We inoculate our children against harmful disease. Why not inoculate our teenagers against harmful attacks on the Church they face at school by sharing with them accurate material on difficult subjects in the safety of a Family Home Evening setting where they can ask questions and discuss.
The following video clip is right up to date. It deals with recent news items that confuse the FLDS Church with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Teens can even send it via Facebook, or email to friends who misunderstand.
If the clip doesn't play to the end, click on stop, then pull the little arrow further along the bar and release. The end is powerful.
Author Lee Ann Setzer recently posted an interesting idea for Family Home Evenings on the A Ton of Authors and a Wannabe blog. I thought her idea excellent, and emailed asking permission to post it here.
Lee Ann is the author of several books for children, such as Tiny Talks, the Sariah McDuff series, I Am Ready for Baptism, and Gathered: A Novel of Ruth. Here is the Setzer family's Adverb Home Evening. This can be adapted to any size, any age family.
1. Get out the hymnbook.
2. Open to page 1, or any page you like.
3. Look at the upper left of any hymn, near the top. There should be an adverb: “resolutely,” “reverently,” “cheerfully,” etc.
4. Now that you know where to look, page through the hymnbook, reading the adverbs. Soon you’ll have a whole list of positive, but very different adverbs. Notice that they tend to cluster—a whole set of “resolutely,” “firmly,” “diligently,” followed by the “happily” family, and so on.
5. Sing your favorite hymns. Try to make them sound like the specified adverb.
6. Now think about yourself. Which of the adverbs describe you? Do many of them describe you, but at different times? Is it “better” to live “cheerfully” or “reverently”? Or are Heavenly Father’s children as varied and wonderful as the songs of Zion? Which adverbs would you like to incorporate more of into your life?
Home Evenings With Linda Paulson Adams' Family--Part II
This week, Linda Paulson Adams continues with more help from her family's wealth of Family Home Evening ideas. In addition to her success as an author, Linda is also a talented musician, and more about this can be found by clicking on this link.
Linda's second book
More from Linda. "We always begin and end Family Night with prayer. That's not optional. Inviting the Holy Ghost to be with us, during the prayer, is pretty important for success, too. Now, songs are wonderful. I love music. I love the hymns and Primary songs with all my heart. They don't always make it into the meeting, although we try - it depends on the patience level detected by our finely-tuned extra-sensory parental perception."
She continues. "I want to share a few ideas we've used that help out in those times when we messed up and planned nothing, the kids are whiny and arguing, and/or Mom and Dad are just plain worn through, but we still want to HOLD THE MEETING."
Here are a few of Linda's ideas:
* Get everyone together in the same room. (This is kind of important.) Have your prayer, and announce a Family Project Night: for the next hour, everyone gets out one of those UFO's (Un-Finished Objects) we all have lying around, and works on it. Smaller children can color a picture or play quietly with a toy. Legos or other building toys work well. Older children are likely to groan and complain at first, but when we've done this, amazingly, everyone is able to find something to do. What we like about this one is that while everyone is in the same room, the kids tend to get along, and conversation remains decent for some strange reason. It's... nice.
* Get everyone together in front of the TV (hang on, I'm going somewhere with this), have your prayer, and pop in a Church or Seminary video or Conference talk. Pay no heed to any whining, groaning, moaning, threatening (as in: "If I have to watch this one more time, I'll poke my eye out with a stick!" My answer: "Help yourself, just don't leak any eye juice on the carpet, please"), or Classic Teenage Grunts which may occur.
FYI: If you're not already aware, you can subscribe to get a set of General Conference DVD's delivered to your home for about $14/year, when you're ordering your Church magazines. Pretty cool, huh? You can also order lots of Church videos for extremely low prices from the Church distribution center at: www.ldscatalog.org If you're really up a creek, Extreme Home Makeover or Lassie on DVD might do in a pinch, but try to keep the torture factor to a minimum for all involved when subjecting your family to what you think (or they think) is wholesome entertainment.
* Get everyone together (Are you noticing a theme here? Good!), have your prayer, and pull out a board game - preferably one the whole family likes, if such a thing exists. It's OK to have a "kiddie" game for younger kids and an older one for the teenagers - but keep everyone in the same room. Our family likes "Apples to Apples." Even though the little ones need some help reading - there's really no way they can mess that one up. I mean, really. You can try Duck Duck Goose or Mother May I or Simon Says, too. Or croquet, if the weather's nice and your children aren't the type to misuse the wickets for ulterior purposes of sibling vengeance.
