Teaching Your Child Morals

Instilling good morals in children is the ABC of good education. Your job as a parent is to set the moral tone and standards for your household and teach your children to adhere to those standards. Here we will deal with how to instill moral behavior in your children.  

I am not going to discuss how to choose those standards.  That is a personal decision.  But you must decide on your standards, and once you have decided you have to know how to teach them to your children. 

I am going to draw upon a study that was done a number of years ago.  This study was done by a researcher named Jonathan Freeman.  I will explain the study first and then explain how it relates to you.   

Jonathan wanted to study how to teach children right and wrong.  He chose a group of twenty boys.  He brought each boy individually into a room with a bunch of toys.  Each time he would tell the boy that he had to go out and that the boy could play with any toy in the room except for one.   

There was a very expensive robot toy and by far the most exciting toy in the room.  He told the first group of boys that they were not to play with the robot and if they did, they would get severely punished.  He would state, You cannot touch that robot, and then would step out of the room.   

As he expected, most every child listened, except for one boy.  He told the second group almost the same thing.  He said not to touch the robot but he did not mention giving any punishment if they did touch the robot.  He said not to touch it because it was wrong to play with the robot.  He did not threaten punishment, nor did he promise rewards for it.  He then left the room.  Jonathan had about nineteen out of twenty boys that did not touch the robot. 

But an interesting thing happened about six weeks later.  In an apparently unrelated test, he sent in a different researcher, a woman, and gave the boys what they thought was a drawing test.  They drew pictures of something and each boy was told that the tests would be graded now and that they should go to the other room and play with a toy until the grading was done.   

Since a different researcher, a woman, was involved the boys did not know there was any connection.  Out of the first group that Jonathan told would receive severe punishment for playing with the robot, almost eighty percent of the boys played with the robot.   

Out of the second group, who were told please not to play with the robot, only a third of the boys played with the robot.  With the first group, once the threat of punishment was gone there was no reason to contain the behavior.  

However, when the second group was told it was wrong and no punishment was given, a large percentage of these boys realized that doing this behavior was wrong and incorporated into their view of the world.   

They took responsibility and took that moral value upon themselves.  What this means to you is that if you do not want your child to lie, or steal, by saying If I catch you lying I am going to give you a severe punishment or if I catch you stealing, I am going to spank you, you do not help him incorporate morals.  

In other words, if he sees that there is no threat of him being caught for stealing and lying he will not incorporate in his moral standards that lying and stealing is wrong.  But, if you say Brad, Cindy, stealing is wrong, please do not steal or lying is wrong – I will be very unhappy if you lie.  Since there is no serious threat, the child will still listen to you and will incorporate that behavior and make his own moral view.   

The explanation is this:  when you give a punishment, you focus on the punishment; when you just say, please do not do it because it is wrong, the focus is on what is wrong.  The child incorporates that concept of right and wrong into his daily life and his view of the world.    

This is one of the reasons why rewards and punishments, as they are currently used, are not very effective.  We will discuss how you use rewards properly in the future, but for now, they are not very useful.   

If you give a reward or punishment for compliance of a behavior, you are getting the child to focus on the reward or punishment and not to incorporate the immoral view of the world into his view of the world.  What you want to do is just say it is right or wrong and do the minimal amount of reward and punishment in order to get the child to listen and incorporate the behavior as his own.