Text 23 raising a g-rated child in an X-rated world1

The Los Angeles-based Josephson Institute of Ethics found in a national survey that 33 percent of high-school students had shoplifted in the previous 12 months and 61 percent had cheated on an exam.

In Cambridge, Mass., after a 15-year-old was arraigned for murder, his friends cried not for the victim but for the high bail the judge had set. Students told reporters they didn’t understand “what the big deal was all about" and that “people die every day.” One student said, “Ethics in today's society? What a joke!”

Clearly puzzled, a Boston College student went up to education professor William Kilpatrick during an exam. Pointing to a question about sex education, she asked, “What's abstinence?” Kilpatrick replied, “Just substitute the word chastity.” The student paused, then asked, “What’s chastity?” Amazed, Kilpatrick discovered the next semester that half his class didn’t know what chastity meant.

At times it seems that we are raising what Kilpatrick calls a nation of “moral illiterates.” Plainly, our modern culture comes up short on moral instruction. As former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett puts it, “For a long time, most of us knew and agreed on the answers to questions children have: ‘Why shouldn’t I smoke dope? Why shouldn’t I have sex?’ But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we became afflicted with cultural doubt. Too many adults forgot the right answers.”

A growing number of parents, however, are fighting back. They are determined to teach their children such moral values as honesty, courage and self-control. In the face of what can seem like insurmountable odds, they are showing how it is possible to raise a G-rated child in our X-rated world. Here are seven parent-tested solutions that work:

1. Tell your children what you value. When we want to teach a kid to play football, we toss a pigskin around. But when it comes to teaching morality, many parents believe that if they love their children and treat them kindly, the kids will know how to behave. Unfortunately, with so many immoral messages floating around, you can't assume your child will live by your values.

One Los Angeles father recalls sadly that when his daughter went to college, her attitudes toward premarital sex changed overnight. “She started sleeping with one young man after another,” he says. “My wife and I had talked to her about AIDS, but not about sexual morals. We thought she knew where we stood.”

Richard and Linda Eyre of Salt Lake City are the authors of Teaching Your Children Values. When the first three of their nine children were toddlers, the Eyres started their own at-home “values school.” Each month, using games, stories and traditions, they teach a different moral value. During honesty month, for example, they draw up an “Honesty Pact,” and the family vows always to tell one another the truth. When working on self-discipline, they bestow the W.B.P. (Work Before Play) Award. This paper “plaque” is given each week to the child who displays the most self-discipline — perhaps by finishing homework before playing with friends or by tidying his room before going out. Why reward a child for doing the right thing? “Because a prize — even a paper plaque — lasts longer than praise for young children and has a stronger effect,” explains Richard Eyre.

2. Give reasons for your rules. When our children were in grade school, I vowed that they would never choose drugs because they didn’t know the facts. I wrote the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information and requested booklets and pamphlets about the dangers of drugs.

In about a month, I received a giant carton of free publications on every drug from cocaine to pot. I put all the studies in an old blue suitcase; it must have weighed 100 pounds. I said to my kids, “All the reasons not to take drugs are right in this suitcase.” Then I read them some of the moST shocking findings. Years later my 19-year-old daughter, Erin, admitted that she'd been curious about drugs, but that the weighty suitcase full of hard facts had convinced her not to try them.

3. Focus on how the person feels. “When we empathize with people, we also have a strong impulse to help them when they’re in trouble,” explains child psychologist Michael Schulman, chairman of Columbia University’s Seminar in Moral Education. “One of the people who risked his life to save Jews during World War II was asked why he had done so. He replied, ‘When someone knocked at my door, the hand of compassion was faster than the calculus of reason’.”

Schulman relates the story of a 17-year-old from Bloomfield, N.J., who was fired in his second week on the job as a mechanic's assistant. When his mother asked why, the young man replied, “They told this guy they’d fixed his car. I knew they hadn’t — so I told him so. All they did was adjust the carburetor to make it sound better.” He knew the man was planning to drive to Canada with his family and pictured them stuck in the middle of nowhere, their vacation ruined. “I couldn’t let that happen,” he said.

Schulman attributes the teen’s hon­esty to his ability to put himself in the other guy’s shoes — to empathize. “To teach your child to empathize, use the word feel often,” Schulman adds. “Ask, ‘How do you think your brother feels when you call him names?’ Discuss how victims of prejudice must feel and help your child to be sensitive to those feelings.”

