I worked in campus ministry for 15 years and during that time, there was no lack of desperate parents calling to ask us to help them with a kid who had stopped going to church. I have also done a lot of speaking/training of Catholics through the years. It isn’t rare to get a line of folks who have questions. But, whenever I talk on evangelization, the most common discussion is about how to evangelize family who have left the Catholic Church. You probably know some of the statistics about the decline in the number of Catholics. I won’t get into them here. But, every one one of those stats has a name and a family of origin.

Every former Catholic has parents
Every disenfranchised Catholic has a soul and a destiny.
Every cultural Catholic needs Jesus, even if they don't know it.
Every person has a right to our best efforts to help them get to heaven.

Thus, the heartbreak of a kid who walks away from the Catholic Church is truly devastating to a parent who believes. Until you have tried to comfort and encourage hundreds of parents of adult children who are living far from God, you won't know just how sad these situations are for the parents involved.

So, if you are like me, you hate regrets. Well, I can tell you that the biggest regret of all those Catholic parents (especially the elderly ones who have had a kid leave the Church and they fear for their salvation), is this - that they didn’t do enough to evangelize and make disciples of Jesus out of their kids. So what can you do to keep your kids from leaving the Church? Below are some preventative measures for parents who still have kids in the home. We will cover what can you do if they already have left the Church in a future post.

Catholic Parenting With Intent

1 - God Has No Grandchildren
While reading my 14 year-old’s text messages a few days ago (I have an app that tracks all my kids phone activity [creeper/responsible Dad alert!]), I saw an exchange that went something like this (I will translate teenage text speech for those who don’t know what it is):
Friend - WYD (what are you doing?)
Daughter - NM (nothing much).
Friend - busy?
Daughter - Nah. Just finished spending some time talking to Jesus.

I couldn’t have been happier. She had some free time and chose to spend it reading her Bible and praying. It made me so proud and happy. I believe this is what every Catholic parent wants for their kids - to have a life-giving and personal relationship with Jesus, that is forged in prayer and then spills out into growth, responsible decisions, and maturity in the faith.

But, how do you get there? Well, there are no sure-things or shortcuts. It is hard and there are certainly no guarantees. Even the most saintly and best Catholic parents will still have kids with free will and the ability to walk away.

Prayer is the first foundational part of faith. I know a lot of Catholic parents who pray with their kids, teach them prayers, pray as a family, and model having a personal prayer life themselves (which is absolutely indispensable). But, I still see one thing missing in most families - the expectation that every member of the family has a daily time of personal prayer. Though the years our family has emphasized this duty in many ways. When the kids are small it was on a list of things to do every day alongside chores, exercise, homework, etc. When older, we encourage them by asking “have you talked to Jesus today?” or something similar.

There are no perfect ways of doing this, but having a built-in ongoing discussion about the fact that God has no grandchildren (but only children) really helps each member of the family know that none of us can rely on our parents’ or family’s faith to get us into heaven. Each of us has to believe in Jesus as Lord for our own salvation. That isn’t optional once we reach an age where we can make decisions freely.

2 - You Can’t (and shouldn't) Force Faith But You Can Create An Environment Where Faith Can Grow
If you have ever walked through a large college campus, you know there are some paths that students make themselves, by taking a shortcuts through the grass. These paths through the grass are a constant headache for the groundskeepers. They put up signs, they put barriers up, and they may even try marketing campaigns. Still, you will always find paths through the grass.

Parenting is somewhat like this. Kids tend to want to take the easy path. They look for shortcuts in life, they want comfort/ease, they like to be coddled and served. But don’t you like these things too? Why would an immature kid be any different?

What a lot of groundskeepers have learned through the years is this - if you can’t force the students to stop making shortcuts, at least you can build a path through the grass for them. If it is inevitable that change is going to happen, don’t fight the change, direct it. Our current culture is like that. For instance - my wife and I don't keep screens completely out of our kids' lives, we try to direct them into responsible behaviors (at appropriate ages). They each get a phone around 12 years old (just talk/text). But, they have strict rules about when, where, and how long they can use the phone. Whent they are 16 they get data, but with strict filtering software and still with rules. This is so that when they leave our house, they haven't already started a phone addiction, looking regularly at porn, etc.

Every kid grows up. The question is, how are you going to direct their growth. How can you help your child move into a person who makes wise decisions without your guidance? How do you make a Catholic kid into a Catholic adult? One thing you need to do is give them as many opportunities to have conversion experiences as you can (whether the initial conversion to following Jesus for themselves or a deepening of that decision).

My wife and I have sacrificed a lot of time, money, and effort to get our kids into these kind of situations. The first thing we did was to put our kids into a school that has a positive Christian culture. By no means is it perfect, but it has a culture where Christian faith is seen as an acceptable and even attractive thing for kids to have. This is uncommon in most schools, even Catholic ones. Some other opportunities included small groups, parish youth group, Catholic camp, Steubenville Conferences, Bible studies, etc. The more opportunities the better.

Another way we made room for conversion is by offering them moments to choose forgiveness, mercy, virtue, grace, etc. When they struggle, we help them to turn to prayer. When they mess up, we take them to Confession. When they feel far from God, we give them an opportunity to decide to invite God into their situation. 

In this way, conversion becomes a normal part of our family. This way the kids have as many chances to encounter Jesus and grow faith as they can.

