Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms

by Justin Whitmel Earley, Troy Simons (Foreword), Ruth Chou Simons

Discover simple habits and easy-to-implement daily rhythms that will help you find meaning beyond the chaos of family life as you create a home where kids and parents alike practice how to love God and each other.

You long for tender moments with your children--but do you ever find yourself too busy to stop, make eye contact, and say something you really mean? Daily habits are powerful ways to shape the heart--but do you find yourself giving in to screen time just to get through the day? You want to parent with purpose--but do you know how to start?

Award-winning author and father of four Justin Whitmel Earley understands the tension between how you long to parent and what your daily life actually looks like. In Habits of the Household, Earley gives you the tools you need to create structure--from mealtimes to bedtimes--that free you to parent toddlers, kids, and teens with purpose. Learn how to:


Develop a bedtime liturgy to settle your little ones and ground them in God's love
Discover a new framework for discipline as discipleship
Acquire simple practices for more regular and meaningful family mealtimes
Open your eyes to the spirituality of parenting, seeing small moments as big opportunities for spiritual formation
Develop a custom age chart for your family to more intentionally plan your shared years under the same roof
Each chapter in Habits of the Household ends with practical patterns, prayers, or liturgies that your family can put into practice right away. As you create liberating rhythms around your everyday routines, you will find your family has a greater sense of peace and purpose as your home becomes a place where, above all, you learn how to love.

Genres: Parenting, Christian, Nonfiction, Family, Faith, Christian Living, Audiobook

226 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2021

About the author

Justin Whitmel Earley (JD, Georgetown University) is the creator of The Common Rule, a program of habits designed to form us in the love of God and neighbor. He is also a mergers and acquisitions lawyer in Richmond, Virginia. He previously spent several years in China as the founder and general editor of The Urbanity Project and as the director of Thought and Culture Shapers, a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving the community through arts. He and his wife, Lauren, have four sons and live in Richmond, Virginia.

Reviews

[Jennifer Squire]

I tend to be hesitant to recommend books on habit formation - mostly because the weight of idealism can be overwhelming and burdensome when you are already trying to survive your home.

I found this book to be full of grace and transparency. His premise is that you already have habits, let’s leverage them for purpose and worship. I laughed at many of his real life examples of his home, and teared up a bit in the last chapter.

The best books are encouraging and challenging and I found this book did both for me.

[Melanie Duke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’d give it 10 stars if I could. One of the most practical & realistic family life / parenting books I’ve ever read. Earley’s humility is evident in his writing - his personal anecdotes made me laugh aloud and make me feel a little less crazy.

I feel convicted & inspired. I’ll keep this one near me at all times and will recommend to everyone.

I love the reminder at the end of each chapter:
“Gods love inspires our action, but our action does not inspire Gods love. Our family habits will not change Gods love for us, but Gods love for us should change our family habits.”

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

My endorsement: “I met Justin Earley fifteen years ago; we were fresh out of college serving together as missionaries overseas. Even then, I could tell he had wisdom beyond his years. And ever since, I have been encouraged to watch him develop his voice for the benefit of Christ’s people. It’s no secret that home life can be chaotic—many of us are in its throes now, settling for ‘survival mode’ as we simply try to make it through the day. We want to form our kids with Christian virtue, but sometimes the fight can feel futile. ‘Habits of the Household’ will help you implement rhythms that will bring order to the mess and grace in the stress.”

[Tim Michiemo · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.9 Stars - 2024 Top Reads

Right after Jesus the most precious and important thing to me in my life is my family. There is so much beauty but also messiness when it comes to life in the home. In this book, "Habits of the Household," Justine Whitmel Earley captured all the feelings that I have about life in the home. His vision of home life was not only helpful and encouragement, but also just made my heart sing. I cried multiple times reading this book.

The main point of this book is that our habits shape who we are, and parents inevitable end up shaping who their kids are. So the best way to shape our children is to have Christ-shaped habits that form the home. This includes everything from dinner, discipline, sabbath and snack time. Its a wonderful picture of the home as the center of family discipleship in opposition to the idolatrous hustle and bustle of the world.

