Family Conflict Doesn’t Have to Be Ugly. Here’s How to Reframe It.

Posted on by

On a scale of one to five, how would you rate the way your family handles conflict?

If you’re looking for a benchmark, here are a few to consider: In the end, does conflict tend to bring the people involved closer together, or does it tend to push them farther apart? Put another way, do the people involved feel more secure in their relationship because of the way it’s handled or less secure?

If you feel like the way your family handles conflict is less than ideal, Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak have good news for you: the way your family of origin handled conflict doesn’t have to be the way your family handles it now.

“Whatever your experience of conflict in your family of origin was doesn’t have to be the experience of conflict in the family that you’re raising,” Dr. Popcak said on a recent episode of the CatholicHŌM podcast.

Conflict is an inevitable part of human relationships for the simple reason that different people have different wants and needs, and sometimes those differences bump up against each other.

So, family conflict is inevitable. But unhealthy family conflict that leaves people hurt and relationships strained isn’t inevitable at all.

Unhealthy Conflict Wears Two Faces

Most of us continue to operate out of the lessons we learned about conflict (and other aspects of relationships) as kids. If conflict was handled poorly in our family of origin, that’s likely to shape our strategy for handing conflict in adulthood, the Popcaks said.

St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body offers a helpful lens here. Sin, he taught, disrupted the communion God intended between people—the free, mutual gift of self that marriage and family are meant to embody. In its place crept two distortions: domination, where one person tries to control the other, or a kind of fearful appeasement, where one person abandons their own voice just to keep the peace.

A “winners and losers” approach to conflict that features raised voices, slammed doors, or icy silence doesn’t, in the long run, strengthen family relationships. But neither does an approach that attempts to avoid conflict through appeasement.

In parenting, this second unhealthy way of handling conflict often shows up in parents who, instead of guiding kids from a place of calm authority, parent from anxiety, desperate to prove they’re doing it right and terrified of losing their child’s affection.

The irony, Lisa explained, is that this approach backfires. “When we parent from a place of, ‘please love me, please love me, please let me know that I’m a good parent,’ we cause even more dysregulation in our children,” she said.

Kids don’t want a parent who’s afraid of them, even when their behavior suggests otherwise. They want a mom or dad who can stay steady through their frustration and help them manage those feelings in a healthy way, Lisa said.

Four Tips for Healthier Family Conflict

If your family of origin didn’t model healthy conflict, spend some time thinking about the virtues you’re aiming for, Dr. Popcak suggested: “How do we approach disagreements in a way that’s loving, in a way that’s kind, in a way that’s supportive?” he asked. “How do we deal with differences in a way that’s curious as opposed to defensive?”

Here are four strategies they recommend for changing moments of conflict into something that actually builds your family up rather than pulling it apart. These strategies are especially appropriate for handling conflict between you and your kids.

1. Choose your guiding virtues

Before the next conflict arises, pray about who God is calling each of your children to be, and let that vision guide you.

“I’m going to take some time and pray about who I think God’s calling this particular child to be, what virtues I want them to live by,” Lisa said. Naming those virtues—kindness, self-control, courage—gives you something steadier to stand on than your in-the-moment feelings.

This reframes conflict from a threat to manage into an opportunity to teach. As Lisa put it, naming these virtues in prayer becomes “your guiding star, rather than how you’re feeling in the moment.”

2. Stop unsafe behavior first, talk later

If your child is in a full meltdown, hitting, or saying hurtful things, the first job is to calmly stop the behavior, not analyze it.

“You stop everything and you’re just saying, ‘I love you. I know you have a need right now, but this behavior is unacceptable and it’s going to stop now.’”

Depending on circumstances, you might help them calm down by holding them in a warm embrace on your lap or having them stay somewhere in your line of sight to calm down on their own. With adults or older kids, this might mean taking a cool-down break with the intention of reconvening once everyone’s emotional temperature has settled down from a nine or a ten to a level that makes productive problem-solving possible.

Only once everyone is calm does the conversation about needs and solutions begin.

3. Get curious about what’s really going on

In any conflict, curiosity about what the other person is trying to achieve is a good starting point, and that’s especially true with younger kids.

