FHE for a non-believer

Family Home Evening is whatever the parents decide to make it. Period.

When I was a kid – many eons ago – Family Home Evening always had a manual. For most of my childhood, a new one was delivered by the Home Teachers once a year. Later the church just made a thick general one.

Most of those manuals were packed full of lessons and activities that were non-religious. Family Fire Escape Plan night, taking a certain amount of money and dividing up and buying dinner ingredients – then cooking it. We had game night once a month, usually a board game with popcorn. There were religious lessons, too. The first one I ever taught was the story of The Good Samaritan. I honestly don’t remember lots of LDS scripture centered lessons until I was a late teen. When we did do scripture stories, we used children’s bible stories.

You could begin there. There are tons of lessons about bravery, honesty, hard work, perseverance, and so on. The Wright Brothers, Einstein, Madame Curie, Apollo 13. Lives lived heroically. If you are looking for non-denominational Christian stuff try Guidepost Magazine, or Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Great question – and I don’t think we have a thread on it.

Focus on principles that transcend specific religions — being honest, being kind, assertiveness, peer pressure, etcetera. Let the church do its thing, and work on creating your own family culture at home. Also, don’t be afraid to teach temporally.

One thing my wife and I did recently was list all the things we want our kids to be able to do when they leave home. These things, in my view, represent good topics for Family Home Evening. I had one on estimating a while ago! As a business person, I’m always a bit perturbed when I ask people to summarize things like “how many people attended the social?”. And my kids would respond “I don’t know, I didn’t count them all”.

So I taught my kids how to make such estimates. We started with simply estimating different linear distances, and them measured the actual distance. Then I went on and showed them how to estimate the number of people at an event when everyone is standing up and unevenly distributed throughout the room.

Not that this is what your family needs, but it shows how you can use the time allotted for FHE to teach them things they will need when they go out into the world on their own.

Roadrunner wrote

If I werent a member I’d probably still have FHE.

About 15 years ago my husband was reading some big business guru’s biography, the guy wasn’t a member of the church but some of his employee’s were, they told him about FHE – he went home and implemented in his home. If I recall they always ate spaghetti on family night and then did something together, a game, bike ride, so on.

Even in my TBM days when the kids were young our FHEs were rarely a formal lesson. We did have conversations with our kids about basic moral principles and church standards, but usually not in that context. When the kids were young we went to the library every third Monday and mostly did other fun activities (going to the park, watching a movie, etc.). Sometimes we did service. If you must do something more “spiritual” to appease your TBM wife, I’d go with short lessons about core gospel principles – love your neighbor, atonement/resurrection of Christ, ten commandments, etc.

On edit and thinking about this some more, I want to add that I think what you DO at home and elsewhere in front of your children has much more impact that what you say. For example, your children seeing or at least knowing you perform service has far more impact than telling them service is important but not actually ever doing any.