The Home I Want My Children To Remember

A Christian home has the power to be a place of joy and belonging. It can be a place our children want to return to and recreate someday, or a place they look back on with heaviness. Our children may not remember every Bible story we read to them or every carefully planned lesson, or even our mistakes we will inevitably make. But they will remember what “home” felt like. I want them to have fond memories of growing up in a Christian home.

I’ve learned that a Christian home is built through repeated rhythms that all point to Christ. Ordinary little rhythms that teach our children what we value, Who we worship, and what kind of people we are as a Christian family. I want to share the home rhythms I am intentionally building into our family culture so that our home is one the children have fond memories of and one they want to come back to. I want them to someday build homes of their own and carry little pieces of our home with them. Even now while they are living here, I want them to feel that this way of life is worthy of aspiring to.

Regular Rhythm of Serving Others

One rhythm I want children to grow up with and remember about “home” growing up is the rhythm of opening our home to guests. In this season, we host something a couple times a week. This is usually some sort of play date or play group. We’ll also host a family for dinner. It has become so normal now that my children will ask, “Who’s coming over this week?” I love that they expect people to be around our table and for our house to be full multiple times a week. I love that they are growing up with the idea that home is our little sanctuary and also can be a sanctuary for others.

One of the things I want my children to understand about hospitality is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. For example, we have a six-seater dining room table. Where we live there are a lot of big families so, when people come over, we are pulling out extra tables and random chairs and squeezing people wherever they fit.

Last year, we hosted a family when we had just moved into our house. Our backyard was in a truly unfortunate condition. We had no fence because the one that was there when we moved in was in shambles, we had trees cut down, zero grass, and the whole backyard was basically a dirt pit. It was absolutely not the moment where you would think, “Yes, this is the perfect time to invite people over for a BBQ in the summer.” But we did it anyway. Spoiler alert…it was such fun! Our children played, we got to know them, and that family has become dear friends since then.

I think when your home is imperfect like that, it’s kind of a breath of fresh air for people when they come in. I’m not saying don’t prepare for your guests, quite the opposite, really. Roll out the red carpet for them! But don’t wait until your home feels perfect before you open the door. Make things as lovely as you reasonably can, and then let people into your real life. There is something so comforting about being welcomed into a home that is cared for, but still lived in.

As Christians, we get the joy of opening our homes to others and sharing what the Lord has entrusted to us. Romans 12:13 says, “Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.” Hospitality is something we ought to actively pursue. We are to “seek” to show hospitality. We look for ways to do it. Sometimes that means to be cheerfully inconvenienced in order to do it.

I want my children to grow up seeing that. I want them to see that we serve people with what we have. If the house is small, we squeeze in. If the meal is simple, we serve it gladly.

I also want them to learn how to be good hosts themselves. If children are coming over, which they usually are, I’ll have my children think through what might help those children feel welcome. I have them think of the ages of the children coming and what they might like to do and what will help them to feel comfortable and excited to be there. This teaches children to look outside themselves.

When we are the ones being hosted, I want to teach them how to be hospitable guests too. How can we bless the home we are entering? I like to teach them how to “read the room,” and I put them through little scenarios. For example, if all the children are sitting quietly at the table, what should you do? They’ll say, “Sit quietly at the table!” And I’ll say, “If the other children have shoes on outside, what should you do?” You get the idea. They are surprisingly good at that game.

I remind them: we greet people when we come in, we do not barge through someone else’s house like we own the place, we say thank you, we help clean up, we respect their toys and their house rules.

One of the biggest things I want my children to remember about hospitality is that it’s fun, not a dreaded stressful event. If every time we host, I am frantic and tense and snapping at everyone because I decided this was the perfect day to make some fussy recipe with seventeen steps, then my family is not going to grow up loving hospitality.

When we host, I try to make it easy. Even though I love fussy recipes, hosting is usually not the time I choose to make any of them. I make simple meals, sometimes even use paper plates, and I will do practical things ahead of time that make cleanup smoother, like making sure the dishwasher is completely empty before everyone arrives, so after dinner I can just load it quickly.

