Good Kids, Tough Choices E-Book

Rushworth M. Kidder

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 384

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

A practical analysis and inspiring guide for teaching kids"ethical fitness" Parents are beginning to realize that deficiencies in ethics andcharacter are becoming a big problem among our nation's children.According to the latest data, lying, cheating, and rampantinsensitivity to other people are increasingly common. What canparents do? In this book, ethics expert Rushworth Kidder shows howto customize interventions to a child's age and temperament. Heencourages parents not to give up, since what they do can alwaysmake a difference, regardless of how long or deep the bad habits ofdishonesty may be. * Encourages parents to intervene early and re-establish childrenon the right course * Explores the keys to ethical behavior: honesty, responsibility,respect, fairness, and compassion All of Kidder's practical advice is based on the latestpsychological and neuroscientific research about how kids developcharacter and learn what's right and wrong.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Also by Rushworth M. Kidder

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

How to Use This Book

What If I Face Ethical Dilemmas of My Own?

Chapter 1 - Raising Kids in Today’s Moral Environment

What the Research Tells Us

Why Parents Make a Difference

Chapter 2 - Birth Through Age Four

Branson and the Gold Coins

Teaching Responsibility

Playing According to Your Own Rules

Loren Wrecks the Train

Chapter 3 - Ages Five Through Nine

Teaching Thrift in an Age of Opulence

Teaching Ethics Through Principles

Ethics and Peer Pressure

Chapter 4 - Ages Ten Through Fourteen

Resolving Ethical Dilemmas

Zero Tolerance

Avoiding Bystander Apathy

Showing Moral Courage

Chapter 5 - Ages Fifteen Through Eighteen

Finding the Third Way

A Sexual Crisis

Caught Stealing

Confronting Parental Weakness

Explaining Divorce

Chapter 6 - Ages Nineteen Through Twenty-Three

Counseling, Not Controlling

Supporting Your Daughter or Saving Your Grandchildren

The Difference Between Courage and Stubbornness

Chapter 7 - Conclusion

How Emotion and Morality Interact

Using the Moral Toolkit

Top Ten Tips for Ethical Parenting

Notes

Glossary

Further Reading

About the Author

Questions for Discussion

Index

Also by Rushworth M. Kidder

The Ethics Recession: Reflections on the Moral Underpinnings of the Current Economic Crisis

Moral Courage: Taking Action When Your Values Are Put to the Test

How Good People Make Tough Choices: Resolving the Dilemmas of Ethical Living

Shared Values for a Troubled World: Conversations with Men and Women of Conscience

Heartland Ethics: Voices from the American Midwest (editor)

In the Backyards of Our Lives

Reinventing the Future: Global Goals for the 21st Century

An Agenda for the 21st Century

E. E. Cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry

Dylan Thomas: The Country of the Spirit

Copyright © 2010 by Institute for Global Ethics. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kidder, Rushworth M.

Good kids, tough choices : how parents can help their children do the right thing / Rushworth M. Kidder. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-54762-5 (pbk.); ISBN 978-0-470-87551-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-0-470-87552-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-0-470-87553-7 (ebk)

1. Parenting. 2. Child psychology. 3. Parent and child. 4. Child rearing. 5. Decision making-Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title.

HQ755.8.K53 2010

649’.64—dc22

2010021304

For my wife and daughters, the ever-fixéd marks

Acknowledgments

This book was launched by a comment from a wise and wonderful philanthropist in California, Louise Greeley. “Why don’t you do a book on ethics for parents?” she said to me one day.

Through a lifetime of promoting important causes, she’d come to understand that our collective global future lies in raising children of integrity. She was familiar with the conceptual frameworks we had developed at the Institute for Global Ethics around shared values, ethical decisions, and moral courage. But she’d also observed that many parents, facing ethical issues with their children and not knowing what to say, either come at their kids with moral sledgehammers or tiptoe past on eggshells. She saw the need for helping parents teach their children what she called the “habits of obedience” to moral principles, through which kids learn how to work their way courageously through life’s toughest decisions.