3 - Allow Room For Kids To Wrestle With Truth And Struggle To Believe
A few years ago, one of my kids came to me because one of their friends (a girl) revealed she was attracted to other girls and was dating a girl. My kid didn’t know how to process this and was struggling with trying to love their friend and the Church’s teaching that a sexual relationship outside of marriage is always wrong. We had several conversations about this topic prior to this and many more after. But those conversations didn’t lesson the internal grappling that my kid had to go through, because all of us have to do that. I didn't just provide the answers, I tried to help my kid sort through the issue. Here is a paraphrased sample of what that was like:

Me - So, how does this make you feel?
Kid - Confused. I don't know what to feel about it all?
Me - Do you still love your friend and want the best for her?
Kid - Of course! I know that God still loves her too, but wants her to make better decisions about her sexual relationships though.
Me - Can you make decisions for her?
Kid - Of course not.
Me - Well, how can you love her in this moment, in the tension that you feel?
Kid - I am not sure.
Me - Would it be more loving to end the relationship or to continue to be her friend?
Kid - Be her friend.
Me - I agree...but what might your love look like?
Kid - What do you mean?
Me - How can you love her yet not like all her decisions or make them for her?
Kid - By still accepting her, knowing God loves her, spending time with her, and yet not validating that all her decisions are good ones.
Me - I think that is wise and that you are on the right track. Would you like to pray for me about this situation?

Part of directing, guiding, and mentoring, rather than forcing comes by way of asking open-ended questions that get others to think through things. Your kids are going to struggle with certain aspects of following Jesus and His Church. It just happens. So, allow your kids the room to ask tough questions and ask them tough questions yourself. While you want to allow them room to wrestle, you also want to give them something solid to moor themselves to. This is what the truths of Jesus and the Catholic Church provide us. But, these truths must be consented to. This is the process of making the truths of the faith personal. It doesn’t happen all at once. So, balance teaching with room for struggle, all the while challenging your kids to not settle for the easy or convenient answer.

One thing we know is happening - young Christians aren’t responding to the harmful parts of culture and analyzing them. Rather, they absorb them, accept them as valuable, and then have their faith tell them something different. The Church, in response, is reactive. We aren’t forming kids into disciples of Christ first, and then releasing them into the culture. Rather, we allow the culture to form them first. This means the culture has the upper-hand in guiding them and teaching them where happiness is found. So, be proactive in forming your kids hearts, minds, consciences, and souls.

Someone and something is going to be formative in your child’s life. If you don’t do it, then others will. That comes to sexuality, relationships, faith, etc. So, be involved as a parent and guide by teaching, talking, etc.

Too often we seek to “engage” kids (esp. teenagers) instead of challenging them to live out their faith. I am not proposing that the two are mutually exclusive (in fact they can’t be if we do both successfully), but we do seem to have a desire to entertain teens more than anything else. This is also indicative of modern parenting. We leave the formation of young people, in faith issues, to the churches and religious schools. Too often parents do not model or teach the faith in the home. Now, do we need to make church relevant? Certainly. But, never at the expense of the Gospel and the call to holiness.

Our family tries to eat dinner together every day. We also have discussions around the dinner table about their feelings, their friends, tough questions, and more. Sometimes it is about how a sibling is annoying another one or that Dad is grumpy, but you get the point. We also teach our kids the content of the faith through using some great catechetical tools. This includes Theology of the Body, weekly family study of the Sunday readings, daily family prayers, and more.

One of the biggest barriers of belief in Catholicism, for many young people today, is the Church’s teachings regarding sexuality. It is no wonder, because of how opposed to the modern concept of sex the Catholic Church is. When you don’t have anything to say “Yes” to about sexuality, then you will only here the Catholic message about sexuality as a big “NO”. But, this isn’t what the Church has ever taught. We teach that the NO to premarital sex, contraception, and other sexual sins is really a big “YES” to God, life, purity, chastity, healthy relationships, spiritual wholeness, bodily integrity, etc. But, if all a kid knows is NO, then the other stuff doesn’t make sense. The solution to this one is age-appropriate teaching of sexuality by parents, backed up by the Church’s teaching of Theology of the Body.

4 - Final Thoughts
“Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” -Ep 5:25

• Jesus wants your kids to go to heaven more than you do. Don’t ever doubt this.
• We can’t wait for others to evangelize our young people, we need to do it ourselves. This is the purpose of the Church – to make disciples of all nations. But, the domestic Church (your family) can't be replaced! Since most parishes are struggling to even survive (much less thrive), we can’t wait for the parish, youth minister, Catholic school, or any other thing outside of the family do it for us. Hopefully, they can be a support, but sometimes even that is lacking.
• Your main objective as a parent is to get your kids to heaven. Let this be your constant vision and goal.
• If you don't spend time with your kids, you really have fewer opportunities to make an impact on them. The ordinary is necessary to raise a disciple.
• Make sure you know and voice who your kids are (their identity). They are beloved children of God, made by love itself, because they are loved, created in order to receive love and love others back.
• If your kid grows up and leaves the house, maybe then you can be a friend to your kid. Until then, be the parent they need. Set boundaries. Enforce them. Love them. Hug them. Tell them you love them. Be involved in their lives, but not smothering. Demand the best of them too. Don’t settle for being a friend when they need you to be a parent. Be especially vigilant with phones, computers, and video games. 
• Continue to learn, grow, pray, and seek conversion/holiness yourself. You can’t give what you don’t have. If you aren’t a mature Catholic disciple, you can’t make mature Catholic disciples out of others!
• Pray every single day for your kids. You have no spiritual power if you don’t pray.