THE GIFT OF FAMILY (13); RAISING MORAL CHILDREN

A group of six-year-olds are playing and one of the children falls, scrapes her knee and starts crying. One child offers a reassuring “I’m sorry you’re hurt” and shows a desire to comfort. On the other hand another child laughs and calls, the child “cry baby.”

The little illustration above is a common experience among children. It happens every time; most times we just laugh over such experiences and forget it afterwards. Truth be told, such reactions and responses tell a great deal about the kind of family (home) each child is coming from - whether it's a caring one or an uncaring one. Your children will only develop into caring adults or individuals if they have experienced same growing up.
Bringing up moral children is a way of saying, teach your children to live by the rules. If you want your children to go about treating others like you want others to treat them, then you have to teach them how to be able to think through an action before doing it and to judge how the consequences of that action will affect themselves and others; in this lies the basis of a moral person.

It’s in the family caring children are raised; parents are the child’s first morality teachers. Observations as well as countless studies show that infants are more likely to become moral children and adults if they experienced their parents doing same. The one quality that distinguishes these children from kids raised in a detached parenting style is sensitivity. Plant it in your children good morals and watch it sprout. Other virtues, such as self-control, compassion, and honesty and so on are by products. Here’s how to raise morally upright children.When children spend their early years with a morally upright parent or caregiver, they develop the inner sense of rightness, a sense of well-being. Being on the receiving end of this style of upbringing plants in the children - trust and eventually - good lasting morals. The children make these virtues part of themselves, and they actually growing living by these rules. They learn from the family that it is good to help and hold a person in need. They develop the capacity to care, the ability to feel how other people feel. They are able to consider how their actions affect other people.

This kind of behaviour becomes deeply ingrained in them; as a result, they develop a healthy sense of guilt, feeling appropriately wrong when they act wrong. To them, a lie is a breach of trust. When they derail, their well-being is disturbed, so they strive to preserve and restore this sense of moral balance. This kind of children will truly do the right things for others because others have done the right things for them.

The child who grows up with insensitivity becomes insensitive. He has no point of reference on how to act. Because there's no inner guidance system, their values are subject to change according to their whims. A major difference between morally upright children and children who aren't is their ability to feel remorse, to be bothered by how their actions affect others. Criminologists have noticed the most significant trait shared by morally upright and psychopathic adults is their inability to feel remorse and empathy, and thus take responsibility for their actions.