Have you ever noticed how darn hard it can be to have a little fun together as a family? Periods of work stress, exams, illness, or just the daily grind often seem to conspire against enjoying some downtime together. We’ve been through many such periods where the schedules or the interests just aren’t syncing. Times of enjoyment within the family wane, our family culture becomes anemic, and the fun memories that are so central to our bondedness don’t materialize.

Building a vibrant, robust family culture isn’t easy. In fact, the arena where we celebrate our family’s communion by enjoying leisure together requires initiative, intentionality, focus, and yes … guardrails. Given the challenges to celebrating our family’s communion, can we “reverse engineer” our way to a family culture that allows our family bonds and our reserve of fun family memories to grow?

In working alongside so many families in Trinity House Community Groups, we’ve seen 4 guardrails rise to the surface in conversation after conversation:

1. Guardrails around your family’s Sabbath. A special Sunday is “the front door of your Trinity House.” You have to enter it as a family, with foresight, planning, and intentionality. To do that, try to get the housework done on Satuday and think twice (or thrice!) about any regular Sunday commitments such as for sports.
2. Guardrails around your daily family meal. The family meal is your “mini-Sabbath” every day! What an amazing goal to know that we are working hard all day so that we can sit down and enjoy each other’s company around the dinner table. When that’s followed by some family prayer and a walk, game, story time, art project, music, or show together, we know our family culture is on track. Even if one or two family members won’t be present, don’t let that stop the rest of you from having fun together!

3. Guardrails around your own phone use (we’re talking to you, Dad & Mom). Your own digital sobriety and ability to be deeply present to your children will enable your family culture to sprout wings. Maybe putting a hard stop to phone use after a certain hour could help? If online shopping and checking email aren’t an option, imagine all the more interesting things you can get up to with the kids!

4. Guardrails around your heart. The focus of our heart is the focus of our love. It’s so easy to allow our hearts to fall for lesser goods, inferior loves. Your family culture builds up an arsenal of love-filled memories that you are in the process of imparting to your children today … tonight. What lesser loves might be keeping you from this wonderful, fun-filled adventure? Through prayer, self-denial, and sharing our goals with our spouse, friend, or spiritual director, we can gradually be freed for deeper communion.

To sum up, family culture without guardrails outsources our kids’ memories to the world: to Hollywood, social media … to whatever penetrates the walls of your home and captures their attention while intentionality is taking a backseat. Needless to say, homes like this can feel lonely, adrift, and cold.

But family culture with guardrails—drawing deeply from the communion of the Most Holy Trinity—is an exciting, hands-on, intentional, and joy-of-a-lifetime experience. Your love for your kids—which flows from the love you receive from your Heavenly Father—creates an utterly unique, unrepeatable, immersive, and secure family culture that will guide them through this life … and yes, heavenwards.