I highly recommend this book and its for sure going to be at the top of my list as one of my favorites for this year so far. I cannot recommend it more highly!

[Susy C. *MotherLambReads* · Rating 5 out of 5]

My new favorite books on habits and routines!
SO very good! Loved this book much better than his other one.
Intentionality! Living in the now! Setting up boundaries! Living in faith! Family values and motto! Finding the right balance. Taking action! So many good principles to put into place.

[Ada Tarcau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it! Both honest and wise, inspiring and packed with practical ideas, it is really encouraging, making you want to roll up your sleeves and change the habits of your home. The approach was very relevant to the world we live in today.
A plus for me, it was super-relatable, having 3 little boys under our roof.

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed Earley's The Common Rule a while back, and Habits of the Household handily applies his ideas from that book to daily family life. He gives on-the-ground advice for parenting, neither too lofty nor too specific to be applied in the trenches.

Earley is honest about the constant nature of parenting, and some of his ideas regarding very brief liturgies and prayer are easily applicable. Near the end of the book, he discusses casting a vision for family rhythms, but thankfully most of the book is more concrete than that. Every chapter ends in a sort of quick-reference section that is helpful for glancing at and using as reminders. I had a strong feeling that he wrote this book out of an ongoing conversation in his own life, which made it feel more truthful and worthy of consideration than some parenting resources I've come across.

Like so many other parenting resources, Earley occasionally seems consumed by "mess signaling," if you will. Many paragraphs are devoted to assuring the reader his kids are messy, his house is messy, they spend a lot of time cleaning, and so forth. Maybe that's reassuring and helpful for some readers, but as someone who grew up in a home where etiquette was taught and reasonable expectations were had, I could have done with a little less of that.

Two limitations of Habits of the Household to consider are that it doesn't cover teenage years, and doesn't do a great job of showing how the church plays a part in household rhythms. The first is because the Earleys haven't spent much time being parents of teenagers, but a lot of the rhythms they discuss will adapt, deepen, and expand to accommodate adolescents. The second...I'm not sure what is bugging me about this, exactly. Perhaps it's being Anglican and seeing how families at our church form their rhythms around church rhythms, and how a liturgical church shapes a liturgical family. Maybe the Earleys don't have that kind of church experience. I don't know. But I didn't get a good grasp of Earley's ideas on how church plays a role in family rhythms. It's not even a section on the "Habits of the Household" circle that's on the cover! These rhythms don't make sense outside of a church body, though on reading the book, one could get the idea that attending church or not doesn't affect family rhythms at all.

I'm not a parent, nor soon to become one, but I found Habits of the Household good food for thought as I think about family life and household rhythms. Despite its limitations, it can be helpful to the liturgical-type parents who want to be spiritually formed alongside their children.

[Rachel Schultz · Rating 3 out of 5]

really close between a 2 and 3 star so I’m trying to be generous but I don’t want you to think I don’t hate the wokeness and feminism in it. Didn’t know this dude and the names on the back of book endorsing are troublesome people. But some of the content is very observant and profound.

Warning this book has that type of writing Christian authors of a certain brand do that is long paragraphs revelling in how disorderly their house is. “Two kids are having a wrestling match in the bath tub; in another room a child is pouring flour in the carpet; I hear a terrible a scream upstairs; I can’t remember whose T. rex toothbrush is whose” etc. (That’s my paraphrasing/parodying the genre.) It’s really lame and also not funny when they’re trying to go for that. He had enough good content I kept going. but by the end I was rushing to wrap it up.

The first chapter with his point about liturgy (or “habits” if you’re the self help writer) and his big picture principle was 5 or 6/5 stars with the proceeding chapters where he got to talking about daily life showed he is not v wise. Every page has a keen sentence but then you have to go through some dull and some cringe paragraphs inbetween.

[Brett Wiley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. My heart and mind were stirred to think more intentionally about how Emily and I are forming our children. We’ve already had some great discussions about rhythms of conversation, prayer, rest, and date night that we need to either re-emphasize or adopt. And then he had me crying at the end thinking about our kids age timeline and how a conversation with his dad changed his life. “We become our habits and our children become us.” I won’t soon forget some of the ideas in this book.