When it came time to convene workshops and interview parents to gather information for this book, we received further significant support from the Isabel Foundation in Flint, Michigan, and from Betty Barker, a dedicated member of the Institute for Global Ethics’ board of directors. We’ve also had strong financial support from other institute members, including John and Zemula Fleming, Larry Mills, Helmer Ekstrom, Jayne I. Hanlin, Jennifer B. Dyck, Judith A. Stauder, and Nancy Farmer-Martin.

This work would never have taken shape without the dedication and hard work of Polly Jones, my executive assistant at the institute, and Lynda Sleight, who devoted months to finding and interviewing the parents whose real-life narratives form the backbone of this book. My colleagues at the Institute all had a hand in shaping and sustaining this work as well, including Graham Phaup, Marty Taylor, Paula Mirk, Sheila Bloom, Marilyn Gondek, Amber Kruk, Linda Leach, Marie Demmons, Andrea Curtis, and Pat Smith. In addition, I owe great thanks to my literary agent, Rafe Sagalyn, whose clarity helped shape the initial outline, and to my editors at Jossey-Bass, Alan Rinzler and Nana K. Twumasi, who gently brought the book to its final form.

But no one has had more to do with this book, word by word, than my wife, Liz. In ways large and small, her influence has been pervasive, from decades of conversations about ethics and parenting to scores of comments penciled in the margins of manuscripts. Finally, I could never have written it without the experience of being a parent to our two extraordinary daughters. From these three family members, I continue to learn the real meaning of ethics, and it is to them that I dedicate this book.

Lincolnville, MaineJune 2010

Introduction: Three Lenses for Ethical Parenting

What do parents really want for their kids? Call it character, integrity, virtue, morality, or ethics—whatever term you use, it comes down to living a values-based life. Yes, parents want children who are bright and intelligent, who find success and achievement, who are content with themselves and happy with others. But in a deep and essential way, parents long to raise good kids. In other words, they want children who know how to do three things: live by sound guidelines, arrive at wise decisions, and have the courage of their convictions. Put another way, they want children capable of knowing what’s right, making tough choices, and standing for conscience.

This book is about these three things. We call them lenses—ways of looking at the world to magnify the goodness, spot the pitfalls, and show the way forward. The first of these concepts—knowing what’s right—helps you and your children focus on the five shared moral values that are common to cultures around the world: honesty, responsibility, respect, fairness, and compassion. Turn this lens around, and it defines unethical behavior. What’s unethical is whatever is dishonest, irresponsible, disrespectful, unfair, or lacking in compassion. As a parent, what do you do when your small-framed thirteen year old tells you his best friend’s mom took the two of them to the movies, told the box office he was eleven, and bought him a twelve-and-under child’s ticket? To him, she was being irresponsible, even dishonest. But she may have seen it as thrifty, even clever. What should he do the next time that happens? In a world that’s losing the ability to choose right over wrong, the knowing-what’s-right lens is an essential tool.

But what happens when two deeply held values come into conflict with each other? The second lens, making tough choices, helps you see that the world’s hardest calls are about right versus right, not right versus wrong. What do you do when loyalty pulls you one way but truth telling pulls you another, or when what’s good for your child is bad for the group? How do you respond when justice comes down on one side and mercy on the other, or when short-term needs are pitted against long-term requirements? Our toughest dilemmas arise when these four patterns emerge. In our shorthand, we call them paradigms and label them as truth versus loyalty, individual versus community, justice versus mercy, and short term versus long term. Suppose your daughter, who stars on her high school basketball team, assures you she’s kept up with her homework despite frequent long road trips. But the day of the play-offs, just as she’s leaving home for the game, a letter arrives from the school saying she’s failing all her courses. You want to confront her this instant—although that could wreck the game for everyone. Your wife urges you to wait until later, even though that might diminish the seriousness of the matter in your daughter’s eyes. In this short-term-versus-long-term dilemma, what do you do when you and your wife are each right but you can’t do both things at once? The making-tough-choices lens gives you and your children a framework for addressing life’s difficult decisions.