Behind almost every frustrating thing your child does is a need they don’t yet know how to express well. Instead of assuming they’re trying to manipulate or attack you, ask what they were really trying to accomplish. Dr. Popcak suggests asking: “What were you trying to do, and how can we work together so that the next time you can get what you’re looking for in a way that works for me too?”

In the conversation that follows, the focus is on problem solving. The parent helps the kid identify what their need or want was (“I wanted to keep playing,” “I was hungry,” etc.), why their chosen strategy isn’t a good way to solve their problem, and alternate strategies that might actually work the next time the situation comes up.

4. Don’t overthink it with little ones

With younger children, resist the urge to interrogate them about their motives. They often don’t know what they want—they just know they’re frustrated.

Dr. Popcak suggests simply naming the feeling for them and modeling the words: “I’m really frustrated. I didn’t want to have to do that.” A short, calm acknowledgment, followed by gentle encouragement, does more good than a drawn-out conversation a small child isn’t equipped to have.

Yes, Conflict Can Bring Us Closer

The bottom line: Healthy family conflict isn’t about trying to “win” or avoid uncomfortable feelings. Instead, it’s about adopting a curious, cooperative, problem-solving posture: We may want different things here, but we’re in this together, and we’re going to work to find a healthy resolution.

In a parenting context, this attitude shifts the goal from “winning” (forcing the behavior we want to see) toward teaching our kids effective, healthy strategies for meeting their wants and needs.

If you’d like to keep talking through what healthy conflict can look like in your family, join other parents and pastoral counselors in the discussions and coaching section on the app at CatholicHŌM. And for more parenting tips, check out Parenting Your Kids with Grace and Parenting Your Teens and Tweens with Grace available at CatholicCounselors.com.

Both of these titles are now available on Audible!

What Does the Theology of the Body Have to Do with Mental Health?

Posted on by

Which is more important to your health, your mind or your body? How you or your health care provider answers that question has real implications for your well-being.

Most of us treat the body and mind as two separate entities, reaching for a pill for physical pain and going to therapy for emotional struggles. Inevitably, this divide leaves us feeling fragmented and poorly served by modern medicine.

But the Catholic Church has long insisted that body and mind are not competing entities, but are profoundly united. Spirit and matter “are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature” (Catechism #365).

It’s a radically countercultural doctrine. For centuries, influential thinkers have pulled this unity apart. On one side, Plato and René Descartes treated the body as a sort of prison for the mind; early pioneers of psychology like Freud and Skinner followed suit by largely ignoring the body’s role in mental health. On the other side, materialist philosophers claimed that the human being is nothing more than a complex biological machine—a view that resurfaced when the discovery of psychiatric medications led many modern experts to reduce mental health to “chemical imbalances” in the brain.

In recent decades, modern science has come to recognize that mind and body are a single, deeply connected system. The Catholic Church has known this for centuries, and in the writings of Pope John Paul II, now known as the Theology of the Body, that ancient truth has been developed into a comprehensive framework for understanding the human person.

The Theology of the Body is foundational to the way the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com approach pastoral therapy. Here’s what it teaches and why it matters for your mental health.

A Roadmap for Human Wellness

When St. John Paul II became pope in 1978, he brought with him a manuscript he had been developing for years on what it means to be a human person. His starting point, as Dr. Popcak describes on the More2Life radio show, was this: if we took everything God has given us—creation, Scripture, salvation history, all of it—what universal principles could we discover about living a more abundant life and having healthier, holier relationships?

The answer became a comprehensive vision of the human person: what it means to be human, how we are wired for mental and emotional flourishing, and how we relate to one another. This vision became known as the Theology of the Body, and several of its insights speak directly to mental health.

Your Body is Speaking. Are You Listening?

One of TOB’s central claims is that our bodies are part of how God communicates his design for us. As Lisa Popcak explains on the show, drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas, God speaks to us through every cell of our bodies. Aquinas called this the Book of Nature—the idea that how God designed us, body, mind, and spirit, reveals his plan for how we are meant to live and relate to one another.

“Theology of the Body reminds us that biology is theology,” Dr. Popcak explains. “By prayerfully reflecting on the way God built our bodies and brains, we can discern important insights about what it takes to live a healthy, holy life.”