[Beverly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was hesitant to pick this up even after seeing many glowing reviews. After all, my kids are teenagers now. Would this book be solely geared towards those with younger kids?

I’m really thankful that I decided to order it anyway. It’s full of not just concepts and good theology, but how parents can incorporate those beliefs into their daily “habits of the household” and routines.

There were parts of this book that made me think we’ve done a pretty good job at certain things and other parts that made me realize we need to start doing some things differently, but the bottom line and theme that runs throughout this book is that “our habits don’t make God love us more, but the fact that He loves us should change our habits.”

My favorite chapters were the ones on work and conversations, perhaps because those were the most applicable to my current stage of parenting. But all the chapters were valuable, and I was sobbing while reading the epilogue.

Bottom line- whether your kids are very young or growing into young adults like mine, if you’re a Christian parent, you need this book!

[Haley Baumeister · Rating 4 out of 5]

A worthwhile book to read with your spouse or other parents.

While each of these things are not in and of themselves revolutionary or exhaustive (he has resources for further study or exploration in each chapter), where this book shines is in its ability to show us the big picture of how everything we do on a daily and weekly basis adds up to our lives. They add up to our discipleship and spiritual formation.

Discipleship and spiritual formation --whether for ourselves, our children, or our family as a whole-- is not a program, and doesn't primarily happen "over there." It happens in the routine moments, if we will be diligent to practice them.

This resource is up there with what Phylicia Masonheimer is doing with teaching *practical* rhythms of family discipleship (while raising YOUNG children!) There's a lot out there on the *theology* of parenting, marriage, or family life, but we've got 3 kids under 4 and things get crazy. When it comes down to it, how does being formed into the image of Jesus look on a daily, hourly basis? How do its rhythms show up on the calendar? How does it show up in the things we are already doing every week? What do the brass tacks of spiritual formation look like at a certain time on Tuesday with your children? With your spouse on Sunday evening?

There's plenty of great scripts, questions, and ideas I've already added to my own arsenal in Google Docs, to draw from in our family -- and plenty more to explore and personalize as family life goes on.

[Gabie Peacock · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5 would be a more accurate rating for me personally)
Part 1 of this book was excellent and motivating, I could have left the book feeling inspired and encouraged if I stopped after this section. Very Charlotte Mason-esque.

I want to be as generous as I possibly can with this book because I overall thought it was heartwarming and sweet. The personal stories of the author's parenting woes and victories were great! I also particularly enjoyed his thoughts on screen time and found it very balanced.

Other than those things, I didn't take anything else from it. The tone of the book was a tiny bit snarky. (I listened to the author read it out loud so that may have contributed to that) The author kept emphasizing the *love* part of a parent/child relationship but failed to lay out the principles of *respect* and *honor*. I saw more of the author's opinions on parenting and less of the biblical standards Christians desperately need to hear. I also had my *woke* radar going off a few times which is less important but still doesn't give me the confidence to recommend this as a good book.

Instead of reading this book, I recommend "Teach Them to Work" by Mary Beeke and "Parenting by God's Promises" by Joel Beeke.

[Hanna Way · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the best books I’ve read this year. so encouraging and practical.


this quote got me:
“we had such high hopes for having kids and now it seems more work than love, more exhaustion than fulfillment. at best we feel tired, at worst we feel trapped, in between we feel lonely, and more likely than not, we feel bad about our parenting.”

If that resonates with you, read this book!

[Brittany Lindvall · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great reminder of the importance of habit within family and our role as parents. I needed these reminders and this is a great book to revisit in the future.

[Angie Ede · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so encouraging. The author has 4 young boys and approaches each area of habit as an opportunity to be purposeful in pointing our families to Jesus regardless of how messy the current situation gets. The author shares his failures and how he has learned from them and talks about how each habit can take time to develop and be meaningful. Would definitely recommend reading slowly and taking the time to try out different habits as you go because by the end it feels like, there’s so much where do I start?

