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Are you building a family culture?
Is your home atmosphere life-giving to you or a source of constant drain and frustration?
Life gets busier than ever imagined and more complex than ever thought possible when a couple begins their family and continues to grow it. Big families are beautiful, but the fact remains that they introduce you to a reality that is not easily imagined.
As a mother of six, I totally get it!
Culture is always being drip fed to our children, both by the world and the family. Families ought to identify their unique culture and strive to protect it by keeping it in focus and not allowing it to get diluted by the tugging, attention hungry world out there.
In so many cases, and often before we as parents even realize it, a subtle shift takes place. We move from thriving to just surviving, and our culture becomes diluted in the process. After all, we’re “family-ing” (a verb, as defined by Ann Voskamp) to make it through this life, and we must do that with stability and focus.
Each family is a school of moral excellence, body and soul, breeding the culture of the future of their family.
All families, whether inadvertently or intentionally, build a culture. The children a family is blessed with will be raised and fortified within that culture, structured around goodness, ordered beauty, and truth. But to have any chance of successfully transmitting a family culture to their children, the couple must be the first to house and espouse their culture’s guiding principles and ideals.
It is our intent to build a culture of faith in our family. We want our children to be on their knees before God their entire lives, but we can want that all day and seldom or never successfully model it ourselves. We are their primary spiritual directors and so we factor this in heavily and try to help attract them to our ways.
We also desire a culture of health, from the food we eat to the relationships we promote and the activities we participate in. With deliberation, we raise much of our own food, which ties us even more to the land and necessitates that we work together in a culture of family teamwork.
My husband and I also give great importance to and actively uphold the culture of personal growth, wherein we enable one another to strive for our personal goals and dreams. We make room for each other and sacrificially let the other have some personal time to grow, change, and expand, so as not to overcrowd each other with burdens and responsibilities, something that is all too easy to do. Rather than living in the rut of a daily grind, we live a culture of sacrificial love.
We have very full lives raising 6 homeschooled kids on our homestead while simultaneously operating two businesses. We try to savor a “date” out of anything that just involves the two of us, like road biking, watering the garden, moving our cows, hiking the trails of our property, or singing together at sunset. It is part of our culture of quality time to do these little things together, which also helps put our marriage first.
When we see our kids self-prioritizing the creation of cool things or engaging in wholesome activity out on the land, we smile with satiety in life’s fullness and we aid their creativity because of how we value the work of the hands. We have a whole household of very active children who go go go all the time and love to be around people. We love hosting a lot of people at our place, bringing them closer to creation and to one another. It’s the culture of spontaneity, hospitality, and adventure that keep us really excited to share our lives.
Culture is always being drip fed to our children, both by the world and the family. Families ought to identify their unique culture and strive to protect it by keeping it in focus and not allowing it to get diluted by the tugging, attention hungry world out there.
A family culture gives the family an edge, and if their culture is actually lived out, that edge will take the family places.
What makes your family’s vitality increase and remain?
What is your family culture?
Let’s hope we can build a culture that is able to sustain our families.
Seriously …
LET’S HOPE!
In His grip,
Rebecca Dussault
Fit Catholic Mom
Rebecca Dussault is a Catholic wife, mother of six, Olympian in XC skiing, and World Champion at Winter Triathlon. Together with her husband she runs a full-scale homestead while simultaneously coaching Catholic women who struggle with balancing life, physically and spiritually, and gets them into the best shape in both of those areas so that they can better embrace their vocations as mothers and wives! She uses the platform Fit Catholic Mom to inspire fellow Catholics on how to prioritize, balance, and train their body and soul in a way that first and foremost glorifies the Lord.