The human body offers numerous examples of this principle at work.

  • The face. The human face has roughly 43 muscles dedicated almost entirely to emotional expression—far more than almost any other animal. Humans are also unique among primates in having visible whites of the eyes, which allows others to track exactly where we are looking and what we are paying attention to. We are, literally, built to be
     “read” and to “read” others. The body reveals that we are made for mutual knowing.
  • Mirror neurons. God wired the human brain with mirror neurons—cells that fire when we observe another person’s emotional state, producing a similar feeling in ourselves. This is the neurological basis for empathy. We are designed not merely to observe others’ inner lives, but to share them.
  • Touch. Physical touch—a hand on a shoulder, a long hug from someone you trust—triggers the release of oxytocin, a hormone that reduces cortisol, lowers heart rate, and builds a sense of safety and trust. Research shows that holding someone’s hand during a stressful situation measurably reduces their physiological stress response. The body is designed to give and receive comfort through physical presence—another form of self-donation.
  • Secure attachment. When people feel securely connected to God and others, their nervous system operates in a calmer, more integrated state. The body’s social engagement system is literally activated by felt safety in relationship. Isolation, by contrast, keeps the nervous system in a low-grade state of vigilance and threat. This is why withdrawal from God and others doesn’t just feel painful—it physiologically disrupts our capacity to function well.
  • Anxiety. Brain science tells us that anxiety is not primarily a response to external problems, but acts as a warning signal that something is wrong in our connections to God and others. “Rather than being a direct response to problems,” Lisa Popcak explains, “anxiety is actually a sign that we feel disconnected from people—the people that God has placed in our life to support us. The key to regaining our peace is working to restore that sense of communion and connection.” When we feel anxious, the body is sending a message: go find safe, healthy people.

Physical symptoms like panic attacks, chronic tension, and persistent exhaustion follow the same logic. They are often the body making visible some dysfunction in the mind or spirit. Medication may help manage those symptoms, but lasting healing requires attending to the whole person.

We Are Wired for Communion

These five examples point toward one of TOB’s most practically important teachings: we are made for communion. Not just in the sense that other people are nice to have around, but in the deeper sense that we are literally strongest when connected to God and to one another—physically, neurologically, and spiritually designed to give and receive love.

As Dr. Popcak puts it, isolation doesn’t just leave us running low; it actively drains us. When problems cause us to withdraw from God and the people we love, our brains change in ways that make us feel powerless, overwhelmed, and alone.

This understanding that we are made for relationship shapes the Popcaks’ approach to specific problems. When a caller struggles with anxiety, for example, the conversation might move toward examining what connections in their life feel threatened or broken. Other times, when someone lacks the confidence to tackle a tough problem, the Popcaks urge the practice of receptivity, which Lisa explains as “the ability to listen to God in the moment so we’re not just relying on our own strength or our own instincts or even our own fears to guide us.”

Suffering is Not the End of the Story

Perhaps the deepest gift the Theology of the Body offers to people in pain is a way to understand their suffering.

As the Popcaks explain, every human story follows the pattern of the larger biblical story of God’s relationship with humanity.

  1. Chapter one is original man—who God created us to be before sin: “secure, whole, capable of loving and being loved totally without fear.”
  2. Chapter two is historical man—the wounded people we are now, “living in a fallen world, carrying the scars of sins committed against us and the sins and mistakes that we’ve made.”
  3. Chapter three is eschatological man—the people we are becoming, day by day, through God’s healing grace. Ultimately, we are destined to be fully restored and glorified in Christ.

The paschal mystery—Christ’s suffering, death, and Resurrection—blazed a path for us from chapter two to chapter three. Because Christ took on a human body, he did not suffer abstractly. He suffered physically and emotionally (body and mind): exhaustion, grief, betrayal, abandonment, and death. Human suffering does not have to be meaningless: God himself has walked this territory, and because he has, he can lead us through it.

“Even in the middle of difficult times,” Lisa says, “God wants to show us how to respond to what we’re going through in a way that helps us to become the people he created us to be, and to work for the good of those around us.”

