What do you think? Are parenting trends hurting our children? Good parenting requires moral training.
I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach parenting, good relationships and good communication
all over the world through the lens of self-government and in this video we're going
to be talking about how you can better morally train your children so that they can succeed.
In this video I'm going to be talking about what happens when we don't properly morally
train our children but then also I'm going to be sharing with you what we can do to morally
train the hearts of our children too. There are key principles you're going to want to keep in mind.
Parenting trends are hurting our children morally and even physically. There are so many things that
parents are promoting or sometimes even advocates for parents are promoting that really are not
sound for our children because they are amoral. Amoral training creates selfishness, entitlement
and oftentimes even hopelessness. Without morality, a person does not have anything to hold on to
and I'm not talking about any particular religious or belief practice. I'm talking about just straight
morality. So what is morality? Morality is your measuring stick for what is right and wrong,
good and bad, true and false. In fact when I was raising my children, I realized that that lesson
in what is right wrong, good bad, true false was the most important lesson I would ever teach them.
It was the core of anything that they would learn. Have you ever wondered why it's been the tradition
for children not to start going to school until they usually reach the ages of about five or six
years old? Well the reason is because the parents usually give the child the core. In the beginning
they give them that moral training so that they can discern everything around them, socially as
well as academically. Education involves a lot of information but that doesn't mean that it's always
true. So much of it is hypothesis and so we have to have some sort of way to discern what we're
learning and whether we want to take it in as truth or not. The only way to do that is to prepare
someone ahead of time to ask good questions and to be able to see moral examples of moral absolutes.
I know talking about moral absolutes can be very unpopular for some people but your children
are craving it. They are looking for it. In fact they are wondering is that wrong, is that wrong,
is that not safe, is that- mom they put their toe in the street, does that mean that they're in the
road without like- they want to know. Since they want to know, we need to give that to
them. If developmentally they want to know and we do not do proper moral training, we turn them
loose with the theories of the day which are like well you know whatever anybody wants to do
is okay. I mean for them you know. If we give them that, that is a different morality. It is a
watered watered-down morality, meaning that like there is no authority in it. When you are trying
to decide if something is right and wrong, good and bad, true and false you're actually honoring a
greater authority than yourself. You don't make up what's right, good and true. In fact the word good
comes from the Latin god so it actually means god-like. If something is good that means it's god-like.
The root even suggests going back to the author of morality or a higher authority
than yourself. So, you definitely have to keep that in mind as you're training your children
that there has to be an authority greater than them otherwise the morality is just subjective,
it's just moral relativism and it's them becoming their own god. So, do you want your child to become
their own god or do you want them to follow a god that will actually stay constant for them because
individuals change all the time. Their wants change all the time which means their theology is very
shaky. We're going to move on to training the hearts of our children and how you can do that
but before we do, I'm interested in hearing from you. So, in the comments below this video
how about you share with me and with some of the other people watching what you have seen
as far as some of the moral struggles that maybe some of your children are facing or
some of the moral dilemmas that children seem like they're not prepared to face and if you've noticed
something that's beneficial, leave that there too. When training of children is amoral and they
become their own authority or their own god then what happens is we end up pacifying a person's
needs or wants instead of actually training a heart. If you're going to train a heart of a person
then they have to feel like they are in alignment with truth, that's the only way that they have
peace. The word train if you look it up in the Greek lexicon means to strangle and inaugurate.
Now we're not going to be strangling our children, I definitely would not promote that but what does
it mean a strangle in that Greek lexicon. It means to give boundaries to, to have restrictions. So
if you're going to train the heart of a child, you have to teach them this is the law, this is the
rule, this is the skill you need to use and then we are going to hold you to it. If you fall outside
of the law, we will gather you back in. We don't go outside of these parameters, that's what
it means to strangle according to that definition. I think of a little tree. So where I live, it's very
windy and the trees can end up growing sideways. If someone does not put a little
circle thing around them when they're little and around the trunk to hold them straight
and tie them off against the wind, those are the same types of things that we have to do as our
children are growing up. Like little trees, we have to tie things off, pull them back in the way that
they need to, that gives them the boundaries or the strangling that they need. What about inauguration?
Inauguration means to give someone a preparation for a future thing. So if you're going to inaugurate a
person, you're going to give them a vision of what lies in store for them or who they are becoming,
where they're headed. So, what they will also need to become that person or to go in that direction.
Well there's some pretty self-evident truths about who everybody's becoming. We all grow the same.
We grow from baby to child to adolescent to young adult to older adult to way older adult
to aging adults. This is what every person does and so we know that that's
part of a person's path, so part of their inauguration is to prepare them for adulthood,
to prepare them to be successful as adults. So if we're going to train a person's
heart, we need to help them understand who they are and what their phase of life is,
where they're headed, what they're going to need and how to keep themselves on track as they go
throughout this process. I'd like to share with you the formula that I created for my family to
do their moral training. So, number one, beginning of the day always started with something called canon.
This was a time where we would do our devotion as a family. We would pray as a family, we would
read scripture, we would also read other books and we would memorize things out of those books
that were inspiring, would help us have lessons or truths to live by but we would also discuss
the stories and the characters in these classical books and where they were at with their morality.
Were they doing something that was right or wrong, good or bad, were they seeing a truth or not?
Were they following after something that was false and we would discuss that. In fact all tv,
all books, we have always discussed all of those things as a family. I call it discussing deeper.
So anything that we see or encounter whether it's within our faith, within our studies, within our
social groups or within our family unit, we discuss deeper which means we take it back to the core.
Even if they're older than five years old. In fact that need for core development
never diminishes. No matter if a person is in their later years of life, they still come back
to the core to help them make sense of everything that they're seeing happen around them in the news
and in their social circles. The next thing that I did was I deliberately created a family culture
that centered around family bonding, that meant that we pushed out a lot of other distractions.
We didn't spend a lot of time in front of devices or tv. Instead we spent a lot of time together.
I wanted them to see real relationships and I wanted them to be able to discuss with real people
all of the time so that they weren't just trapped in their own heads on a device or a machine. This
proved to be very successful, our relationships were really healthy, they still are to this day
even though all my children are grown. We talk all the time. They discuss important things with
each other and with me. Our family culture is a culture of helping, supporting, openly talking,
sharing opinions and ideas. Do we agree most the time? Yeah because we have the same core moral
foundation but do we sometimes disagree on a few things? Yeah that can happen too. So when your
family has this relationship development though, it doesn't matter if you disagree, you still have
this respect and good rapport with each other even if you don't see eye to eye on every single thing.
So, relationship development, open communication, key. A must for creating a moral environment is
calmness. If your family can calmly handle problems, if you can discuss the problems that your family
is facing without losing control and emotionally dumping on each other or hurting each other
then your family culture becomes the example of morality. Self-government
involves a person being able to be assertive, restraining some of those aggressive tendencies
and instead inserting assertive skills and good open communication with the family members instead.
If that is the environment they were raised with, they will always be looking for other
environments that support that same feeling of calmness and truth that existed in your family
dynamic. I know calmness is easier said than done and people oftentimes are missing tools or skills
to help them with their calmness. I would like to give you a gift of some free calm tools.
I have something called the calm parenting tool kit on my website and since you have
watched this video today, I would like to give it to you for free. So if you go to the description
below this video and click on the top link which says teachselfgov.com/toolkit,
something like that, that will take you to the calm parenting toolkit for free. So click on that link
now. Get some of those skills happening, develop your calmness, overcome some of the things that
are getting in the way by providing yourselves with the tools that you need to live according
to your morals and principles. Click on the link to that course now. I'll see you there.