Teaching Values Takes Time

Values

Most parents believe it’s important to instill such values as respect, kindness, honesty and compassion in their children because it lays the foundation for them to be good people and citizens. Teaching values takes time, however, something many parents today don’t have.

“Our increasingly competitive economy is creating an environment where Mom and Dad are spending longer hours at work and fewer hours with their children,” says Gary Hill, Ph.D., director of Clinical Services at The Family Institute at Northwestern University, in an article for Good News Magazine.

In addition, outside influences like peer pressure, the Internet, TV, movies, video games and music are also affecting children by shaping their perspectives of the world around them. To tackle these forces, Hill says parents need to make time to be with their children and, more importantly, make the time count.

“Talk with them about what’s right and wrong, and what constitutes good behavior and what doesn’t,” he says, adding that having these conversations on a regular basis makes talking about values a normal thing in your household. They’ll be more comfortable opening up to you about moral conundrums, rather than with their peers. If you don’t address these issues with your kids, society will fill in the void, says Hill.

When teaching your children the importance of having values, one of the most important things you can do is set a good example. They learn from seeing how you treat them, overhearing your interactions with others, and observing what you do in different situations throughout the day. All the teaching in the world can be undone if your children watch you behave in ways that contradict what you’ve said.

“If there’s a discrepancy between what you say and what you do, your kids are just going to ignore what you told them. But if your actions are consistent with your words, then your message is reinforced,” Hill says.

While instilling values in your children is important, developing their moral code is equally, if not more, important.

Child and family psychologist Richard Weissbourd, who is also on the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and School of Education, says teaching children values is the easy part. Having them live them out day-to-day can be the challenge.

“Children don’t need us to define the goal. That’s easy,” he says in an article with Psychology Today. “To develop children’s morality, we need to focus, minimally, on five basic capacities.” They are:

Moral identity – We need to help children not only know values, but develop a deep commitment to them. By requiring children to help around the house, insisting they be respectful to us and others, and by talking to them about why values are important, we can weave values our child’s sense of self from an early age.

Managing destructive emotions – Often it is emotions, such as the fear of being a pariah or “loser,” that cause us to transgress. Developing children’s morality is about preventing children from suffering high levels of shame, envy, entitlement and other destructive emotions and helping children manage these feelings.

Moral reasoning – Another problem with simply teaching values is that children often face moral dilemmas, situations where values collide. Children need help developing moral reasoning, the capacity to sort through these moral dilemmas and problems. That means, in part, helping children take multiple perspectives and think about the precedents they are setting by their actions for their communities.

Key social and emotional competencies – Morality is also about having the skills need to treat people well every day, knowing how to help others without patronizing them, or how to give feedback constructively. Adults can guide children in developing these social and emotional skills.

The strength and maturity of the self – To stand up for important principles or to take responsibility for others may mean painful ostracism or other hardships. Cultivating children’s morality also means nurturing the strength and maturity of one’s self.

To read more about Instilling values add the Values and Ethics Issue to your MASK Library

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