces of the Sacrament of Marriage through good times and bad. Research shows that the more a husband and wife each practice their faith, the better their relationship, and the more their children thrive.

2. Use the power of good example
The example we set — especially when it is coupled with a loving relationship — is one of the most important ways we affect the character of our kids. Our example includes not only how we treat our children but how we treat each other as spouses and how we treat and talk about others (relatives, friends, neighbors, and teachers).

We increase the power of our own example when we expose our children to other positive role models. The Giraffe Heroes Project has developed a bank of more than 1,000 stories of everyday heroes of all ages who have shown compassion and courage by sticking out their necks for others.

William Kilpatrick’s Books That Build Character offers hundreds of fictional stories whose admirable characters will live in a young person’s heart and imagination.

The website www.teachwithmovies.com catalogs hundreds of good films that offer positive role models and strong character themes.

And we should be sure to tap the rich resource provided by the lives of the saints (see Mary Reed Newland’s book, The Saints and Our Children). “The saints had their eyes on God,” says one Catholic mother. “They make very real what it means to follow Christ.”

3. Teach directly
If we want our example to have maximum impact, our kids need to know the values and beliefs that lie behind it. We need to practice what we preach, but we also need to preach what we practice.

We should directly teach everyday manners: “Say please and thank you,” “Don’t interrupt,” “Look at a person who’s speaking to you.”

We should make a list of the Catholic truths we want to teach our children. Says a Catholic mother, “I want my children to know how tremendously important the Sacraments are — how they give us the strength to get through life.”
We should directly teach the fundamentals of our faith, starting with the three purposes of our lives (salvation, stewardship, and sanctity). We should make a list of the Catholic truths we want to teach our children. Says a Catholic mother, “I want my children to know how tremendously important the Sacraments are — how they give us the strength to get through life.” Says a father: “I want my kids to understand that there is such a thing as truth, and that when the Pope teaches on faith and morals, he speaks with the voice of Christ.”

Other Catholic truths we want to be sure to transmit:
Life is sacred, from conception until natural death.
We have a special duty to help Christ’s “least ones” — the poor, homeless, disabled, sick, oppressed, and unborn.
When we join our sufferings with the Cross of Christ, we become more like Jesus and participate in his work of saving souls.
The Mass is the single most important part of our faith
A relationship with the Blessed Mother is a sure path to a relationship with her Son.

4. Exercise authority wisely
As parents, we must have a strong sense of our moral authority and then exercise it wisely in three ways. First, we must take strong stands that are consistent with our Catholic values.

Second, we must discipline wisely. Even small things — a mean remark to a sibling, for example — should be taken seriously. The most effective discipline gets kids to take responsibility: “What do you think is a fair consequence for what you did?” “What can you do to make up for it?” Getting kids in the habit of going to Confession — examining their conscience, telling God they’re sorry for their sins, experiencing Christ’s forgiveness, and resolving to do better (we, of course, must model this) — is another vital part of helping them take responsibility for their actions.

Third, we must practice vigilant supervision. The research report Building a Better Teenager (www.childtrends.org) finds that “hands-on” parents — those who know where there kids are, who they’re with, what they’re doing, including their use of media (do you know what’s on their My Space page?) — have teens with the lowest rates of sexual activity and drug and alcohol abuse. As one writer puts it, in today’s moral environment “we need to watch our children like a hawk.”

5. Provide authentic experiences of the faith
Building Catholic character requires authentic personal experiences of the faith, within and beyond the family.

One Catholic father found that taking his self-centered 15-year-old son to see the city’s soup kitchen for the hungry and homeless, where they subsequently volunteered together, got the son thinking less about the latest stuff he wanted and more about the needs of others.
One Catholic father found that taking his self-centered 15-year-old son to see the city’s soup kitchen for the hungry and homeless, where they subsequently volunteered together, got the son thinking less about the latest stuff he wanted and more about the needs of others.

I know Catholic parents whose teenagers have been turned around by going to a Youth 2000 weekend (in some cases, more than one), where they experienced Masses, the Rosary, Eucharistic Adoration, and Confession (often for the first time since their initial reception of the Sacrament) and heard both adults and other kids talk about how they were changed when they let Jesus into their lives.

Our son Mark son and the oldest three (ages 13, 11, and 8) of his seven children were able to participate in Benedict XVI’s Mass at Yankee Stadium in April 2008 and came home inspired by being with the Pope and thousands of devout fellow Catholics. World Youth Days have had similar effects on young people.

These intense spiritual experiences are especially important in the teen years, when religion can seem like “a bunch of rules” or just something your parents make you do.

A caveat: Even parents who do all the right things to build Catholic character can’t control the outcome of those efforts. Not even God can make us be good. The final forming of our children’s character lies in their own hands.

That said, our most important job as parents is to use the countless opportunities God gives us to help our children grow in goodness and holiness. For as the Church has always taught, the family is the first school of virtue.