Conor Gallagher is the author of a new book for Catholic parents that proclaims blue-collar principles as a shortcut to raise children who persevere, with a willingness to do hard work and exhibit essential values of the Catholic faith. 

Gallagher is the author of several books, including the newly published Raising Blue-Collar Kids in a White-Collar World, which offers ways that Catholic parents can raise children with “grit and grace.”  

The CEO of TAN Books, a publisher of Catholic books and catechetical courses, built his new book upon his earlier book Well-Ordered Family.  

He told the Register via email that Catholics raised with “blue-collar principles” may do a variety of work, but they will all show perseverance and self-reliance.  

“Let’s face it, being an authentic Catholic is hard work. … If your kid is going to practice his faith as an adult, he must learn self-denial, hard work and perseverance. Let’s call it grit.” 

“Holy Mother Church needs gritty men and women who know how to suffer well,” he added. And this begins early in the child-rearing process by giving chores to children, enforcing technology restrictions, and being told, “No.”  

“A child who can endure is on his path to sanctity,” he explained. 

Raising Blue-Collar Kids by TAN Books presents some of the challenges faced by Catholic parents trying to raise Catholic kids. For example, it cites statistics indicating children aged 8 to 18 in the United States spent seven and a half hours in the digital sphere per day. In 2024, those aged 6 to 17 spent an average of one and a half to two hours per day on video games, and those between ages 3 and 16 spent only four minutes playing outside.  

Catholic parents’ concern about technology is only bolstered by findings, for example, by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles: that the first exposure among children to pornography comes at the age of 8. And 79% of men and 76% of women aged 18 to 30 report consuming pornography at least once per month.  

What is the best way to combat these devastating trends? 

Gallagher wrote that parents need to enforce family rules: “Create a culture of accountability. Have a chore chart. Have a digital policy. Have bedtime and rise time.” Teenagers, he wrote, “have no ‘right to privacy’ to their technology any more than a toddler should have a ‘right to privacy’ while playing with chemicals under the kitchen sink.”   

Giving children chores, Gallagher writes in his book, is a secret weapon for parental success. He cited findings that kids engaging in chores are more likely to develop life skills and show higher levels of success in adulthood. But even these miss the mark, he said, as to chores’ importance. He noted that Aristotle explained that virtue is developed as a habit of finding the mean between two extremes. “Chores,” he wrote, “help kids build the right habits. It is a muscle they flex for years at home, and this follows them into their careers.” 

Among the fruits of having a blue-collar spirit, he wrote in his email, is: “Humility. Blue-collar has a built-in humble aspect to it.” He also highlighted fortitude. 

On a societal level, Gallagher warns in his book (which is often blunt in its observations) that assessing colleges is key, positing that students at “elite” colleges are likely to lose their faith, “become pro-choice, graduate as a communist-leaning socialist, and adopt woke ideology. Highbrow education seems to have sucked common sense right out of multiple generations of Americans.” (See the Register’s annual “Catholic Identity College Guide” for quality college choices.) 

As he writes in his book, “a blue-collar spirit will help your child’s white-collar career more than anything.” 

Successful people, even if they have white-collar jobs, have blue-collar souls, he writes: “They never lost the drive to get their hands dirty, to work tirelessly toward something good — not for any lauds or rewards, but because they learned that hard work isn’t just a means to an end, but it can be the end in itself.”  

While many people know how to use tech and have college degrees, all too many lack the “grit to endure the struggles of daily life in a virtuous, charitable, and humble manner,” Gallagher observes, adding that the saintly person knows how to “suffer, endure trials and tribulations.” 

For Gallagher, blue-collar principles indeed have a spiritual dimension. In his email to the Register, he wrote that both he and wife Ashley have their individual prayer lives but also pray the Rosary with their family every evening. As he wrote, “Becoming virtuous is a tough job and self-denial is a prerequisite. Picking up one’s cross is pretty darn ‘blue-collar,’ right?”