Thoughtful home, better world

We all know—we all know—that family and home life are the most important shapers of human character, and thus the most important shapers of society. “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old, he will not depart from it,” we learn in Proverbs. We want to help our children flourish—physically, emotionally, intellectually, socially, and spiritually.

Often, though, that vocation seems impossible and hopeless. The speed at which we’re all expected to operate in modern life, the multiple activities and distractions available to children and adults, the mind-numbing pleasure of screens and their encouragement of isolation, the worship of independence and personal autonomy: all of these realities present obstacles to creating a home whose inhabitants flourish.

Dia Boyle understands all this, and knows it applies to homemakers of all ages, races, religions, and incomes. She spoke on this subject for years before writing The Thoughtful Home. The homemaker she addresses is most likely a mother—who may hold a job outside the home. But it may also be a father, grandparent, or someone else in charge of making the home. Anyone whose job is to focus on the flourishing of those living in the home is a homemaker. Focusing requires making the time to really notice each family member and think about what would help him or her most. It’s simple, but not easy, because everyone is short on time these days.

Thoughtful attention

“We all need to be looked at, paid attention to, thought about,|” writes Boyle. “Paying attention to and thinking about those who live with us every day now takes a level of deliberation that would simply not have been required in an earlier generation. This thoughtful attention is not culturally supported in any way. Instead, it is powerfully undermined and opposed.”

“Homemaker” is not usually a complimentary term today. “Our culture does not like to talk about homemakers and homemaking,” says Boyle. “It is a subject fraught with cultural and ideological controversies. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to be put off by terminology. Homes don’t make themselves. They don’t happen by chance; they don’t happen in nature. Homes have to be made, which means that someone has to make them. The modern home is breaking down in many places and circumstances in large part because no one is available to do this needed work, to give this needed care.”

This book is not a jeremiad, and it doesn’t harp on what’s gone wrong and why. It’s calm, reasoned, and conversational in suggesting many ways that we can make our homes thoughtful in spite of what Boyle calls “the mess of the world.” We’ve all experienced lifestyle and spiritual self-help books that are much longer than their content requires or deserves; The Thoughtful Home runs a mere 170 pages and is so well-written that the journey is as pleasurable as the arrival at the book’s end.

What makes the book effective—and this will sound crazy to some—is that Boyle’s thought process is rather Thomistic. She’s rational by nature. Her philosophical training has been Thomistic. And her husband, John Boyle, chairman—and a founder—of the Catholic Studies Department at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, is a well-known Aquinas scholar. Thus Boyle helpfully starts by defining terms: What do we mean by home? By thoughtful? What is a thoughtful home? Why is it important? How does our current culture make it difficult? What can we do to countervail the culture and make our home a place where our family flourishes?

The effective path

But first: is homemaking the best way to do battle with the world? Boyle says that there are three paths a homemaker can take—but that only one is effective. The homemaker can abandon the home in order to do something big, such as getting involved in politics or setting up a nonprofit. This may or may not make the world a better place, but it is obviously not good for the home. Alternatively, the homemaker can make the home a shield, a fortress against the outside world. In reality, though, it’s impossible to keep the world out of our homes.

The third way—the best way—to deal with the outside world is this, Boyle says: “We respond to the mess of the world by facing it squarely. We neither sacrifice our homes nor turn them into fortresses. Instead, we devote ourselves to cleaning up the messes of the world precisely by means of our wholehearted effort to make and keep a thoughtful home.”

“We respond to the mess of the world by facing it squarely.” That’s the Catholic way—to be realistic about reality—and Boyle gently keeps bringing us back to reality in her book. Good exists, bad exists, and it’s all part of the life and times we were born into. “We and our children were made for the time we find ourselves in,” is how Boyle puts it. Reality is our friend only if we acknowledge it and act accordingly.

To make our homes more thoughtful and promote the flourishing of our families, Boyle suggests a number of simple—which, again, is not to say easy—practices that homemakers can start (or reinstitute, if they once existed but have fallen into disuse). For instance, she recommends initiating regular family meals, and keeping the Sabbath as a special day of relaxation. A suggestion that may surprise and dismay us is, “Whenever possible and appropriate, private [that is, family] spaces should be shared. …it isn’t good for anyone in the home to be habitually hiding out alone behind closed doors.”

