I often feel completely lost and befuddled as a Catholic father in today's world.

How do I set the right example?

How do I help my sons grow up with a strong Catholic faith?

How do I prepare them for a culture that often teaches and rewards actions counter to what we believe and how we should live?

One of my frequent daily prayers after I thank Jesus for my wife and children is to ask for help in living up to my vocation as a husband and father.

Do you ever feel this way?

During my prayer time, I often reflect on the example of St. Joseph who is the patron saint of fathers and the best role model we can follow.

What can I learn from this great saint?

I'm not the expert, but it seems that if I follow the example of St. Joseph I have my priorities straight with Christ first, family second, and work third.

A father who emulates St. Joseph spends quality time with his family, not just time.

This man is a role model to his family in living out his Catholic faith and being the light of Christ to others.

This father has joy in his heart and is a man of prayer.

This Catholic dad honors and loves his wife and lifts up the Sacrament of Marriage in the eyes of his children as something special and sacred.

What sort of maxims might this Catholic father, who tries to emulate St. Joseph, follow to stay on the right path?

If we consider what Scripture and the Church teach us, we can look to these four critical rules as our guide.

1. Our vocation is to get our families to heaven.
2. Our children are always watching us. They will likely model later in life what they learn at home.
3. We are made for heaven, not this world. Let's act accordingly.
4. Our children are God's gift to us. The love and care we show our children is our gift back to Him.

Feeling convicted? Me too. Continue reading

Source

• Randy Hain in The Integrated Catholic Life

Randy Hain is the Senior Editor for the Integrated Catholic Life which he co-founded with Deacon Mike Bickerstaff in 2010.

Her perspective has a lot of intuitive appeal in an era where millions of women have children outside of marriage, serve as breadwinner moms to their families, or are raising children on their own. Dads certainly seem dispensable in today's world.

What this view overlooks, however, is a growing body of research suggesting that men bring much more to the parenting enterprise than money, especially today, when many fathers are highly involved in the warp and woof of childrearing. As Yale psychiatrist Kyle Pruett put it in Salon: "fathers don't mother."

Pruett's argument is that fathers often engage their children in ways that differ from the ways in which mothers engage their children. Yes, there are exceptions, and, yes, parents also engage their children in ways that are not specifically gendered. But there are at least four ways, spelled out in my new book, Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives (co-edited with Kathleen Kovner Kline), that today's dads tend to make distinctive contributions to their children's lives:

The Power of Play "In infants and toddlers, fathers' hallmark style of interaction is physical play that is characterized by arousal, excitement, and unpredictability," writes psychologist Ross Parke, who has conducted dozens of studies on fatherhood, including a study of 390 families that asked mothers and fathers to describe in detail how they played with their children. By contrast, mothers are "more modulated and less arousing" in their approach to play. Continue reading

Sources

• The Atlantic
• Image: We Made