To Parents

You saw mistakes your parents made while raising you. You told yourself you wouldn’t make the same ones with your children—you would do better. Now as you raise your children, you have those ideals firmly in your mind. You’re trying to be a better parent than your own parents. Maybe you are doing a good job of avoiding some of your parents’ mistakes. That is a great and admirable achievement. You’ll be satisfied with the improvements and one day your family may appreciate the things you’ve done, as well.

On the other hand, though, are you possibly making your own mistakes? It’s likely, since no one is perfect. No one has all the answers. An area of great importance, which seems often neglected in our day, is the area of moral values. Where do our children learn their values from? It is possible to get some idea by considering where you learned yours from. If your parents were very involved in your upbringing, teaching what they believed; regulating what you watched, whom you spent time with, where you hung out, and so on; and making you responsible for your own behavior; you probably got many of your values from them. But if your parents sort of let you do what you wanted, without a lot of moral guidance, then what? Where did you learn your moral values from? Most likely, you learned your values from the places where you spent the most time. Perhaps it was from friends, perhaps from T.V., or maybe from books. If you were involved in a church, perhaps you learned some values there.

It’s no different with your own children. What they spend the most time seeing and hearing will have the most impact. Where they go on the internet will affect them. What they see on T.V., what they hear on the radio, or what they read in books will affect them. Their friends’ attitudes and ideas will affect them. Their religious education will affect them. And hopefully, their parents’ good influence will affect them, if they are exposed to that enough.

Raising children without specific, directed moral guidance, is like tossing them into a storm and hoping they land in a great place.

Looking at the big picture, parents have a lot of responsibility to raise up the next generation. How parents raise their children will, in large measure, contribute good or bad to our nation and its people. With all the good organizations and programs meant to help adults make better lives, and with a justice system intended to deter bad behavior, it’s hard to say that it’s really working very well. A major problem is that much of our nation’s organized system for instilling moral values is aimed at adults. In other words, our system attempts to fix people who have developed years of baggage and bad habits, or even worse: toxic attitudes. These are hard to change.

According to medical practitioners, children establish much of their value system in the earliest years of their lives. This puts parents in the best position to guide a child’s path and development of moral values. Parents can be the main influence in a child’s life. But it takes work; it takes effort. It takes being conscious of what their children are exposed to and what they are learning from their experiences.

Perhaps it seems a little overwhelming to think of the results of raising your child in terms of how it will affect our nation. One more ingredient can help. Along with the things listed above that a parent contributes (work, effort, etc.) it also takes direction. Parents need a direction to guide their efforts. They need to know where they are heading. Otherwise, they will just pass on whatever seems to stand out at the time, perhaps with no overall goal in mind.

I see great hope for parents and our nation if we adopt three foundational values and teach them to our children (please see The Change We Need). I hope to provide parents information and tools to guide them toward a better child-raising experience that will build a stronger nation through a solid moral foundation. It will take time, perhaps several generations, to improve our nation. But parents may see something better in the near future as their children adopt these values and live accordingly.

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Each post on this blog will relate to one or more of the three foundational values. These posts may expose false information in our culture or they may point out more specific issues to consider. The range of what I might discuss is quite broad, but it will always relate in some way to these values. What I post here will mostly be intended to inform and educate the person reading, rather than giving specific steps or methods to teach children. The idea here is that parents will be more effective at instilling these values, if they adopt them first as their own. Then they can choose their own ways of passing them on to their children.