That is the rhythm I want in our home. Where there are people around the table, lots of children laughing and playing, rich conversations, children learning to serve, guests feeling welcome, and my children growing up with the understanding that our home is a gift from God, and gifts are meant to be shared.

Worship Woven Into Daily Life

Another rhythm I want in our home is worship woven into everyday life. I want my children to remember hymns playing in the kitchen, singing in the car, little songs during the day, worship feeling like a normal part of family life and not something that only happens on Sunday morning.

I especially want them to learn instruments. Part of that is because I want worship to be something they can participate in. I love the thought of my children being able to sit down at the piano, pick up a violin, or play music with other people and have that skill available to them. Music is one of those things that can bless a home, bless a church, and such a practical way to offer something beautiful to the Lord.

Practically, I think learning an instrument is one of those skills that trains a child in a way very few things do. They have to use so many different parts of their brain in order to learn and play an instrument. It teaches them so many life skills like discipline, and patience, and the ability to keep practicing before something feels easy.

Honestly, I want my children to have skills I didn’t have growing up. There are things I look at now as an adult and think, “I wish I had learned that when I was young.” Music is one of them. When I think about the rhythms I want my children to grow up with, I think about the kinds of abilities I want them to carry with them into adulthood. I want them to learn skills and interesting things they can do with their hands. I want them to have skills that make them more useful, more confident, and more able to contribute wherever God places them. Music really does that.

It gives a child something to work toward. It gives them a way to serve. It gives them something worthwhile to do with their time. The challenge, of course, is that music lessons can feel like a lot for a busy mother. So, to make music lessons part of our actual home rhythm in a sustainable way we’ve started the Voetberg Music Academy as a family.

Voetberg Music Academy offers a holistic approach to teaching music for the whole family. They teach piano, guitar, violin, and more. The Voetberg method has a proven success rate with materials shipped straight to your door and live coaching calls with instructor. Visit https://www.voetbergmusicacademy.com/ and use code THS25 for 25% off your first month. Our family loves it, and I think you will too!

Meaningful Work as Part of Family Life

I also want my children to grow up believing they are part of the household and being part of the household means contributing to the household in a meaningful way. I do not want them to think of home as a place where they are served by invisible hands while they move from one entertainment to the next. Home is something we build together.

Of course, they are children so I want them to have a fun childhood doing kid things, but I do want them to grow up with the understanding that their work is important and they have something meaningful to contribute here. I want to teach them that their cheerful willingness to help is what makes our home run smoothly.

Instead of thinking, how do I keep my child busy today, I think, “How do I bring my child into what I am already doing?” Through this mentality I’ve learned that my children are so infrequently bored, rather they are just purposeless and when purpose is missing, it redirects itself into misbehavior. I keep them purposeful and they can learn that work is important and that we were created for work. It’s a normal part of life and can be so rewarding.

With that, I want them to see my husband and I working faithfully without complaint. Children’s brains are waiting for wiring instructions from the world and, mostly, they’re learning from us what they ought to think about this thing or that. If I’m grumbling about all the work that needs done around the house, they will too. I have to model a happy heart around work for my children. I want to teach my children skills around the house and that hard work around the home is a good thing. I want them to be capable of doing hard things and empower them to make a home better because they are in it.

In a Christian home, we want to raise children who know that ordinary work can be done unto the Lord.

Celebrating Ordinary Life

I also want our home to teach my children that life is worth celebrating. I want them to remember that they grew up in a home where we noticed the gifts of God and made it a point to celebrate them. Even little things like getting excited about the Spring blooms and bringing them into the house in a beautiful way. Tea time when it’s gloomy outside. Every Fall I get one of those Costco boxes of Ghirardelli brownies and it carries us through winter. My favorite way to eat chocolate is in brownie form and cold nights were made for a warm pan of brownies as far as I’m concerned.