* Get everyone together in the car, have your prayer, and head off to Dairy Queen (budget allowing). Pizza Palace is OK too. Or go for a drive-thru taste test: Who REALLY has the best French Fries? Order one large fry and hand out a few to everyone, then go to the next place and do it again. Until you're either tired, out of time or money, or you're all sick.
* Get everyone together in front of the piano, have your prayer, and have a family sing-along. Hymns and Primary songs are ideal for FHE, but hey, if you're having fun jamming to "Yesterday" or "Come Sail Away," why not? You're together. *Reality Check: We haven't actually tried this one out yet - at least 1/3 of my kids would revolt. (Man... that statistic sounds so familiar... wonder why?) Go with what's right for your family.
"And a quick lesson idea for when you haven't planned so great," Linda says, "but you're up for a little more duty than the above exercises: Pull out the Friend, New Era, or Ensign, Church News, Preach My Gospel, or the scriptures, and open to a random page. Discuss whatever topic, story, article, or verse you find there. Those work too.
"We've found if we keep serious discussions to ten to fifteen minutes and bookend it with a little fun or nonsense, the kids hold their attention a little better - okay, a LOT better - than when one or the other parent (or both of us) try to wax eloquent and complicate up the simplicity of the Gospel by inserting lots and lots and lots of words - IE, lectures. Keep it fun.
"The point is to stick together, and stick to it. You're the parents. You're in charge. On some level, kids get this concept. (Even if they don't like it all that much.) Once they know you mean business, and they are not getting out of this obligatory "family time," they might even start to enjoy it."
Home Evenings With Linda Paulson Adams' Family--Part I
Linda Paulson Adams is the author of two LDS novels set in the Last Days, which lead up to the building of the New Jerusalem. Read the first five chapters of Prodigal Journey and Refining Fire on her website at www.alyssastory.com, where you may also order autographed copies of her books. She is hard at work on the third and final book in the trilogy, and plans to complete it this year. Linda also works as a freelance editor, public speaker, singer, and songwriter.
According to Linda, Family Home Evenings in her home range from the well-planned (rare), coordinated and organized to the more frequent "What are we doing tonight? Eeek, it's 7:30 already!" variety. She says, “The thing we feel is most critical is to HOLD THE MEETING: ready or not, here it comes!”
She continues, “Don't just not have it because you forgot to plan anything. Don't skip it because you're tired, the kids are whiny, nobody seems to be listening, someone's missing, or the game's on. HOLD THE MEETING. Period.”
The Adams family has six children. The oldest is preparing for college soon and the youngest is in kindergarten. As Linda says, “We have a variety of ages to keep interested, which is a challenge. And as lifetime LDS parents, we're well-schooled in the ideal FHE routine, which means opening and closing songs which are perfectly matched up to well-thought out lessons, with excellently prepared and interesting visual aids, during which all the children are perfectly reverent and participating in a lovely Gospel discussion . . .
Meaning (ahem), no one is running amok with underwear on their head, calling out inappropriate answers relating to some anatomical body part or function, poking their sibling with some pointy object, or asking those unanswerable ‘But where did Heavenly Father come from?’ sorts of questions, none of which has anything whatsoever to do with the lesson at hand.”
“Yeah,” she continues, “Let's get back to reality. Life is messy. And - news flash - mortal life wasn't meant to be perfect. Perfect comes later. A lot later. As in, in heaven. (In fact, if you do a careful study of the scriptures, even Christ didn't label himself perfect until after He was resurrected.) So let's just give that up right now and focus on trying. All you Star Wars fans out there, I'm going to offend you right now, so close your eyes and skip this paragraph: Yoda was wrong. Let me repeat: That cute, fuzzy Muppet with an uncanny resemblance to President Kimball was not actually any sort of prophet, and he was wrong.
“Yoda told Luke Skywalker, "Do or do not - there is no try." Wrong! False doctrine. There is too try. And in my universe anyway, trying counts!
“Sure. Once in a while we hit pay dirt and actually have one of those cool, ideal, and structured evenings. We do strive for it. That's the ideal. But I have real children - a lot of them - and try as I might, they don't all behave. And they don't all, always, get along with each other or want to be there. (Example phrase: "I'd like it better if [insert name of random sibling] didn't have to be here.")
