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.
I love this! My heart is for our students to love their schools, communities, states, and country. I believe that modeling and encouraging servanthood is key to motivating students to serve. Thank you for your heart for students. I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to learn from you at HOPE Institute yesterday and look forward to implementing them in my school.
One can understand why the younger generations are less likely to join the military or to express national pride. Setting aside the current embarrassing U.S. political divisions, I believe they can sense that more attention should have been given to peacebuilding over the years. They see extreme waste in building global fighting forces and advanced weaponry, particularly heading into the age of climate change, which was or should have been readily foreseeable. When one introduces the factor of big-money interests as a driving force for military spending, the existing state of the world becomes all too abhorrent to them. The State Department budget (for peacebuilding) is a tiny fraction of the Department of “Defense” budget (for envisioning and planning for war). Some have even said that the State Department is becoming an arm of the Defense Department. Where the greatest service is needed is younger generations calling out the failures of past generations and seeking to change things. They should be encouraged to do so.