Celebrating the first snow of the season, the first garden tomato, all the little seasonal things deserve recognition in our home. This turns our eyes upward because it teaches us to notice the Lord’s kindness in the little things we might otherwise rush right past. So much of motherhood is repetition, and it can be easy to move through all of it like we are just trying to survive the next task. But I want to cultivate the kind of home that celebrates little victories and looks for reasons to have fun. I do not think celebration has to be elaborate. In fact, I think the best family traditions and the things children remember the most are usually the ones that are silly simple.

A special birthday breakfast. A stack of seasonal books that come out every year. Daddy’s special popcorn and mommy’s famous cookies. A certain meal every Friday that marks the weekend.

Children do not need elaborate celebrations to remember home as joyful, they just need the warmth of repeated and intentional joy. To have the memory of mama delighting in life and delighting in them so much that she found reasons to celebrate ordinary days, changing seasons, answered prayers and really just anything worthy of celebration. I want my children to grow up with a sense that life with God is full of feasts and small mercies and little traditions that become part of the family story.

Building a Peaceful Home Begins With a Peaceful Mother

If you’re reading all of this and this is exactly what you want for your home too but you’re totally burnt out as a mother and cannot even possibly imagine how you can cultivate this kind of Christian home, I want you to know that I was there too—I was so burnt out, so overstimulated, and constantly on edge that this all felt impossible. There was absolutely no way I was able to do any of this even though I desperately wanted this for my children.

Listen, I give myself grace for this season of my life because I was living with something called nervous system dysfunction, and I have a theory that so many mothers are struggling with this. Basically it’s living in a chronic state of stress which puts your body in fight or flight mode every second of the day. If you’re struggling with this, you know exactly what I mean. And none of what I’m talking about here would have been possible when I was living in chronic stress. For me, the Lord showed me that I could not build a peaceful home from a body that was constantly stuck in panic.

If you relate to that, I have a free workshop where I share the exact process that helped me heal from nervous system dysfunction.

Becoming an Adventure Family

Another thing I want my children to remember about our home is that we were an adventure family. I want them to remember fresh air and being in God’s creation.

My husband and I like to do New Year goal planning together every year and this year, we decided that we will be an adventure family. We just made the decision that regardless of the friction and how hard that can be with little ones, we are going to push past that and create the culture we want for our family. For us, that includes being adventurous and recreational activities outside in God’s creation and for us, that means making outdoor adventure a normal part of our family life.

We want to give our children the advantage of having recreational skills like mountain biking, skiing, hiking, swimming, camping, and paddle boarding. We want them to have started from a young age so that they can decide what they like and want to keep up with as they get older.

We want to have an active family culture where our children are healthy, capable, and comfortable using their bodies. I want them to know what it feels like to learn a physical skill, to be bad at something and then work hard, get stronger, and get better at it. I want my children to grow up seeing God’s creation not only as a gift, but medicine too in the very physical sense. I want their bodies to learn balance, strength, coordination, and endurance by actually moving through the world God made. Fresh air, sunlight, changing temperatures, water, trees, and open space are so good for us. I want my children to grow up with bodies that are awake to God’s creation.

I’m so thankful for my husband because he’s the one that gets me out of the house. If it weren’t for him I’d be in the house all day because there’s just so much to do and I’m sure you can relate! But my husband jokingly calls me a little house cat and will make purring noises if he knows I need to get out of the house. So we take little evening constitutionals or bike rides, even just around our neighborhood. And it’s just such an important reminder for the whole family that life is bigger than the four walls of our home. I want my children to remember that we went outside in all seasons. That we thanked God for His creation and delighted in His creativity.

I know my children will not remember every lesson I tried to teach them. They probably won’t remember every Bible story, every correction, every carefully planned activity. But I do think they will remember what growing up in a Christian home, our home, felt like. And Lord willing, they will aspire to build homes of their own that carry similar values.