“And any of you with a teenager most likely knows the sound I call The Grunt. It's an answer, a shrug, a pledge of annoyance all at once. Hearing The Grunt during Family Home Evening most likely elicits from one or both parents' mouths the rapidly-fired innuendo that someone in the family is behaving, ahem, ahem, like unto Laman and Lemuel. Which accusation most likely elicits yet another Grunt. Pretty soon, the living room sounds like we're raising livestock instead of children.
“Most of the time we try really hard to get some doctrinal discussion in there, spend five to ten minutes going over the family calendar, and call it good. Our most successful discussions lately have centered around Preach My Gospel and current Conference talks.”
Author, Annette Lyon, Utah's 2007 Best of State Fiction Medalist, shares her family's experience holding Family Home Evenings, and shows how they merge commitments in ways that fulfill more than one requirement.
Annette has written many books, including her Temple series, House on the Hill, At the Journey's End, and the recent Spires of Stone, which features the Logan Temple.
"Between Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Duty to God, and Faith in God," Annette says, "our children have so many things they need to pass off that it sometimes gets overwhelming. We've found that using Family Home Evening as a chance to pass off some items for these programs works well."
She continues, "Service projects, scripture reading and discussions, musical and cultural experiences, teaching lessons, reading from the general conference reports, memorizing the Articles of Faith, and more are all requirements that can be easily adapted to Family Home Evenings with little preparation but big results.
We recently spent several weeks going through the "For the Strength of Youth" pamphlet during Family Home Evening, covering two or three topics each week. We'd read a section, the associated scripture, and then discuss what it means to us and why it's important to live by those values. It was a wonderful opportunity to recommit our family to the standards and to explain to the younger children why they are so important."
This week, we have more ideas from Sherry Ann Miller, "writer of miracles," and author of Mama's Lemon Pie.
"Each week before Family Home Evening," Sherry Ann says, "we already had a topic assigned (we rotated assignments at the end of each FHE), and everyone had a full week to prepare. The kids tried to think of ways to make the refreshments and game or activity relate back to the lesson topic. It was always interesting to learn a little more each lesson the children gave. Many of them "traded" lesson assignments with each other when they were in Seminary, because they often learned something in Seminary that they were dying to share with the family."
Sherry Ann continues, "Back in the 80s, I recall learning how children were more likely to stay in the Gospel as they grew older if the family observed Family Home Evenings on a regular basis. This observation had a great impact on me and my husband, and we were delighted that we had already decided FHE should be the single, most important thing we did together with our family.
"Today, our children are grown and we have twenty-seven grandchildren, and all of them enjoy spending time with each other . . . the grandchildren, too. We can see the love and compassion they have for one another, and we realize their family-oriented lifestyles were nurtured during Family Nights. We're glad we took FHE so seriously back when the children really needed it."
I feel the reason Family Home Evenings are so difficult to accomplish is because of their extreme value in binding families, which makes them number one target for the Adversary. Listen to Josi S. Kilpack, author of many LDS books (Sheep’s Clothing and others) and see if her experience sounds familiar.
“I’m afraid that my family home evenings aren’t quite ‘writable’ since we’re hit and miss and often doing a cub scout or young women thing to pass something off—or like last night, we delay until Dad gets home at 7:30, then forget about this homework project and that phone call and Dad goes in to record the game and gets sucked in while. I sit down at the computer for JUST ONE MINUTE and BAM it’s 9:30 and time to berate the kids for staying up too late, and this one says he didn’t get any dinner, and that one remembers she has to write a book report and this one (that’s me) wants to go to bed.”
There are two things I love about Josi’s comments. First, she’s honest enough to admit that holding Family Home Evening isn’t easy. Second, at least the family does make an effort and succeeds now and again—and now and again is way better than never. Her description of one success made me chuckle.
“The best FHE we’ve had over the last 6 months,” Josi said, “was a lesson on how our bodies work, and why we need to treat them with respect. The part that held their attention was when I explained in detail the urinary system of the body, why pee is supposed to be light yellow, and that they all really need to start flushing the toilet.”
I have the feeling Josi’s children will find that particular lesson popping into their minds throughout their lives, and it will make a difference to their health and spirituality, because body and spirit work together.
It’s never too late to hold Family Home Evenings, no matter what age our children, or where we find ourselves in life--or what obstacles we need to navigate.
An author of Christian books,
gained recognition for her short stories in the New Era, an internationally acclaimed magazine for LDS youth.
Her inspirational fiction appeared in the magazine for over sixteen years.
