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Your Child Could Be Armed and Dangerous |
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Written by Rabbi Irwin Katsoff
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“Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind.”
--Jonathan Sacks
Your Child Could Be Armed and Dangerous!
What would you do if you discovered that your child is carrying a weapon to school? Every child carries a weapon to school: his or her words. Here’s the kind of damage your child can inflict with that weapon:
- Calling names
- Making fun of others
- Gossiping
- Shunning
- Criticizing
Every school day millions of American children come home wounded, sometimes for life. How can you teach your child to refrain from hurting other children with words?
- Educate yourself. Take time to give serious thought to your own values. Systematize them. Then devise a program for passing them on to your children. A book such as Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues that Teach Kids to Do the Right Thing by Michele Borba, or To Kindle a Soul by Lawrence Kelemen takes your kids’ moral education out of the realm of free-floating and invests it with the seriousness it deserves.
- Spend one-on-one time with each child. Numerous studies correlate a person’s level of morality with the amount of individualized time his parents spent with him during his childhood years. For instance, studies by John Gottman of the University of Washington found that parents who are most successful in developing the characteristic of empathy in their children are those who are actively involved in their children’s lives and also emotionally available. Another study of women raised in Islington, England found that children raised by more responsive parents were twice as likely to have a positive self-image in their adult years. Since gossip and shunning are often the result of caving in to peer pressure, fostering your child’s strong self-image is the best way to equip her to say, “No, it’s wrong. I won’t do it.”
- Set the right example. If, when you child spills salad dressing all over the clean floor, you shout, “Slob!” how can you expect him not to call the overweight kid on the school bus, “Fatso!”? If your child hears you gossiping on the telephone, how can you expect her not to spread nasty rumors about other girls in her class? As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “What you do speaks so loud I can’t hear what you’re saying.”
All three of the above techniques require improving yourself before you can improve your child. So, it’s back to school for all of us!
Food For Thought
Data File: Acts of violence in the public schools have become all too common today. The Public Agenda for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found that 34% of teens at small schools (less than 500) and 46% of teens at larger schools (1500 or more) witness a "serious" fight at least once a month.
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