It is tempting to think that our wounds, our struggles, and our bad habits define who we are. But the Theology of the Body insists otherwise.

“Our past may explain some things about us,” Dr. Popcak says, “but it’s grace that defines us.”

Body, Mind, and Spirit Working Together

Pastoral counseling rooted in the Theology of the Body doesn’t treat the body, mind, and spirit as separate departments. It understands them as interlocking dimensions of a single human experience. Tackling relational or personal problems means taking all three into account, and the Theology of the Body offers a framework for doing exactly that.

If you’d like to explore what that kind of integrated healing might look like in your own life, reach out to any of the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.

To End the Chore Wars, Go Deeper Than Deciding Who Does What

Posted on by

More than half of married adults say sharing the load of household work is very important to a successful marriage, according to a 2016 Pew Research survey. Yet nearly half of married couples say that responsibility for work around the house is split unevenly in their marriage.

Since chores are one of the leading causes of conflict in marriage, figuring out how to share the load matters. But as Dr. Greg Popcak points out, reducing conflict around chores is about more than balancing out how much each person does. It’s about something most couples have never talked about: emotional labor.

The 10 percent problem

“Doing the task is only about 10 percent of the actual task,” Dr. Popcak explained in a recent episode of his BeDADitudes podcast.

Think about what actually goes into getting something done. There’s the task itself — and then there’s everything that surrounds it: noticing the task needs doing, making a plan, gathering what’s needed, scheduling the time, following through, and making sure it stays done. That surrounding work is emotional labor.

In most households, emotional labor falls unevenly, with women usually (but not always) carrying most of the mental load. Often, the person doing the emotional labor can’t fully explain why they feel overburdened. They just know that even when their spouse “helps,” they’re still the one who had to notice, plan, and direct everything. In effect, that person has an extra job as the “general contractor” for the household.

“We’ve been socialized to think it’s one person’s responsibility to do the emotional labor,” Dr. Popcak said, “and the other person’s job to show up when told to do something. That’s really not the Christian view of household labor.”

More than checking boxes

Christian family life calls every member of the household — not just one person — to practice prompt, generous, consistent, and cheerful attention to each other’s needs. (Readers familiar with Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak’s Liturgy of Domestic Church Life will recognize this as one of twelve foundational practices for a healthy, holy family.)

The goal is to really “show up” for one another — cluing in to what the household and the people in it actually need, and contributing to that without waiting to be asked. Waiting to be told what to do, staying focused on our own corner of the house, or checking out after our assigned tasks are done amounts to the vice of sloth, Dr. Popcak said.

“Sloth isn’t necessarily laziness,” he said. “It’s the checking out. It’s not engaging with the things right in front of us.”

That inattention, however unintentional, damages relationships over time.

Building the Kingdom of God, One Sock at a Time

On the other hand, showing up, noticing what needs to be done, and then following through is a very real part of Christians’ responsibility to build the Kingdom of God.

“It’s not enough for the Christian person to be told what to do,” Dr. Popcak said. “The Christian person really needs to recognize what needs to be done and how I can use this moment to build the kingdom of God.”

Building the kingdom of God means doing what we can to cooperate with God’s grace and to undo the damage that sin does to our relationships with one another. “That’s what building the kingdom is because the kingdom is built on relationship,” Dr. Popcak said.

We tend to think of building the Kingdom of God in terms of “big” acts of charity. But noticing that the laundry needs putting away or that the dishes need to be done and then taking the lead on that is just as much part of building the Kingdom of God as bigger, more visible work like establishing hospitals and housing programs. The ultimate goal of both types of work is the same: sharing God’s love in a way that restores and strengthens relationships.

With that in mind, here are three simple ways to start shifting your family’s mindset around household work.

1. Scan before you sit

When you walk into a room, take five seconds to look around before settling in. Is there something small that needs doing? Maybe it’s a dirty cup on the counter or a child who looks like she’s had a rough afternoon.

You don’t have to act on everything you notice. The goal is simply to pay attention — to cultivate the habit of awareness rather than waiting for someone else to flag what needs doing.

2. Leave every room a little better than you found it

Dr. Popcak suggests adopting the old scouting principle of leaving your campsite better than you found it. Applied at home, that might mean wiping down the sink when you leave the bathroom, putting something away as you pass through the kitchen, or picking up what’s on the floor before you leave the bedroom.