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to this, now I'm convinced to buy it and read it again.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Justin Whitmel Earley's "Habits of the Household" helps guides parents (especially those with young children) who want to establish healthy spiritual rhythms in their home. Earley has a knack for reducing spiritual aspirations to spiritual practices. His first book "The Common Rule" has become my go-to book for helping people integrate spiritual disciplines in their lives.

Earley takes us through a day and considers how we can inject habits that invite God's grace into our homes. He wants us to think of our homes as "schools of love." “The most Christian way to think about our households is that they are little “schools of love,” places where we have one vocation, one calling: to form all who live here into lovers of God and neighbor.” I particularly enjoyed Earley's thoughts on bedtime liturgies. Earley comes alongside as a fellow parent in the trenches and offers grace and wisdom.

I am hoping to help start a class at our school for parents utilizing Earley's book. I was blessed by Earley's gospel-saturated book and I think many others will as well.

For more of my reviews see thebeehive.live.

[Caleb Batchelor · Rating 5 out of 5]

The parenting book I’ve been wanting to read.

[Heath Cockrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Parenting is one long process of revealing who you are.”

“The most significant thing about a family is what is considered normal.”

Convicting and encouraging. Didn’t agree with everything, but a great reminder that our habits and actions show the people around us, especially our children, what is truly important to us.

Thankful for God’s grace to grow in godly habits.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A potentially transformative book for how one views and shapes their family if put into practice well. The central theme emphasizes the “greatest spiritual work happens in the normal moments.” As a parent and a spouse, these normal moments either require strict intentionality (which is unrealistic to be on all the time) or setting up habits/liturgies in your family’s daily life that naturally blend in God’s truth.

As my family is just beginning to grow (maybe our first kid will be born tomorrow, if not, this weekend???), the practical application is a little more limited for now, but I’m confident I will return to this book many times as a parent for guidance in the future.

Very happy I read this book, very excited to become a Dad :)

[Heather Lehman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely recommend. And definitely recommend reading with your spouse if possible. It helped us have conversations we didn't know we needed. And while we certainly aren't adopting all the ideas, we have already adopted some and -- perhaps even better -- are coming up with some habits of our own.

[Linda Filcek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy to read. Practical. Biblical. Would recommend couples with kids at home to read together and pick a couple of the rhythms to try to implement in their family.

[Kevin Halloran · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great blend of encouraging stories and practical recommendations to help make your household more intentional and worshipful. I love the author’s realistic emphasis on the messiness of families and parenting.

[Brice Karickhoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Big fan of this book on how to build a home where husbands, wives, and children can flourish. It was highly pragmatic and had some classic Anglican/JMC vibes; very on par with all the ~formation~ talk nowadays, which I am generally a fan of. Maybe I didn’t agree with 100% of the authors points, but he knows 1000% more about marriage than I do and exponentially more about parenting, so I was happy to humbly learn.

One major pro of this book was the fact that the chapters can be taken in isolation. I’m always a fan of books like this. Not only is it more forgiving to stretches of imperfect focus, but it also allows you to come back and revisit specific chapters. On this go-round, the chapters on screen time, discipline, and bed time all stuck out. I’m sure I’ll revisit this book often in the future. Great read!

[Becca Garber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just turned to my husband and gave this book a resounding endorsement. It is an excellent parenting book!

I think I often get bogged down in spiritual nonfiction, unfortunately, but I kept coming back to this one, curious to hear what he had to say about the next habit in parenting. He starts from the place of acknowledging we all DO have habits, whether we mean to or not. Then he challenges each one in turn (waking, marriage, screentime, discipline, bedtime, etc.) with thoughtful, gospel-informed, in-the-trenches-with-you wisdom.

His insight and challenges felt like the “next level” for Elliott and me. I consider us pretty thoughtful, involved parents, but Justin had so many more ideas and insight to help us strive onward and upward. I appreciated it so much.

[Annie Bruza · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a swing and a miss.