4. Recognize the power of guilt. In our society, guilt has almost become a dirty word. Books have been written just to help people rid themselves of this supposedly neurotic feeling. But guilt is the nagging voice of conscience. When your child does something wrong, don't rush to bolster his self-esteem and make him feel better about himself; let him feel guilty awhile. As June Tangney, an associate professor of psychology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., puts it, “It isn't always bad to feel bad.”

In Bringing Up a Moral Child, Schulman recounts the case of a seventh-grader from Brooklyn, N.Y., who stole an unattended handbag from a library table. She was delighted with her booty — $17 in cash, a pen and a bottle of perfume. But guilt slowly overtook her and she started to cry. Realizing how sad the other girl must feel over the theft, she found the owner's name and address on an identification card and returned the bag with all its contents. “Even if a child gives in to temptation,” says Schulman, “the pain of a guilty conscience can motivate her to make amends.”

“A child who feels guilty, feels bad about a specific behavior and is more likely to apologize and somehow set things right,” says Tangney. She adds, however, that you should avoid making your child feel bad about herself. That child may either withdraw in depression or lash out in anger. Focus on the child’s behavior by saying, “That was a bad thing to do” (not “You’re a bad person”), suggests Tangney. Then offer ways for the child to fix what she did wrong. Afterward, praise the child (“You were very brave to admit you made a mistake”).

5. Encourage moral education in schools. To raise a moral child, you may have to transform your local school. Many concerned parents are urging their schools to initiate “character education” classes, which teach core virtues — as opposed to “values clarification” classes, started in the 1960s, which discourage the teaching of objective standards. “The up-to-date way to carry on the destruction of traditional values,” writes Thomas Sowell, “is to claim to be solving some social problems like drugs, AIDS or teenage pregnancy. Only those few people who have the time to research what is actually being done in “drug education”, “sex education”, or “death education” courses know what an utter fraud these labels are. For these are courses about how wrong are outmoded notions, about how your parents’ ideas are no guide for you, and about how each person must start from scratch to develop his or her own way of behaving.”

A number of groups, such as the Character Education Institute in San Antonio and the Jefferson Center for Character Education in Pasadena, Calif., offer the support and materials you might need to get a character-education program started. You can also recommend that your child's school use a sex-education program that promotes abstinence. Mary Kelto urged her school district in Ishpeming, Mich., to institute one such program developed by Teen-Aid of Spokane, Wash. She even helped raise the $6000 needed to fund it. Asked what the program had done for her, one seventh-grade girl said, “I learned that you don't have to have sex to be in a good relationship. There are many ways to say no, and if the boy doesn’t respect that, then he doesn’t love you. Abstinence is the way until marriage.”

6. Tell stories about heroes. “Children need heroes just as they need food,” says Kilpatrick. “Yet too often kids have only junk-food heroes, noted not for virtue but for money or fame.” Fortunately, real heroes still exist in folk tales, biographies and children's classics — from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit to Sterling North’s Abe Lincoln: Log Cabin to White House. Such stories inspire kids to discover strengths they didn't know they had.

One ten-year-old boy was suffering from cancer. As the chemotherapy treatments wore on, his usually high spirits waned. Then one day the boy chanced upon a story about the trials of Hercules. Inspired, he was able to continue his cancer treatments with renewed hope and courage.

Consider reading to your child from William Bennett's Book of Virtues. This is a treasury of great moral stories, poems and essays every child should know — from the Biblical story of David and Goliath (showing courage) to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (inspiring perseverance).

7. Let your life be your message. Finally, when it comes to teaching moral behavior, realize it’s not what you say but what you do that counts the most. The negative side of this is illustrated by the adage “The footsteps a child follows are most likely the ones his parents thought they had covered up.”

Positive role-modeling, on the other hand, can bring big rewards. Every year, Kristen Belanger of Woodbury, Conn., watched her parents give Thanksgiving dinners to unfortunate families. In fifth grade, Kristen organized a fund-raiser for a local soup kitchen that netted $750. In an age when so many kids are thinking only of themselves, how did Kristen become a Good Samaritan? “I watched my parents,” she says simply. Last year Kristen won Chesebrough-Pond’s/ Faberge National Hero Award given to benefit Big Brothers/ Big Sisters of America.

“Children can come to believe that when they live up to moral standards, they are leading the best life a human being can lead,” Schulman reminds us. “Then, living up to their moral codes will give them a sense of pride in themselves that isn’t dependent on rewards from anyone else.”

Raising a moral child in today's topsy-turvy world requires its own kind of courage. But it is imperative that we each accept the challenge — and the responsibility.

(by Sue Browder, http://www.rd.com)