My wife will never forget her dad’s nightly walk through the house, checking on doors, windows, heaters … you name it. His unfailing fire watch gave her and her siblings a visceral sense of being loved, protected and cared for.
While my father-in-law is not a fireman, he might just as well have read the National Fire Protection Association’s codes and standards, which define the fire watch as “the assignment of a person or persons to an area for the express purpose of … preventing a fire from occurring; extinguishing small fires, or protecting the public from fire or life safety dangers.”
But what does a parent’s daily fire watch look like with the raging brushfires and catastrophic four-alarm fires of our toxic culture: pornography, secularism and media addiction (to name only a few)?
Now I’m not advocating we seal our kids off from all engagement with the world. After all, it seems that those kids who were most sheltered growing up are also the most likely to go off the deep end in college — jettisoning their faith and disparaging their parents and upbringing.
Every parent must discern a prudent point somewhere between bunker and laissez-faire. To do that, I propose a seven-station fire watch not only to prevent spiritual and emotional fires in our families, but also to build a strong and vibrant Christian home:
1) Prayer Chair. Wherever you pray first thing in the day, this is your primary watch-post. Like many, I have a prayer chair where I encounter God and his Word — and where I intercede for my children before the day’s cares and concerns pull me in 10,000 directions.
2) Home Altar. Daily prayer as a family requires a focal point. In addition to grace at meals, we need to invest five to 20 minutes daily in the family rosary, Divine Mercy Chaplet, or praying from a devotional such as Magnificat or Word Among Us. This is also where you can call on the intercession of St. Joseph, our Blessed Mother and St. Michael the Archangel.
3) Charging Station. To corral the many devices in our home, we built a special set of shelves in our living room where the entire family (parents included) checks in their tech each evening. This designated place allows us to verify compliance with one glance, and it keeps the screens out of the most harmful place they can be (bedrooms).
4) Dinner Table. Social science data is unanimous in pointing to the power of the dinner table. If you doubt me, just google “benefits of family dinner.” Parents who tend to this watchtower daily give their kids one of the greatest lifelong gifts — imparting to them everything from self-confidence to emotional stability, academic excellence, etiquette, empathy and a rooted identity in their faith-filled family.
5) Passwords. Do you know your kids’ current passwords, social media platforms, search and watch history, and online habits? If this watchtower is vacant, we as parents are negligent and actually creating the conditions for fire — especially given the avalanche of research from the social sciences that prove a correlation between screen time, addiction and mental illness.
6) Homework and Teachers. Wherever your children are academically, it’s important to walk the beat of their coursework and homework regularly, cultivating strong lines of communication with their schoolteachers and administrators. These bonds translate directly into your child’s flourishing.
7) Bedrooms. Do our kids experience our love and daily presence in their bedrooms before lights out? As part of our fire watch, we can read a story, say a bedtime prayer (including a prayer to their guardian angel), mark the sign of the cross on their foreheads as a blessing on them and kiss them goodnight.
And when we are tempted to skip part of our fire watch, let us call to mind the Holy Trinity. First, our heavenly Father stands watch over us. Second, Our Lord Jesus Christ took on flesh and has come alongside us to carry whatever parenting cross we might have. Finally, the Holy Spirit, our Advocate, “intercedes for us with inexpressible groanings” (Rm 8:26).
We are not alone in our fire watch. Our trinitarian Lord is already on the watch. May we join him without delay.
Johnson and his wife, Ever, are co-founders of trinityhousecommunity.org.
