Consistency
It’s easy to post a list of core values on the refrigerator. It’s much more difficult for parents to be consistent. Consistency lets children know what to expect and what is expected of them. Of course, children will push boundaries but inconsistency from parents confuses children.
Community
Everyone involved in your child’s development are critical to modeling and upholding core values. Parents need to work with these important role models to foster the importance of doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, and for the right reasons.
Commitment
Parents need to commit to model and reinforce to their children the core values and character strengths that mean the most to them. They also need to be creative and offer meaningful experiences that illuminate how important these character strengths are to the family’s core values.
Conversations
We know “We need to talk” freaks kids out, but too often parents avoid having conversations about character, especially as children get older. While it may not be easy to talk sometimes, we know from the research that parents who avoid talking to their children about serious matters quickly lose trust and connection.
Celebration
Parents need to find ways for their children to be active participants in their own character growth. Optimal character development occurs when children begin to make self-motivated commitments to consistently practice a core value (e.g. “I want to be the kind of person who is always honest and shows up on time.”) Parents need to celebrate these moments to shape and define individual character.
Great thoughts! I also greatly appreciated your focus on Van Tongeren’s definition of humility as “going beyond yourself”. It reminded me that one of the most important lessons we can learn ourselves, and one of the most important lessons we can help young people to learn, is that some level of humility is required to truly be able to form relationships with others. We must set aside our own interests at times to truly be available to connect with others. Thanks for these great thoughts on humility!
At this point, it is difficult for me to imagine such a world, mostly because most people don’t understand the true nature of humility by any of its definitions. I am not sure whether most people see humility as a virtue. And of course, I might be mistaken.
One way of characterizing the current world is to notice the “me first” or “me only” tendencies of many people. In such a world, there is a kind of irony to think that one way to “glorify” another is to praise their humility.
Knowing, yes. Checking, yes. Going beyond, yes. That’s what the individual can do. It’s so much easier to “try out” humility, though, with some certainty that others will still be there for us. It is about community, isn’t it?