Teaching Your Children Values by Linda and Richard Eyre. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1993. 256pp. $11.
Whether we like it or not, it’s difficult to separate religion and morals. Our culture has evolved with a strong religious component, providing earlier generations with the advantage of clear-cut guidelines for moral behavior. Yet somehow, religion in this age of information technology has been marginalized to the point where we seem to have lost our collective faith in a higher moral authority. This leaves us waffling, clamoring or avoiding what may be our kids’ real needs to have some firm guidelines.
Meanwhile, mass media bombards us with an ever-expanding array of conflicting moral and religious viewpoints. So we have wider access to diverse attitudes and beliefs, but perhaps fewer emotional/psychological resources with which to process them. Overwhelmed, our confusion contributes to a tendency to present our kids with LESS rather than MORE moral education and spiritual direction.
This has played out in my own life through my discovery that I tend to teach values retroactively. When I witness undesirable behavior or begin to see an unnerving pattern in my children, THAT is my cue to act. And then I employ a hit-and-run approach: I see the inappropriate behavior, I jump on it, and then wash my hands of it. Admittedly, this method tackles problems at what is potentially the least productive moment: when I’m angry, and my kids are defensive. I’m mad about the behavior but perhaps more importantly, I’m mad at myself for not taking notice or action earlier. Or perhaps more to the point, for failing to address the bigger issues underlying the behavior.
Teaching Your Children Values is proactive, practical and useful in its approach to moral development. It offers no theory (which I found to be a relief, actually), but it does offer games, awards, and questions and answer discussion to teach values to preschoolers, school-age kids and teenagers. Richard and Linda Eyre have focused on values that they believe most parents can agree on: honesty, courage, “peaceability”, self-reliance and potential, self-discipline and moderation, fidelity and chastity, loyalty and dependability, respect, love, unselfishness and sensitivity, kindness and friendliness, and justice and mercy. The book is broken down into twelve values – one for every month of the year, a strategy that seems to break an enormous task down into manageable components.
An accomplished musician, Linda was named one of America’s outstanding young women by the National Council of Women. Richard has served as Director of the White House Conference on Children and Parents and is active in politics in Utah. They co-host their own radio and TV programs dedicated to better parenting. They live in Salt Lake City with their nine children.
The book’s straightforward approach was refreshing, since it feels like such a challenge to get past the high brow, heavy-handed moral road to the basic tools of getting my kids to absorb and act upon what I think I want to teach them.
This book is not the stuff of straight cover-to-cover reading. Taken that way, it’s deadly boring. Its merit lies in its use as a reference. If your children are very young and you’re really just starting to think about how to impart values, it suggests methods for incorporating ethics into everyday life to build in the lessons. More importantly, if you, like me, don’t have a ready approach to the gray areas of life, you can start by using it as a tool for clarifying YOUR moral code, revisiting the values you were raised with and affirming which to keep, and which to reject.
For all its obvious worth, the disadvantage of the weighty spirituality of earlier generations was its rigidity. While our generation suffers from ambivalence foreign to our ancestors, we do have room for flexibility, room for honesty, room for doubt. We have the exciting (and daunting, no doubt) opportunity to choose our own course, and involve our kids in the process.
This book is an invaluable tool in this. Sufficiently inspiring, in fact, to enable me to overlook the authors’ tendency to present a slightly too-perfect, oversimplified picture of moral parenting, as well as my personal disagreement with their over-reliance on rewards for appropriate behavior.