Raising Toddlers in the 21st Century: A Return to Wisdom and Wonder
Toddlers thrive on order, and as early as 18 months old, they can begin to internalize habits of obedience, gratitude, and self-control.
The raising of toddlers today requires not just courage, but a return to the sacred rhythms of tradition. Our world, increasingly marked by frenetic pace and post-Christian values, invites parents to reassess their deepest commitments. What does it mean to raise a child in the 21st century? The answer lies not in novelty, but in fidelity—to Christ, to His Church, and to the wisdom of generations past.
Modern parents are often plagued by conflicting advice, pop culture, behavioral trends, and the tyranny of screen addiction. Yet, as Solomon wrote in Proverbs, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). This ancient directive is more relevant now than ever, calling parents to rediscover the perennial Catholic tradition of child rearing.
The Family as the Primary School of Virtue
A child’s education must be, first and foremost, a spiritual endeavor. The formation of conscience and the nurturing of wonder are tasks that begin in the cradle and never truly end. Psychological and mechanistic approaches to childrearing have been overemphasized in our contemporary society. Instead, we need to focus on the need for sacramentality, moral formation, and parenting by example. Your child will be as you are.
The Christian home should be a domestic sanctuary, where the child is gradually initiated into the moral and sacramental life of the Church. The formation of character must begin in infancy. Like monks in a cloister, children must be taught the rhythms of prayer, silence, work, and joy. To this end daily chores, play, prayers, catechesis, and readings from the lives of the saints are imperative.
The Role of Temperament and Discipline
Art and Laraine Bennett’s The Temperament God Gave You (2005) builds upon classical insights into human nature by helping parents understand their children’s innate temperament. Recognizing the choleric child’s need for direction, the melancholic’s need for affirmation, or the sanguine’s need for boundaries allows parents to tailor their discipline with both wisdom and charity. This is not indulgence, but incarnation: forming virtue through the unique strengths and struggles of each little person.
Yet no character is formed without discipline. David Isaacs, in Character Building: A Guide for Parents and Teachers (1976), emphasizes the need for consistent parental authority. Virtues, he notes, are cultivated through repeated action, reinforced by loving correction and example. Toddlers thrive on order, and as early as 18 months old, they can begin to internalize habits of obedience, gratitude, and self-control. These are not small accomplishments—they are the building blocks of civilization.
Motherhood, the Domestic Liturgy
The anonymous Capuchin priest who penned Mother Love: A Manual for Christian Mothers in the 1800s held no illusions about the demands of motherhood. He exhorted women to see their vocation as one bound up with the salvation of their children. The mother’s role, he wrote, “is second only to that of the priest, for she, too, prepares souls for heaven.”
This manual reads less like a parenting book and more like a spiritual retreat. It reminds mothers that each meal, diaper, and lullaby offered in love is a participation in the liturgy of daily life. In the words of the late Pope Benedict XVI, “The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.” This greatness begins in the nursery.
Resisting Ideological Indoctrination
But even the most faithful households must reckon with the post-Christian landscape that surrounds them. In The Lost Tools of Learning (1948), Dorothy Sayers lamented the decline of classical education, observing that students were no longer taught how to think, but only what to think. Her solution? A return to child development as a whole, beginning with wonder, discipline, memorization, and play.
Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948) complements this critique by calling parents to resist the cult of productivity. He reminds us that the foundation of culture is not work, but contemplation. For toddlers, this means preserving unstructured play, wonder, and silence—things our digital culture often denies. A toddler staring at a ladybug or building a tower of blocks is doing the foundational work of philosophy: contemplating being.
Michael O’Brien, in A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your Child’s Mind (1994), offers a sober warning to parents: the culture is catechizing your children. If you do not guard their imaginations, someone else will form them—often with devastating consequences. O’Brien urges parents to curate their children’s stories and entertainments, offering them tales that form rather than deform the heart and the moral imagination.
The Moral Imagination and the Restoration of Wonder
C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man (1955), warns that the loss of objective truth and beauty in education leads to the unmaking of man. This “unmaking” begins not in the university lecture hall, but in the playroom. If toddlers are fed ugliness, vulgarity, and vice, they will not later recognize truth, goodness, and beauty when they meet them.
Christopher Dawson, in The Crisis of Western Education (1961), observed that the health of a culture depends upon its spiritual vision. For the Catholic parent, this means not just raising a “good child,” but a saint. It means teaching our toddlers to love prayer, to see Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, and to sense the sacramental in the ordinary.
Upright Kids in an Upside-Down World
Ray Guarendi’s Raising Upright Kids in an Upside-Down World (2019) brings a contemporary, no-nonsense voice to these ancient truths. He reminds parents that love and authority are not opposites, and that saying “no” is sometimes the most loving thing a parent can do. His wit cuts through modern confusion: “You’re not raising a child; you’re raising a future adult.”
My father held that it is especially important to get it right with the first child so that a bar is set for subsequent children. This is important on many different levels, but especially when one considers the importance of teaching first by example. A well-trained oldest child sets an example for the rest of his siblings and makes the job easier as the family size increases.
Indeed, parenting toddlers is an act of hope. It is an investment in souls that will one day shape the Church, the culture, and determine their eternity. It requires a long memory and an eternal vision.
Conclusion
Raising toddlers in the 21st century is not a task for the faint of heart, but it is one for the faithful. It demands that we reject the noise of modernity and listen again to the whisper of wisdom—from Solomon to Dawson. It calls for mothers who pray and instruct in virtue, fathers who lead and bless, and homes that echo with song and silence, imaginative play and laughter, prayer and sanctity.
To form a child is to prepare him for heaven. To raise a toddler in the love and truth of Christ is to defy a world gone mad, and to begin the restoration of moral order. Let us not look to the latest parenting trends. Let us look to the saints and the perennial Catholic tradition.
For my recommended reading list for parents and children see Recommended Reading for Parents and Mr. Warner’s Annotated Booklist of Children’s Classics.