Small contributions, made consistently by everyone in the household, add up to a home that doesn’t depend on any one person’s constant vigilance.

3. Leave every person a little better than you found them

The campsite principle applies to people, too.

“Am I leaving the people I encounter a little better than I found them?” Dr. Popcak asks. Offering to help, giving a hug, saying a word of encouragement all counts.

At this level, emotional labor is more than household management. When our attention to the household extends to the people in it, work stops being transactional and starts being relational — which is exactly what God intends it to be.

For more help building a stronger, more connected home, reach out to the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com. And if you’d like ongoing support for your family life, join the community of Catholic parents at CatholicHŌM, where you can also connect with Dr. Popcak and his team of expert pastoral counselors.

Teach Your Kids to Obey: 3 Strategies for Success

Posted on by

Introducing your new baby to her older siblings ought to be a joyful moment…but not when your two-year-old and four-year-old kids keep grabbing at baby’s face and handling her too roughly. Then, it’s just plain stressful.

That’s exactly the scenario that one frazzled father described to Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak on a recent episode of the More2Life radio show. “Mark” said that no matter how often they told their kids to not touch the baby, they kept touching her. Mark’s question: How do I get my kids to obey?

It’s a problem many parents face, especially with little ones. Often, parents think their littles’ failure to follow their directions is either willful defiance or the fruit of a “wild” personality.

But as the Popcaks explained, what’s really going on is a lot more basic.

“Our kids don’t know anything unless we teach them,” Dr. Greg Popcak said. “So your child isn’t wild. He’s not broken. He’s not out of control. He’s not willful. He’s just untaught.”

That insight is good news, because if the problem is that a child is untaught, the solution is straightforward: teach them.

Don’t Just Tell; Teach, Too

Most parents naturally assume that once they’ve said something, a child has the information they need. Tell a three-year-old to sit at the table, and he should sit at the table. Tell a four-year-old to be gentle with the baby, and she should know what gentle looks like.

But children can’t draw on knowledge they’ve never been given.

“If we want them to sit still at a table, we need to teach them how to do that,” Dr. Popcak said. “And when I say teach them, I don’t mean tell them. I mean do it with them.”

Lisa Popcak offered an analogy: Imagine playing German-language radio in the background throughout your child’s life—no pictures, no context, just sound—with the expectation that your child would just naturally begin speaking German.

“Will they become proficient? Will it become their second language? No,” she said, “because they have no way to know what that noise is, what it’s referring to.”

We make the same mistake with behavior. We assume that children will absorb good manners by watching us, or pick up gentleness simply because they’ve seen it modeled.

But that’s like trying to teach your kids a new language by playing it on the radio. Behavior is a skill, and skills have to be taught and practiced.

Take Mark’s older children, the ones who were being too rough with the baby. Developmental psychology is pretty clear that two and four-year-olds still really struggle to imagine an experience different from their own. A four-year-old grabbing a baby’s cheeks doesn’t register that the pressure feels different to a much smaller, more fragile person than it does to her. She only knows what she feels when someone touches her cheeks

That’s why she needs her parents to teach her exactly what “gentle” means when it comes to being with baby. Not just describing with words, but actually coming alongside her and guiding her hands.

Realizing that we need to be more intentional about teaching our kids good behavior is actually empowering. Instead of asking, “Why is my child so difficult?” we can ask, “What does my child still need to learn?”

Three Ways to Teach Your Kids Good Behavior

With that insight in mind, here are three strategies for teaching your kids to do what you ask them.

1. Do it with them

Especially when it comes to littles, you need to do more than simply tell them what to do. Teaching means demonstrating the behavior and then walking them through it, step by step.

Most parents already do this when it comes to their kids’ bedtime routine.

“You don’t send kids into the bathroom to do their nighttime getting ready for bed ritual,” Dr. Popcak said. “You go into the bathroom with them and you walk them through those things step by step by step—night after night after night—until you see that it’s become second nature.”

So, what Mark’s children most needed was for him to take their hands, place them gently against the baby’s cheek, and show them—physically, repeatedly—what “gentle” means.