When I was a child, my friend Kerry could ask me to sleep over only when her older sister was also having a sleepover somewhere else, because they shared a double bed. The family was comfortably middle-class. Sharing a bed did not seem like a hardship to any of us. A generation or two ago, not only did siblings share a bedroom, most families shared one bathroom, one phone line, and one car. Nowadays, all of those sharing practices are considered countercultural.

“Yet great human good comes out of the need to share,” Boyle reminds us. “Creativity and ingenuity are fostered when we are faced with the need to do more with less. The conflicts that naturally arise from sharing a bathroom or a car can quickly be resolved by paying for another bathroom or car. But these conflicts can also be resolved by moderating our own demands, by learning how to wait or how to make do, by becoming accustomed to taking the needs of the others into account.”

Sometimes creating a thoughtful home requires a big effort and a lot of change. For example, the Boyles bought their first house when they had one child and hoped for many more. It was a large house with numerous bedrooms and bathrooms, and close to campus. They loved to host extended family and friends and Boyle’s husband’s university students. But, she writes, “As the years passed, our family did not grow as much as we had hoped, and our first child grew into an introverted adolescent. He disliked that our house was often full of ‘strangers,’ as he called them. To him, our home did not feel like a private place. Consequently, he took advantage of the size of our house to hide away in an attic room or a corner of the basement.

Time and attention

She writes: “We realized that the purpose of our home was the care of our family. We understood that our home should be organized primarily and fundamentally for the care of that family. So, we decided to move from that house to a smaller house, closer to our children’s schools and friends, and more suited to our budget. With fewer places to hide and fewer ‘strangers’ to hide from, our son naturally returned to the mix of family life.” Time and attention were what brought the problem into focus.

Other necessary changes are small but still potent. “When my son was little, I began to realize that he would start misbehaving when his father had been unusually absent or distracted due to work,” Boyle says. “I wondered whether his behavior might improve if I could find a way for the two of them to spend some time together. When my husband came home from work, I suggested to him that, because our boy seemed to need a little ‘Daddy time,’ he play Legos with him rather than chatting with me while I made dinner. The difference this made was immediate. The problem was small, and the solution was easy. But my time and presence had been required: time with my son to recognize that his behavior had changed, time spent thinking about what might be going on, and time to consider a remedy. Had I had only ‘barely enough’ time to get home and fix dinner, I might have misdiagnosed the problem—or reacted to it with frustration and anger.”

Again, time and attention were the key.

Another simple solution: Boyle’s son and his friends always gathered at a certain boy’s house. Boyle wanted to know how she could entice them to her home, too, so she asked that boy’s mother. The secret? “She told me that whenever her son asked whether his friends could come over, she almost always said yes, even though it often meant changing her own plans,” Boyle says. “Whenever they came over, she offered them her homemade cookies. Her simple and reliable hospitality made these boys feel welcome, and that feeling of welcome was what kept them coming back.” We’re all busy. How easy it would have been for that mother to say no! But her yes and her cookies were all it took to entice her son’s friends to her home.

It can be done!

Making a thoughtful home is eminently doable, Boyle believes. “We are human beings with the freedom to think and choose. No matter how deeply we are conditioned by cultural forces, no matter how hard we have to fight against destructive assumptions and habits, we do not lose our capacity to deliberate, to struggle, and to change. We have our homes, and in them we are particularly free and especially powerful to foster and support true human flourishing.”

A word about regret: My husband and I have long been empty-nesters, and our only child and only grandchild live far from us. When our child was little, I was neither the mother nor the homemaker I wish I had been, and occasionally I’m overcome with regret. Boyle talks about this in her introduction. The book, she says, is for everyone: for young beginners at homemaking, for “those already engaged in the battle, overwhelmed perhaps by a houseful of young children and the demands of a career,” and for “battle-weary and wounded veterans, those among us whose lives contain what seem like sad, hard failures in marriage and family life.”

When I’m clearheaded, I understand that I now try to provide a thoughtful home for my husband, and that he does the same for me, by how we treat each other.

For all of us, Boyle has these final encouraging words: “We can always change, and we can always change for the better. Any successes will be triumphs in a most noble cause.”

The Thoughtful Home
by Dia Boyle
Scepter Publishers, 2024
Paperback, 171 pages