How to live Lent well always presents challenges, but living Lent together as a family can bring exceptional spiritual benefits for all during the 40 days and beyond. Several families shared with the Register what they planned to do for a successful season.

“Every year since the first year we had a child, we always do a family sacrifice, and then everybody does an individual one,” Stacy Martin said. She and husband Sean, the director of evangelization, catechesis and family life for the Diocese of Gary, Indiana, have two boys and four girls, ages 7 to 22.

As a family every year, the Martins give up all TV. “We feel that, as a family, we have to be sacrificing and loving,” Stacy explained. “And if we’re participating in each other’s joys and sorrows and all of those things, then the family sacrifice is appropriate as well. We feel it’s important as a family to sacrifice together because if that’s the ultimate example of love on the cross, then we ought to be doing the same for each other.”

Without TV, the family focuses on “intentional time together,” Stacy said. “Maybe we’re playing a family game, maybe we’re saying extra prayers or a Rosary. Whatever it is, we’re doing something together, using that time together.”

The children keep track of individual penitential act with M&Ms. Maybe they gave up chocolate or stopped complaining. If they did well, they get a red M&M, as that color represents the blood Jesus shed. Big sacrifices earn more colors. “Brown reminds us of wood, and pencils are made of wood,” Stacy explained. “So your primary vocation is to be a student. How are you doing in your schoolwork? Are you doing it without complaining?” The earned candy, of course, cannot be eaten until Easter.

The Way of the Cross is also part of the family’s penitential observance.

“The Stations of the Cross have been a guidepost for us,” Stacy also said. “We’ve tried to instill that in our kids, that on Fridays we are to spend that extra time meditating on Our Lord’s passion.”

The family’s own losses tie in to how they approach this season, Stacy added. “We lost two babies, and both of them we lost in Lent. It really focused our meditation, and our focus honed more on the sacrifice of the cross. The suffering of not just Jesus, but Our Lady, the women at the foot of the cross, the apostles, everything that everybody felt. So it’s not just Christ’s sacrifice, but also knowing and seeing how that ripples and affects everybody else, and then our Heavenly Father, sending his only Son.”

Sean added that the family is now doing a “Mission to Families,” leading parish missions as a whole family to encourage other families.

North of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Sean and Mary Harrell use tradition as a benchmark with their six children, ages 2 to 14. Mary explained how children benefit “not from doing things differently every year, but from doing things the same. Just as we have our traditions when we feast and have the same dinners or go to the same places, so with our children, we generally repeat our observances from year to year.”

And sweets are also part of the picture — giving them up, that is.

“There is great worth in giving up chocolate,” Mary said. “There is great worth in trimming your daily life from the sweetness and the pleasures and the small comforts of life in the times of the fast. Children greatly benefit. It makes a big impact when they can’t have their favorite fruit snacks or when they don’t get pudding every night after dinner.”

Secondly, the family goes meatless several days a week, not just Fridays. Mary, who home-schools the children, observed that the family has several other protein sources. “Tonight, it’s fish or it’s cheese enchiladas because it’s Wednesday, because this is our other day that we’re giving back to the Lord and uniting this small suffering with his.”

Mary, Sean and the children age 10 and older also individually pick a piece of spiritual reading. Her favorite is usually rereading Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence by St. Claude de la Colombière and Father Jean Baptiste Saint-Jure, reporting how she gets “so much out of rereading that every year.” Story of a Soul is “always a beneficial one for younger readers,” she added. “And a saint’s autobiography or biography is always a wonderful book for kids to pick up.” They also listen to podcasts together, such as The Bible in a Year.

Good Lenten practices have a way of growing a family’s spiritual life long past Lent. Mentioning the nightly family Rosary, Mary explained, “One practice we started in Lent and that we have kept going all year is that whenever we pray the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday and Friday, we have begun going through the Fifth Sorrowful Mystery, the Crucifixion and Death of Our Lord, on our knees. It really sticks with children that when we talk about the Crucifixion of Our Lord, we should do it from our need to have some sharing in his suffering.”

The Sorrowful Mysteries are central for the Duffy family in Andover, Minnesota, too.

Eric and Alison Duffy observe Lent with their six children ages 2 to 13 (another child is in heaven).

Alison recalled the family’s Lent last year: “We would study the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary in order. Each week, we found a piece of art that would go with whatever decade [we were studying],” she explained. “The children would “have a piece of art to look at,” as it was taped on the wall next to the dinner table. “Every night at dinner and every day at lunch we could see what the mysteries were and study that art and what that Sorrowful Mystery is about. It helped us memorize it, but it also helped us understand more what the mysteries are. This way we could contemplate it and see the art, read about it and ask questions about it.” She wants their children “to know what the mysteries are and what Jesus went through.”

Overall, Alison said, “It was really fruitful. So we’re going to do that again this year.” She hopes this Lenten practice will inspire a deeper love for the Rosary with the children during the year.

The Duffys also incorporate acts of service.

Alison explained that, given “the focus of Lent is that Christ is giving absolutely everything he has to us, we’ve just tried to look and say, ‘How do we give a little more of ourselves to the Lord — to reflect that sacrifice to hopefully make us strong enough to stand at the foot of the cross and to embrace the cross, too, when it’s handed to us in life, rather than run from it like the disciples did?”

She suggested how important “little things” can be.

“Maybe it’s making a phone call to a relative or visiting a shut-in,” Alison said. “Everybody in the family can do something small.”

And this service looks ahead to Easter.

For a number of years, the family made cookies for Easter baskets handed out at the local food pantry. The family also has helped clean their church ahead of Easter Sunday.

Overall, Alison said, their Lenten observances “draw us deeper into who Jesus is, and, hopefully through it, help us fall deeper in love with Jesus, too.”