Help With Your Mother's Rule

Help With Your Mother's Rule is a forum for women who want trouble-shooting help with their Mother's Rules or about any aspect of the 5 Ps of the married vocation.

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Thursday, February 10, 2011

Nurturing Our Children's Vocations

Dear Holly,
I'd like to know how to nurture our girls into choosing their vocation? Living in the world, kids seem to think that it is their decision alone. How do we guide them to seek God's will for their lives? When parents suggest that, it can seem to the young person like they're suggesting a foreign concept. Many of the mothers I know all feel this pressure, like we have only so many years to nurture our authentically Catholic women (when we are learning ourselves!).
Posted by at 4:59 AM
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4 comments:

  1. The key issue in nurturing a vocation in our children, which includes all states of life - married, religious, priest, single, consecrated - is for the parents to be living their own vocations consciously and in a state of supernatural awareness that they too have been 'called'. Then, the awareness of our vocation or call from God as the normal state of human life becomes natural. Conversations throughout their lives reveal how the parents think and this in turn, forms the child. The best thing a parent can do is to seek her own holiness as a response to God's call to her as a mother, and this will have its supernatural effect in the life of the child. Our example is our prime means of teaching.

    But we can also use words. And as the children grow, aside from bringing up this perspective in our talks with our children every time we discuss it - teaching them - we can use other resources that help them discern, even if they are not thinking about life this way. I am thinking specifically of a program & video called Lifework, which is one of the resources I use:

    http://www.amazon.com/LifeWork-Finding-Your-Purpose-Life/dp/089870636X

    I use the book, but there are videos as well.

    It's important not to fear - to just keep encouraging our children, to make it as matter-of-fact as possible that God calls and our life is about responding, and pray! Aside from our example, the supernatural means of God's grace is the next best formative tool.

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  2. Something I started doing about a year ago which brings me a lot of peace about this: After receiving Communion, I try to pray simply for my children's vocations. I ask God to lead them and open their hearts to his vocations for them, and to make my husband and I open to joyfully accepting their vocations. I also pray for their future spouses and their families (who are living somewhere right now, and possibly having their own struggles right now), the orders and dioceses and parishes that they will belong to, and their future superiors and bishops. Once in a while I really enter into this prayer and pray in a very heartfelt way, but most often it is brief. And I feel at peace, because at least once a week, I'm offering that prayer up to God.

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  3. The former vocations director for our archdiocese recommends that we each spend an hour a month before the Blessed Sacrament for vocations. My husband and I have tried to do this for our own children's vocations.

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  4. Excellent suggestions ladies - thank you

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