There will be times, however, when the choice is crystal clear but nobody dares to carry it out. The third lens, standing for conscience, illuminates the moral courage you need in order to take action when your values are put to the test. Moral courage lets you face down the challenges arising from fear, cowardice, or ambiguity. It helps you overcome a desire to flee, duck, waffle, or appease. It gives you the confidence to confront and stand firm. How do you counsel your spindly eight-year-old musician after he’s seen a popular class athlete cheating on a test where a high score would disadvantage others in the class? Somebody needs to speak up to the teacher—but should your son be the one to do it? Given the dangers, will he dare? Given what’s at stake, however, how can he not? The standing-for-conscience lens gives you a way to talk to your children about their own bravery, conviction, and resolve.

This book gives you a crisp, practical framework for using these lenses to build what we at the Institute for Global Ethics have branded as Ethical Fitness®—a term so unique and compelling that we’ve registered it. Like physical fitness, ethical fitness is not an inoculation or a one-off immersion. It’s a process that doesn’t happen all at once. It grows gradually, gets you in shape, and lets you respond more easily to the tough climbs. And then, like physical fitness, it disappears if you don’t persist. Ethical fitness didn’t arise solely for this book. I have developed it in two of my previous books, and it has been tested in the crucible of tough decision making through two decades of work at the Institute for Global Ethics. We’ve hammered it out with tens of thousands of participants in corporations, schools, nonprofits, military organizations, and government agencies in the United States and overseas. We’re now taking these well-seasoned ideas to one of the most important audiences we’ll ever reach: parents, who, more than any other group, will determine the ethical fitness of the coming generation.

How to Use This Book

This book applies these three lenses of values, decisions, and courage to scores of real-life stories that parents have told us in interviews over the past several years. There’s nothing inflated, abstract, or glamorized about these stories. Unlike some scenarios used in ethics classrooms, these narratives are personal and authentic. They don’t pose agonizing choices about whether to switch a trolley that’s about to kill five people onto a side track where it will only kill one, or which person to toss out of a sinking lifeboat so the rest will survive, or whether to take multiple organs from one child so that four others can live. Such stories leave the impression that ethical dilemmas are catastrophic events totally apart from ordinary life. Frankly we’ve never met a single parent or child who has faced such a dilemma, so we don’t use them here. Given a choice of having readers say, “That’s a sensational story!” or, “That’s exactly what’s happened to me!” we unhesitatingly choose the latter.

This book, then, is about the common challenges that parents face in the daily, hourly, practical work of raising good kids. It focuses on the interface where parents and children personally encounter ethical challenges and have to find their way through. That’s why we avoid sound-bite ethics—those condensations that try to compress wrenching dilemmas into two sentences. Although a few summaries appear in the book, the chapters center on extended narratives because that’s how we heard these stories in our interviews. Moral judgments are often shaped by details, and we’ve learned in our workshops that bare-bones summaries invite snap judgments that misrepresent the way parents really work through dilemmas with their kids. In fact, but for space limitations, we’d provide novel-length treatments of each story, so that readers could get to know these characters in something like the way these characters know each other in real life.

In presenting these stories, we have generally changed names to protect the privacy of the families they describe. Unless otherwise noted, however, the words in quotation marks are exactly as we heard them from our sources. Many of these stories were initially told to my research assistant, Lynda Sleight, who, tape recorder in hand, vigorously sought out parenting stories. Others came to us during seminars or in interviews I conducted. Although our interviews spanned a range of religions and races, they all took place within the United States. We have no doubt that many of our findings have global applications, but because parenting reflects and draws from the culture in which it happens, it seemed best to leave international examples for future books.

In an effort to make this a thoroughly useful book, the five central chapters are organized by age, from birth through age twenty-three. But they’re also arranged more loosely around our three lenses of knowing what’s right, making tough choices, and standing for conscience. Since these ideas seem to come to light progressively as children develop, the chapters begin with a tight focus on core values (lens 1), move into decision making in the middle years (lens 2), and shift to considerations of moral courage (lens 3) in the older age groups. But since the chapters are collections of stories and since human stories are vigorous, unruly things that don’t conform neatly to such packages, quite often all three lenses appear in a single narrative, for which we make no apologies. Nor do we apologize for occasionally reexplaining our frameworks in succeeding chapters. We suspect many parents who pick up this book will have an age-specific interest and will plunge into a particular chapter without reading the preceding material. That’s fine. For their sake, we’ve added a glossary at the end to help them grasp the ethical constructs we’re using. But it does mean that those who read straight through may notice some modest and pardonable (we hope) repetition.