The same kind of accompaniment works with other behaviors, too.

2. Break it down

Most parents know that teaching a child how to put his shoes on correctly requires mastery of subskills: how to identify which shoe goes on which foot, how to hold the laces, and so on.

The same sort of task breakdown will help your children learn how to speak respectfully, how to touch a sibling gently, or how to regulate themselves at the dinner table.

“Everything needs to be broken down into small skill subsets that will build upon each other,” she said. It’s not so much a matter of taking it slow but identifying which skills are needed for the child to succeed.

Instead of simply saying “don’t do that” or “stop it,” ask yourself: “What do I want my child to do instead — and what’s the smallest next step toward teaching that behavior?”

3. Build in structure that makes success possible

Part of teaching children means designing situations where success is actually achievable.

The Popcaks share a simple example: the “hold hands or hold you” rule for walking in public. Children who have just learned to walk are thrilled by their new freedom but have no concept of danger. Rather than simply saying “stay close,” the Popcaks taught their children a clear, enforceable rule: you can hold my hand and walk, or I will carry you. No third option.

“And that’s how a child learns to stay close to us and to explore the world safely,” Dr. Popcak said. “They point at the thing that they want to go see, and we can decide whether it’s safe to go look at it. We’re giving them the option to explore in safe and healthy ways and learning how to stick close to parents who can keep them safe.”

Your God-Given Teaching License

The Church has always said that parents are their children’s “first teachers.” Fortunately, God doesn’t leave parents to shoulder this responsibility alone, but offers the help of the Holy Spirit and the Church itself.

“You’re invited by the Church to remember that you’re there to teach (your children) every little thing in their lives,” Lisa Popcak said, “so that they can become all that they can be.”

So, the next time your child doesn’t do what you tell them to do, remember: your child isn’t broken. She’s just still learning. Asking, “What does this child still need to learn?” changes everything. Instead of feeling helpless, you have a clear path forward.

To explore more faith-driven strategies for raising children, pick up a copy of Parenting Your Kids with Grace or Parenting Your Teens and Tweens with Grace by Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak.

And if you’re looking for a community to accompany you on your parenting journey, join hundreds of Catholic parents (plus Catholic pastoral counselors) on the CatholicHŌM app.

Two Questions That Can Simplify Every Catholic’s Parenting Decisions

Posted on by

Every day, parents face dozens of choices about how to raise their kids: Which sports programs are worth the time commitment? How much screen time is too much? What’s the best way to correct problem behavior?

Catholic parents face a whole slew of additional questions on top of those. How do I teach my kids to pray? How do I help them develop Christian virtues? How should I approach Mass with squirrelly little kids—or resistant teens?

Fortunately, Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak, drawing on years of pastoral counseling and parenting work, offer parents two simple diagnostic questions that can help evaluate almost any decision, from the mundane to the momentous.

Two Questions to Ask About Everything

The two questions are straightforward:

  1. Does this choice bring our family closer to God?
  2. Does this choice draw our family closer to one another?

Notice that both questions ask about results, not intentions. The focus is on whether this particular choice, in your particular family, is actually producing the fruit you want.

Notice, too, that these questions are intertwined: choices that bring family members closer to God also draw them closer to one another, and vice versa. The Church often calls the family a “school of love.” And what are family members supposed to learn in this school of love? Nothing less than to participate in the love that unites the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. No family does this perfectly, but the important thing is to help one another grow in love and virtue.

Does this draw us closer to God?

Many good Catholic practices can bring families closer to God—but not every good practice is right for every family at every stage.

Research shows that kids who experience their family’s faith life as a source of warmth are much more likely to continue practicing that faith into adulthood. Kids should experience faith as making a noticeably positive difference in daily life—for instance, by helping family members relate honestly and lovingly with one another.

Checking your family’s religious practices against this standard can be helpful in evaluating whether a given practice is right for your particular family right now. It can also shape and guide the way you approach a particular religious practice.

Take family prayer. If you approach it expecting a monastic level of discipline, it can become less than genuinely prayerful. Family prayer that produces frustration and stress—rather than a warm, personal relationship with God—ought to be adjusted or reconsidered.

