Reasons and Moral Reasoning
Something we've tried to do with our kids since birth, or at least since they started to be old enough to understand words, is to explain the reasons why they should or shouldn't do certain things. In some cases it's simple — "If you poke this fork into this power socket you could get a shock" — but in other cases it's more complicated — "if you say 'please' and 'thank you' you're being considerate to people and making society work better".
We got this idea from a parenting course we took based on Gary Ezzo's ideas. We don't agree with Ezzo in all points, and know some of his prescriptions are controversial, but the idea of explaining our own reasoning — for both the things we ask the kids to do and for our own actions — just made sense to us.
If you control the child's behaviour through authoritarianism and rigid rules, then when you're not around all the child has as a moral compass is fear and the memory of the rules. That will tend to result in a person who either rejects the rules or remains stuck within them - neither is a fully developed human being, capable of original moral choices based in principle.
We do believe people are almost infinitely resilient and changeable, though — just because you were parented that way doesn't doom you, it just means you might have more work to do in developing your own framework later.
On the other hand, if you're able to clearly explain the reasons behind your own actions (and that means you need to be consistent in your own actions with the same principles you apply to the child — though perfection is not required), the deep moral principles from which those actions are derived, and the process of moral reasoning by which you arrived at particular courses of action, you're equipping the child with the tools s/he will need.
So, as one example, the reason why children shouldn't run in the shopping mall is not because they might embarrass their parents, or because it's not allowed, but because they might crash into an older person and hurt them, or hit someone who's carrying something fragile, or just annoy the other shoppers. The simple issue of running is an example of the much deeper principle of consideration and thinking about potential consequences of our actions for others.
We also found reasonably often that we couldn't articulate a principled reason for something we asked the kids to do. In that case, maybe we were being arbitrary ("because I'm the Dad and I said so!"), and it was valuable to think about whether that was something we really wanted to insist on, or whether maybe we needed to think again.
Principles tend to be caught more than taught anyway: using this kind of explicit parenting while personally enacting different values in your own life won't work. But thinking about the underlying principles, and articulating those for your kids, is a great way of helping them grow into autonomous moral thinkers.
We got this idea from a parenting course we took based on Gary Ezzo's ideas. We don't agree with Ezzo in all points, and know some of his prescriptions are controversial, but the idea of explaining our own reasoning — for both the things we ask the kids to do and for our own actions — just made sense to us.
If you control the child's behaviour through authoritarianism and rigid rules, then when you're not around all the child has as a moral compass is fear and the memory of the rules. That will tend to result in a person who either rejects the rules or remains stuck within them - neither is a fully developed human being, capable of original moral choices based in principle.
We do believe people are almost infinitely resilient and changeable, though — just because you were parented that way doesn't doom you, it just means you might have more work to do in developing your own framework later.
On the other hand, if you're able to clearly explain the reasons behind your own actions (and that means you need to be consistent in your own actions with the same principles you apply to the child — though perfection is not required), the deep moral principles from which those actions are derived, and the process of moral reasoning by which you arrived at particular courses of action, you're equipping the child with the tools s/he will need.
So, as one example, the reason why children shouldn't run in the shopping mall is not because they might embarrass their parents, or because it's not allowed, but because they might crash into an older person and hurt them, or hit someone who's carrying something fragile, or just annoy the other shoppers. The simple issue of running is an example of the much deeper principle of consideration and thinking about potential consequences of our actions for others.
We also found reasonably often that we couldn't articulate a principled reason for something we asked the kids to do. In that case, maybe we were being arbitrary ("because I'm the Dad and I said so!"), and it was valuable to think about whether that was something we really wanted to insist on, or whether maybe we needed to think again.
Principles tend to be caught more than taught anyway: using this kind of explicit parenting while personally enacting different values in your own life won't work. But thinking about the underlying principles, and articulating those for your kids, is a great way of helping them grow into autonomous moral thinkers.
posted by Bravus at 5:44 PM
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