The first of these central chapters, spanning birth through age four (Chapter Two), is largely focused on the first lens. Here, the need for the very youngest children to master the core values and begin to distinguish right from wrong is paramount. By ages five through nine (Chapter Three), children who are still absorbing the values are also beginning to sense the need for our second lens: making tough choices. By ages ten through fourteen (Chapter Four), the decision-making processes are in full ascendency, but moral courage (our third lens) is also peeking around the corner. By ages fifteen through eighteen (Chapter Five), children become increasingly independent actors, and moral courage and decision making become the major focus.

While a book on parenting could be excused for stopping at age eighteen, we’ve added a chapter focused on young adults, ages nineteen through twenty-three (Chapter Six). That’s because, at this age, our second and third lenses of ethical reasoning and moral courage are continuing to develop strongly—and not a moment too soon! As these young adults have moved on from adolescence, they have suddenly found that they can legally drive, vote, drink, enlist, and form intimate relationships with the opposite sex. Some are moving from the structured high school years to the more organic openness of university life, while others are shifting from the casual commitments of part-time work to the responsibilities of full-time employment. These changes raise significant new ethical challenges—many of which happen while surprising numbers of these young adults are still living under the parental roof or have returned home for economic reasons.

What If I Face Ethical Dilemmas of My Own?

Coping with these changes raises moral dilemmas for parents as well as for their children. One constant throughout these chapters, in fact, is the concern parents expressed about the ethical challenges they themselves encounter. To be sure, a lot of ethical parenting focuses on dilemmas that their children face. But parents are also thrust into moral conundrums of their own—for no other reason than that they happen to be parents. One interviewee told me how she wrestled over whether to hire a wonderful nanny who insisted on being paid only in cash, off the books, to avoid taxes—a parenting dilemma that happened before she was even a parent! At the other end of the scale, we’ve included in Chapter Six a harrowing tale from a woman who faced ongoing ethical challenges even after her daughter finally left home for good in her early thirties.

But perhaps what most unites these chapters is a refrain we kept hearing from the parents we interviewed: doubt. When it comes to helping children grasp core values, make ethical decisions, and develop character-building courage, parents today are often spooked. They don’t feel they know what to say without sounding preachy, or old-fashioned, or simply naive. Too often they end up saying nothing. That’s not only a shame, it’s unnecessary. As we listened to scores of parents telling us their tales, we were surprised and delighted by the principled, well-reasoned, and even daring ethical approaches they took. Parents need encouragement, frameworks, and vocabularies for discussion, all of which this book seeks to provide. And their looming, troubling question—“Am I really a good parent?”—needs to be rephrased into a more practical and useful query: “How can I become a better parent?” In the realm of ethics—take it from us—today’s parents generally have a lot to build on. They aren’t starting at square one. At the very least, they want to raise children of character, and they’re committed to doing so if they possibly can. As in any other field of human endeavor, however, ethical parenting encourages us to build confidence through persistent effort within systematic frameworks. To do that, parents need to know something about the social and moral environment their children are facing. That’s why we begin the book by looking at three significant pieces of research—about lying preschoolers, media-marinated teens, and college kids wearing fake sunglasses—that help us understand today’s parent-child landscape.

1

Raising Kids in Today’s Moral Environment

In a small room at a university research center in Kingston, Ontario, a three year old sits quietly in a tiny chair. Above her, hidden in the ceiling, is a video camera. Behind her, out of view, stand a small table and a larger chair. On the table are a few objects covered by a cloth. She’s there, so she’s been told, to play a game with an adult where she guesses the names of toys by identifying the sounds they make. If she guesses right, she wins a prize.

As the game begins, the adult—actually a trained experimenter—sits on the chair behind the girl and takes a toy from under the cloth, careful to keep it hidden from the child’s eyes. If we’d been a fly on the wall, we might have heard a conversation and seen a sequence of events that went something like this: