Believe it or not, the Catholic family isn’t primarily a human institution. It’s a divine one. By uniting with the sacramental life of the Church, your common, ordinary, crazy family becomes something sacred, a “domestic church."
Family therapist and parent Gregory Popcak and his wife, Lisa, are back with Parenting Your Kids with Grace. Building on their best-selling book Parenting with Grace, first published twenty years ago, this new volume draws on the same parenting principles and provides up-to-date research to guide parents through each stage of child development from birth to age ten.
Practical, faithful, and humorous, Parenting Your Kids with Grace addresses four key
Are Catholic families called to be different from other families in the way we relate to one another in the home? If so, how? What does an authentic, family-based approach to Catholic spirituality look like in practice? What can the latest research tell us about creating a faithful home and raising faithful kids? How can Catholic families be outposts of evangelization and positive social change?By checking our basic assumptions about parenting against both the Church’s vision and what science can teach about living out that vision in healthy ways, we can discover God’s plan for parenting healthy, godly kids.
Read for our men's group. I really liked the emphasis about building attachments with your children as the underlying principle for effectively discipling them. I could do without the extensive preaching on attachment parenting as the only appropriate method of parenting. However the practical tools provided to help re-regulate children's behaviour when they're disregulated were invaluable and I've already seen fruit from using them in our family
While there are a few helpful pieces of advice in this book, I was so annoyed that every page was a plug for either one of their books/services or a friend of theirs. The information became repetitive and then it would refer the reader to purchase another book for “more detail”. Disappointed to say the least.
Discovered this book while listening to the Popcak radio show.
The Popcaks do an outstanding job on their radio show of listening to the callers' problems, breaking down the root causes, and providing practical, actionable next steps to help them grow towards a solution.
While this book is a very good template for how a good Catholic family should operate, I did find that it rested more heavily on the "Tell" vs the "Show." Could have benefited from more stories and examples of problems and then proposed solutions.
As is, the book was a bit light on anecdotes.
That said, I left thr book realizing I've taken a relatively reactionary/ haphazard approach to parenting. And I could benefit tremendously by integrating some of the intentional structures they discuss.
Time will tell, but I believe this book will have a positive and impact on my approach to parenting. So kudos to the Popcaks for giving us parents this resource.