An Open Door: Raising Children Who Know How to Welcome Others

Dear friend,

I want to talk with you about something that has almost slipped out of fashion, though it never slipped out of importance: the open door. There was a time, and not so long ago in plenty of Omaha neighborhoods, when neighbors dropped by unannounced, when an extra chair was always pulled up to the table, and when children grew up watching their parents make room for other people. Somewhere along the way, we started guarding our homes like private retreats, and our children have noticed. If we want to raise sons and daughters with warm and generous hearts, one of the best classrooms we will ever have is our own front hallway.

Hospitality is not entertaining. That distinction matters, and your children will learn it from you. Entertaining says, look at my house. Hospitality says, come into my life. Entertaining waits until the baseboards are scrubbed and the menu is impressive; hospitality throws another potato in the pot and apologizes for nothing. When your children see you welcome someone in while the laundry sits folded but not put away, you are teaching them that people matter more than appearances. That single lesson, learned early, will free them from a lifetime of performing and posturing. A child who knows the difference between impressing people and loving them has learned something many adults never do.

Give your children real jobs when guests come. Let your daughter take the coats. Let your son carry the extra chairs and fill the water glasses. Teach them to look a visitor in the eye, offer a hand, and say the guest's name. These small duties are not chores dressed up for company; they are training in the ancient art of making another person feel expected and wanted. A child who has been given responsibility for a guest's comfort begins to think about someone other than himself, and that quiet turning outward is the seed of every virtue you are praying takes root in him.

Teach them, too, that the welcome matters most when it costs something. It is easy to host the families who are easy to host. But the widower who talks too long, the family new to Omaha who knows no one yet, the child in your son's class who never gets invited anywhere. These are the guests who will teach your children what an open door is really for. Scripture speaks of welcoming the stranger, and children take that seriously when they see their parents do it. Your kids will not remember every dinner party, but they will remember the evening you set a place for someone who had nowhere else to be. They will remember that your family was the kind that noticed.

And do not forget that hospitality begins inside your own walls, between the people who live there. A home where family members greet one another at the door, where a returning parent is met with glad faces instead of glowing screens, where siblings learn to welcome a brother's friend with kindness, is a home that is practicing hospitality all week long. The way your children greet the mail carrier, the repairman, and the grandparent shuffling up the walk is the way they are learning to greet the world. Warmth is not an event you host a few times a year. It is an atmosphere you keep, and children breathe it in like air.

So here is my encouragement to you tonight. Do not wait for a bigger house, a better season, or a quieter calendar. Invite someone this week. Let your children help you set the table, and let them see you give away your time and your food and your attention without keeping score. Twenty years from now, your grown children will build homes of their own, and the question is not whether those homes will have doors. The question is whether they will know how to open them. Teach them now, while their hearts are soft and their hands are small, that a family's love is not diminished by being shared. It is multiplied. The table gets louder, the pot gets stretched, and the children raised in that kind of home grow up rich in the only currency that lasts.

Keep the porch light on.