Monday, November 16, 2009

More thoughts on Family Home Evening

Holding family home evening on Monday nights seems weird to me, if it’s actually (as i’ve heard stated often enough) intended to reinforce the lessons learned on Sunday so that they don’t atrophy during the rest of the week. If this is really (part of) what it’s for, why don’t we hold family home evening on Wednesdays or Thursdays? I mean, if Sunday’s lessons are going to atrophy over six days, it seems to me they’ll atrophy over five days nearly as well.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I've never heard a single person say that's why. But people also don't strongly push the Monday night only thing here either. I have noticed that most school things and community activities don't happen on Monday evenings. People don't much like doing much of anything on Mondays, so that sort of thing gets pushed to Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. Makes Monday night generally the best night for Family Home Evening.

David B said...

You (and Michelle, who’s responded to a post or two on family home evening here as well) have apparently lived in places that are a bit more mellow about the form of family home evening than places i’ve lived—one place i lived, we were essentially told that not holding family home evening specifically on Monday is equivalent to not attending church on Sunday.

Of course, the most recent place we lived had loads of school activities on Mondays—but Wednesdays (the traditional night for Baptist Bible-study groups) were largely extracurricular-free, and so the wards fought tooth and nail to hold youth nights on Wednesdays, rather than letting families use Wednesdays for family nights. I think i’ve posted on (what i saw as) the misplaced priorities involved in that before, though.

(And to pull this back to the original topic of my post, i think the Baptists have the right idea there, by the way—use the middle of the week to reinforce religious messages from Sunday, as opposed to using the middle of the week for the social events our youth nights largely are.)