About ten years ago, I began my research to discover effective ways to empower children and families with virtue.  I brought a unique blend of experience to the task - as a parish catechist, a home school educator, and a marketing professional. I was well aware of the Herculean effort it takes to build character in children and how, no matter the quality of the child's educational experience, toxic cultural influences can undo a parent's efforts to instill habits of faith and virtue in their children.

My son was in fourth grade. We had a loving family - active in our church - and a great local grade school. However, he was showing signs of selfishness, disrespect, laziness, apathy towards faith, and disobedience. Friends and teachers smiled and said, "He is just heading into the attitude issues of middle-school. It's normal". Unwilling to accept the "new normal" now accepted in modern families, I set out to see if anything would improve if we were deeply intentional about the role models he was exposed to through entertainment and culture.

For one summer, what we now call the "Virtue Immersion" summer, I fed him a steady diet of fun-to-read heroic books with characters who not only had courage, but who demonstrated strength of character that flowed from their faith. He watched classic TV series and movies that all had great entertainment quality, often with lots of humor, but each offered good male role models that a young boy could look up to and admire. And even the music he heard included dramatic movie soundtracks and fun upbeat songs that often had a Christian vibe. 

The results were extraordinary. I never dreamed that he'd experience a complete transformation in 3 short months. By the end of that summer, he was behaving with all the virtuous qualities a parent longs for in their child. He was courteous and thoughtful, took initiative and showed responsibility, and was earnestly engaged in the rhythm of our faith. These behaviors were NOT the result of me nagging him. He WANTED to be good.  It was the complete confirmation of my hypothesis... a child immersed in storytelling and media that offers role-models of virtue and good character will WANT to have those qualities as well.

Now I was fully energized to create the best ways for any family to replicate these results with ease - integrated in family lifestyle - along the continuum of growing age and maturity of children. This was the seed that took root as the VFAVE.com platform.

This real world success prompted a new inquiry:

Could we infuse the knowledge and practice of virtue at an early age to fortify children to overcome the morally corrosive content targeted at them in middle school?

When the world closed down during Covid, many of my broad VFAVE Virtue Literacy efforts did too. I had time to think. I thought about the popularity of my first book, co-authored with my sister, about a bunny who acts as a storyteller to lead children at Easter to the love of Jesus.  I pondered the generational and global impact of the likes of Disney, captivating millions of families through the power of cute characters who are great storytellers.  Favorite characters take up residence as powerful role models in a child's imagination. I became convinced that my calling to build the knowledge and practice of virtue - virtue literacy - in children and families would not follow a conventional path. It would not be through teaching intellectual knowledge, terminology or definitions.  I would beguile a child's imagination with characters who are icons of virtue as storytellers...and lead the child to admire heroes - real people, role models, from the Bible, from Christian history, and more. Thus, I created the Virtue Heroes, who continue to emerge in illustrated images, books, and more. They are the adorable delivery system for the vocabulary of, and the desire to behave with, virtue to be imprinted on children's hearts.

But since life is experienced on a continuum. I knew that to solve the problem of moral decay in our families and in society, to overcome evil with good, to be the light that shines in the darkness, we still needed the VFAVE virtue literacy tool for success.

Truth is, if we want our little children to emulate role models of virtue, the big kids, teens and grownups in the family community need to cultivate their own desire for virtue themselves. I've found that if virtue is relegated to the world of young children, then we communicate through our actions that there is a rite of passage in which they just need to be old enough to participate in morally malignant, and often spiritually suffocating, books, movies, music...and behavior. The VFAVE.COM online platform has emerged to give families a go-to hub of entertainment recommendations for all ages, all rated according to virtue. I designed it to be a firewall against the myth of "age appropriateness", which gives kids the impression that they just need to be old enough to get in on the lust, violence, drugs, bad language, and crass humor that the big people get to enjoy. We ALL need to up our game and seek out characters and role models in our entertainment who will inspire us through great stories to be our best selves. 

This is what fuels the emphasis of the Virtue Literacy Project, to invite all ages to SEEK and to BE role models of virtue. If we all embrace this as a lifestyle...the world will be changed. The power of virtue can renew lives, families, communities... to eternity, and beyond!

- Cathy