Heading to confession can feel daunting as an adult, let alone preparing your child for their First Reconciliation! For help introducing this sacrament to kids, Father Dave welcomes fellow SiriusXM Catholic Channel host Katie McGrady and her husband Tommy to discuss their new book, “First Reconciliation and Beyond: A Family’s Guide for Learning and Living Forgiveness.”
The book stems from their experience as parents and educators. Katie recalls the first time they caught their now 8-year-old daughter Rose in a lie. “I think it maybe was one of the most dramatic parenting moments we’ve had. We knew she was lying; we knew she wasn’t being forthright in her apology,” she recalls. “You tell the child the infraction itself is a problem, but when you don’t tell us the truth about the infraction, it just makes it 10 times worse, and we have to unpack all of that.”
RELATED: A New Perspective on Our Faith: A Look at First Reconciliation Through My Daughter’s Eyes
Katie continues, “It leads to so many opportunities to talk about mercy and forgiveness. Sometimes the sin can lead to the lessons; we’d rather not sin at all, but at least we can process it well.” Tommy adds, “The moments that present themselves are going to matter in the long run when we’re trying to explain forgiveness of Jesus. [Our kids will say] ‘When I did something wrong, Mommy and Daddy did this. They behaved this way, and they reacted and responded this way.’ The way that they view us is the way that they’re going to view God.”
They share some stories to help illustrate sin and forgiveness in a tangible way. “Rose and I were driving home from a field trip, and we stopped at this gas station. She wanted an ICEE and so she was fixing it herself, and the little lever on the machine popped, and so the ICEE just exploded,” Katie recalls. “It was red, and she was wearing this gray school shirt, and she was convinced I was going to be furious.”
“Fortunately, stain treaters work, and we were able to save and rescue the shirt…It was this funny little moment of the stain treater works, absolution works, and everybody wins. Everybody is clean as a result of a little bit of effort,” she continues. “It’s moments like that that hopefully click for parents, that they have their own moments in their own family life that remind them of the value and beauty of the sacrament and will help them explain it to their kids. The real goal is for that mom or dad to make it back to confession too, because we find statistically, a lot of parents haven’t been in a long time themselves.”
LISTEN: Preparing Your Kids for First Reconciliation and First Communion With Jackie Angel
Father Dave asks if any teachable moments have not gone according to plan with their kids, and Tommy shares a story regarding their family’s Halloween decorations. “We spent all morning setting up Halloween decorations in the front yard. We put a kayak out with three skeletons in it, and it looked great. It was all Rose’s idea, and she had them positioned how she wanted,” Tommy recalls. “We woke up the next morning to go to Church, and Rose came outside to check on it. She’s like, ‘Dad, the kayak is gone!’ …Someone during the night, drove up and hoisted the kayak onto the bed of their truck and drove off.”
“I was mad about that, but I was more upset because I saw how crushed Rose looked. It was like her first moment of, Oh, sometimes people stink,” he continues. “I was very cognizant that this was a big moment for her, so I said, ‘Rose, this person did a bad thing, and it hurt us, but we need to forgive that person, because that’s how Jesus would want us to act.’ So we knelt down right there in the front yard and said that we forgave this person and said a prayer for them. And I thought, Great, we did it, we’re building a future saint. But nearly every weekend since then — and now we’re getting towards Halloween again — she’s brought it up several times that that person stole my kayak.”
Katie adds, “Little kids have this righteous sense of justice, but they also don’t want you to be just towards them. They want nothing but mercy. So it’s figuring out the balance. The Sacrament of Reconciliation can also be so intimidating for a kid. We’re friends with a lot of priests, so Rose was convinced all the priests talk to each other after the day is over about all the stuff they heard in confession. It was a huge hurdle to explain to her that he’s not allowed. So we work through stuff like that in the book to give parents kid-friendly language to explain it too.”