For example, if you attempt to say the full rosary as a family but end up focused on policing behavior (“Stop trying to lasso your brother!”), it might be better to say a single decade while littles snuggle on your lap—or try an entirely different prayer form for a while.

This isn’t to dismiss the value of the rosary or other devotions. It’s simply a matter of ordering your prayer practices in a way that helps kids experience a warm and lively relationship with God.

The same question applies to other, nonreligious activities, too. When your child considers joining a traveling sports league, ask: Will this draw them closer to God? If the Sunday game schedule and relentless demands on family time get in the way of religious and family obligations, you might decide to hold off. Another way to frame it: Has this activity become an idol, effectively supplanting God? For example, you might decide that your teen is ready for his or her own phone. But if you find that the phone is constantly getting in the way of real-world relationships, you and your teen might want to talk about strategies that help her re-order her priorities.

Does this activity draw our family closer to one another?

Family relationships don’t build themselves—they require shared time, shared rituals, and genuine connection. The Popcaks often emphasize that families need to regularly spend time working, playing, talking, and praying together. This time isn’t optional; it’s an essential foundation for forming deep, lasting relationships and forming kids (and parents, too!) in their Christian vocation. The family may be a school of love, but it’s hard to learn anything if school is never in session!

Most families have no shortage of activities. Each may be good in itself. But if the cumulative effect is that your family is always scattered and rarely sitting down together, it’s worth pausing. Before committing to a new activity, ask: Is our family getting enough time together? Will this cut into it? (The Popcaks suggest 10 hours a week as a baseline for most families.) The foundations of strong family relationships need to be laid now, not after your kids have left home.

You can also deploy this question around family rituals of working, talking, playing, and praying together. A two-hour game of Monopoly might build connection in one family and end in tears and slammed doors in another. A shared chore like cleaning up the kitchen after dinner can be a moment of teamwork and laughter—or a battle of wills. What matters isn’t the activity itself but what it actually produces in your family.

Discipline practices can be evaluated through this lens as well. Any discipline strategy should, in the end, strengthen the relationship between parent and child, not strain it. On the other side of a correction, kids should feel that their parents are reliable, trustworthy partners—not adversaries. Discipleship Discipline, the approach the Popcaks develop in their parenting books, asks parents to lead with warmth and relationship rather than fear.

Putting the questions to work

These two questions won’t eliminate every hard parenting call. But they give you a consistent, theologically grounded framework for making those calls.

When you’re weighing a decision—a new activity, a family devotion, a discipline strategy, a shift in routine—ask what the fruit will be: Is this producing closeness with God in my family? Is it producing closeness with one another?

If the answer to both is yes, that’s a strong green light. If the answer is no, it doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning the practice—sometimes it means adjusting the approach, scaling back, or waiting for the right season.

Children who grow up experiencing the faith as a source of warmth are far more likely to carry it into adulthood. That’s the goal. These two questions keep it in view.

For a deeper look at the principles behind these questions, pick up a copy of the Popcaks’ book Parenting Your Kids with Grace at CatholicCounselors.com. And for daily, ongoing support putting these principles into practice, join the community of Catholic parents and get personalized parenting coaching at CatholicHOM.com.

When “Fixing” Loved Ones Doesn’t Work, What Next?

Posted on by

Even professional counselors miss the mark sometimes. For Dr. Greg Popcak, that moment came a few decades ago. After several conversations with a friend who was going through a rough time, his friend finally said, “Greg, you’re making me feel like a project.”

Dr. Popcak thought he was doing everything right: listening carefully, identifying the issues, walking his friend through solutions. But his friend’s words hit home, helping him realize that he had made his friend’s problem the focus of their relationship rather than seeing him as a person, a beloved child of God.

“My intentions were good but, there you go,” Dr. Popcak said on a recent episode of the More2Life radio show. “And I think it happens to all of us where we want to be there for another person, but sometimes the way we’re choosing to be there for them just isn’t landing the way we thought it would.”

If you’ve ever tried to help someone you care about only to watch them push you away, shut down, or accuse you of meddling—well, you’re not the only one. Maybe they deny there’s even a problem. Maybe they listen but never change. Or maybe your efforts to help are keeping you up at night.