I was excited to read this book about habit formation and daily rhythyms and liturgies, but what I got instead was a wishy washy parenting book. Earley's constant complaining about the difficultness of parenting borders on whininess about a God-given role that we have been called and equipped to do well. No one needs the reminder that parenting is hard. We all know this. Children are challenging, but they're also a joy and that's what we need to be reminded of. This book makes parenting sound like drudgery. He could have done so much better because the stories he told about his four boys were so enjoyable. I just wished he would have talked about parenthood like he talked about his job in the chapter on work.


This book contains some genuinely good ideas. The blessings he says over his children and the ways he limits screentime were some of my favorites, but they seemed to be just that: ideas. The opening of the book talks about monastery living and Augustine's rules of life, but the rest of the book fell short of these things. He seems to take a blank slate view of the world and tries to create meaning where he sees none, instead of what the medieval Christians would have done in trying to live in harmony with the meaning that is already present in the world. His chapter on family meals emphasizes this. He calls his family to come together from their individual tasks to eat and talk together and then he sends them right back to their individual lives without much of a reason why. This book serves the purpose to make parenting or managing a household easier, but without any basis or anything bigger to center the family around.


His writing was muddy and unclear. He would make blanket statements either without backing them up or by explaining them using language that simply rephrases his original point. He also tried to write this book to too wide an audience. His chapter on screentime shows this best. He opens by saying that "screentime is the parents' one buoy on the tempestuous ocean of parenting" (paraphrased obviously) but then went on say that they had severely limited screentime in their home and gave some good, practical tips on how to do this. After this he went right back to "but don't you dare judge anyone for how they choose to do screentime in their house because, did I mention, parenting is so so hard." The book would have been much more effective and clear if he simply said what he thinks without pulling his punches and then let the reader decide what they will and will not agree with or adopt for themselves.


The chapter on marriage was the most problematic. It's ok to not pay a babysitter every week even if you can afford it. You don't need to get away from your kids to feel like a "regular person." You need to be able to maintain your dignity as a full human being in all your roles and facets even if your kids are present. I love date nights and I think having one on one time (not necessarily date night) with my husband is very valuable, but heaping all of your worth and the health of your marriage onto them is only setting you up for failure.


Overall, this was a skip with a few decent points.

[Christina DeVane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this very practical book that is mostly about rhythms that relate to parenting small children.

I appreciated his honesty in the trenches of life and he does not sugarcoat anything. He’s accomplished a lot in his life, yet he still regards parenting as THE hardest job in life.😎

He’s big into liturgy and I wouldn’t agree with absolutely everything, but it made me think more deeply on how our home/family rhythms make us function.

Some quotes to remember:

📖 “The longer we have unhealthy habits, the more normal they will become to us.”

📖 “To steward the habits of your family is to steward the heart of your family.”

📖 “We are formed in the image of what we habitually gaze at.”

📖 “Conversation heals trauma.” -Such a simple statement, yet is so true. People pay a lot of money to TALK to someone about their problems, etc. How can I help cultivate healing conversations in my home? ❤️

📖 “May the habits of our family poke through the holes in life, so that the light of the Divine can shine in.”❣️

📖 “Do not control your children with your anger, rather shepherd and nurture with your love.”
Easy to say, harder to live. 💞

[Kara Hershenow · Rating 5 out of 5]

An awesome read. I laughed, I felt encouraged, challenged, convicted, and inspired to change habits. Most of all so relatable and practical. I’ll be buying a personal copy to reference often!

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

“It is always the smallest routines that build the strongest foundations.”

“The normal is what shapes us most, though we notice it least. It is precisely the unremarkable nature of that normal that gives such remarkable power. All of our unspoken values get hidden under the invisibility clock of the ordinary.”

Highly recommend this!!

[Jordan Shirkman · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’re a Christian parent, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Earley writes from the position of a fellow practitioner, not an expert, and he humbly shared his failures as well as his successes. This book is incredibly practical and provides lots of ideas to get help you get started on creating healthy rhythms for your family. I’ve already put things into practice and I’m excited to continue shaping my family’s habits to help shape all of us into the people God made us to be.

[Sophie Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

A billion stars.

The best parenting book I’ve read. Will return to this often.