Growing up Trad

Growing up as a Trad wasn’t really that strange. Looking back on it, I realize that it may be a little strange to grow up a Trad and remain a Trad. Most people I go to church with are converts or grew up in with the New Mass.


It’s a blessing to see that my grandma started a love of the Faith that is still going strong in its fourth generation. (Actually, I guess her mother was a Trad, too, but I’ve never asked.)

Most of the kids I went to church with aren’t going anymore. The only kids who made it through the age of 20 are the ones who were “normies”. This is why I can’t agree with some people. I have been a Trad for longer than most of the people who attend my church. This is based on the statistic that lives in my head. It’s probably not true, but I am the writer here. I never said it wasn’t fiction.

I have a real problem with other Trads telling me how to get my kids to Heaven. (They NEVER tell me this, again, fiction.) I was raised around all the different types of Trad parents, and I am still going to church with the products of the people who got it right. It wasn’t the commune people. It wasn’t the super-strict overprotective people, it wasn’t the skirt-only people, it wasn’t the people who “let their kids figure it out themselves”, it wasn’t the people who told their kids all kinds of lies to keep them out of sin. It was the normal people.

What is normal, you ask? Why, it’s anyone who is like me. Here is a list of how normal my parents were/are: We went to mass every Sunday. We went to Catechism. We went to :::GASP!::: public school (for a little while). When my mom decided to home school, we were still allowed to talk to our public school friends. We were the Catholic part of a Protestant home school group. We wore modest clothes that looked like regular people may wear them. (Well, they looked regular back then, now they look weird, but it was the 80’s – who looked normal?) My dad went to work and my mom stayed home. My grandma helped teach us our Catechism, and we grew up discussing the Faith with our siblings and cousins. We argued our Faith with our Protestant friends (in a way which allowed us to keep those friends). I went to college some small idea of how to both get along with people and how to “say no”. I had my first steady job at age 11. At age 13 I had my second. At age 16 I was paying for my own clothes, car, insurance, gas and fun. We had extra-curricular activities. Mine included church choir, another choir, and some random sports. (Sports = Place you can meet boys, because our teams weren’t big enough to split up the genders.) We watched TV, but only things that had been rated by Mom. I smoked cigarettes and got in ginormous trouble. I did a lot of other stuff and got grounded, kicked out and banned from my siblings on different occasions. There was never a time I didn’t go to mass. There was never a time I quit trying. There was never a time my parents didn’t show me a good example, keep praying for me, and keep holding me accountable for my actions. It worked. I’m there, and I’m not leaving.

That’s how I want to raise my kids. That is the only Trad parenting style that I have seen work in the long-run. I plan to tone down the whole “getting into trouble” thing, but that won’t be a problem, because my kids are perfect and will never behave like I did. Besides, my siblings are pretty good, so I figure my parents pretty much had it figured out after me. I certainly gave them experience.