Whatever the case might be, when helping hurts more than heals, something needs to change. Here are four principles to follow so that your desire to help produces good fruit for both you and your loved one.

1. Prioritize the Person Over the Problem

As Dr. Popcak learned when he was trying to help his friend, when we make someone’s problem the center of our relationship with them, we’re no longer in communion with them. Instead, we’ve reduced them to a puzzle we need to solve, a broken thing we need to fix. That’s not love—that’s control dressed up in compassionate clothing.

The Theology of the Body helps here. As St. John Paul II wrote in his book Love and Responsibility, loving someone means more than doing nice things for them. It means working for their ultimate good, really helping them become the person God made them to be. Everything we say and do should bring out the best in others.

“As my friend reminded me, people aren’t projects, right?” Dr. Greg said. “They’re not fixer-uppers waiting for our renovation plan. And when we treat them that way, even accidentally, we do stop seeing them as persons. True love respects the other person’s freedom and dignity.”

2. Is your relationship deep enough?

One of the core principles the Popcaks emphasize is this: “The relationship has to be deep enough to contain the conversation you want to have.”

“If your relationship is relatively superficial and you’re just talking about current events or what he did this past week, you’re not going to have those deeper discussions about his goals, his life choices, faith, values, those kind of things,” Dr. Greg explained.

The solution isn’t to force deeper conversations. It’s to deepen the relationship first. This means:

  •       spending time together without an agenda
  •       showing up consistently
  •       demonstrating through your actions that you value them as a person

A caller named Valerie shared how she did this with her adult son. Rather than lecturing him about his choices, she focused on practical acts of love. Specifically, she brought him food, cooked for him, or took him out to eat. Those meals became opportunities for real connection.

3. Ask God what he wants from you in this situation

A common pitfall for people of faith, Lisa Popcak said, is rushing into a situation because God has appointed us to help.

While it’s true that God wants us to help those who are struggling, how we do that matters. When we want to help someone—whether it’s a toddler, a friend, or an adult child—it’s important to pause to pray and ponder.

Not every person God brings into your life is someone you’re meant to fix, the Popcaks noted. Sometimes God wants you to simply love them; other times, you’re meant to pray, or to be a good listener. And sometimes you’re meant to let them face the natural consequences of their choices without rescuing them.

Lisa compared our tendency to jump into “helper mode” with St. Francis of Assisi’s initial response when God told him to rebuild his church. Francis started literally rebuilding stone churches, picking up rocks and mortar.

“And God’s like, ‘That’s not what I meant,’” she said. “I need you to rebuild the church with the way I’m teaching you to live and how you’re supposed to reach out to people.”

Before you decide how to help, pause and pray. Ask God what he’s inviting you to do in this situation. What does this person actually need from you? The answer might be very different from what you assume they need.

4. Focus on producing good fruit, not on feeling helpful

Here’s a hard truth: if your efforts aren’t producing good fruit in the other person’s life, you’re not actually helping—no matter how much energy you’re pouring into the situation. Real helpfulness is measured by results, not by effort or intention.

“Sometimes we think being helpful means doing something, right? Fixing problems, giving advice, stepping in,” Dr. Popcak said. “And we tend to tell ourselves that we’re being helpful even when our efforts aren’t producing good fruit.”

In other words, we measure our helpfulness by our intentions rather than by the actual results, focusing on what makes us feel like good helpers instead of what actually serves the other person’s growth.

This requires brutal honesty with ourselves. Are you spending hours worrying about someone but never actually talking to them? Are you giving the same advice over and over while they ignore it? Are you enabling destructive behavior by constantly rescuing them from consequences?

Connect, Show Up, and Trust God

If you’re exhausted from trying to help someone who won’t be helped, or if you’re wondering whether you are actually helping, take a breath: step back and ask God what he’s actually calling you to do in this relationship. Build connection before offering correction, show up consistently without an agenda, and trust that God loves this person even more than you do.

For more advice about helping adult children, consider reading Having Meaningful (Sometimes Difficult) Conversations with Your Adult Sons & Daughters by Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak. And for more one-on-one guidance on supporting the people you love while maintaining your own peace, reach out to the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.