Do you want to know how to teach values to children?
Well, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach parenting, character development, communication and in
this video, I'm going to be talking about how you can teach values to your children.
In this video, I'm going to share with you 4 things that you can do
to teach values to your children and as a bonus, when you do these 4 things, it's gonna
strengthen your relationship with them at the same time. There is a book called "Little Britches:
Father and I Were Ranchers." In fact, there's a whole series of the Little Britches books.
These books were written by a man named Ralph Moody and they're actually biographical stories
which are about his life and so there's a lot of cool things in there. Well in this story, Little
Britches, we see Ralph, little young Ralph. He steals something, he steals chocolate when the family does
not have a lot of money and they've bought the chocolate for a special occasion. He takes it
without asking so then we see how he feels after and how his parents handle the situation. There
are other stories too like think of Peter Rabbit and all of the Beatrix Potter books. They show that
Peter Rabbit is doing the wrong thing and then he almost gets killed because he does the wrong thing.
We see that it's not a good idea to trespass on other people's property and that we need to stick
to following the instructions of our parents because our parents are going to keep us safe
and at the end of the day, we might not get treats like our siblings did because maybe we got sick
from all of the commotion in Farmer McGregor's garden, right? There are stories that we can use
to teach our children values. I'm going to caution you that not all stories are created equal. In fact,
there are many stories that happen nowadays that just don't really have any redeeming qualities to
them. But when you look back in time just a little bit or when you find true stories from people's
lives, there's often many things that you can learn so get in the habit of reading to your children.
When you read to your children daily and you find things that have value and meaning, then that child
is learning what values they need to have for their own lives from those characters that you
are exposing them to. Think of the 3 little pigs. Why did the pig that had the straw house, why
did his get blown down so easy? Well, maybe he was a little lazy, that's something we need to learn
about. What about work and industry versus laziness, that's a value to understand for sure. So, find good
books and read them to your children. When all else fails, go back to the old maybe slightly archaic
sounding, Aesop's Fables. Aesop's Fables all teach a beautiful lesson that usually goes back to the
character of the person and so there are values presented there that they can use for their lives.
Part of your reading should involve discussions. I believe in discussing deeper. In fact, it really is
a parent's job to help their child mature and to see the world through the proper lens. If we don't
do the job, guess what? Somebody else or something else, maybe a device, is going to do it for us. We
don't want that to happen to our children so we need to discuss what's going on around them and
what they hear. So, pull out one of your Aesop's Fables, read the story and then discuss it. See
if you can apply it to your own life in some way. Maybe you can make a master list of all of the
lessons that you're learning and discussing. Now, don't just discuss stories out of story books
but you might want to discuss things that you see happening in real life too. Maybe there's somebody
who's made a bad decision, maybe one of their friends steals something or isn't honest in some
way. Maybe you need to discuss the value of honesty related to that experience that they had in real
life, it's okay to discuss other people and how their behaviors affected your children, that's not
gossip and it's not mean as long as your heart is an understanding and accepting heart of that
person even though you're using their situation for a topic of discussion and learning. So, discuss
deeply with your children. In fact, you can take your discussion to the next level and you can even
write down narrations. Now many people know this about me but I homeschooled my own children. My
foster children did go to the public school but my own 4 children were homeschooled all growing up
and we did something called a narration where I would type out their words after I read them
a story like Jack and The Beanstalk. I would say tell me what happened in the story? What did you
like about the story and I would type their words out exactly so that they had something written up
that was their understanding of the values and lessons taught in that story. It was really
valuable to them so making narrations could be taking your discussion to even the next level of
depth. You want them to understand moral absolutes, right? Otherwise you wouldn't care about values,
that means you want them to know what's right and wrong, good and bad, true and false and you have to
discuss those things with their experiences that are happening around them for them to discern all
those morals. Before I get to my next tips for you, I would like to know what values you're hoping to
teach your children. What values are important to you and do you know make a good strong and
healthy person for their life? Put your comments below so that I can see what types of values
are useful to you and maybe other people will be getting ideas too of what values they can teach
to their children. A great way to teach values to your children is to create a family standard.
When we took in foster children, we knew we were bringing in people who came from
lots of different types of environments. Their families were certainly not going to be the
same as our families otherwise they probably wouldn't have been removed from their families,
anyway, and so we knew that we had to establish our culture with them. At that time, we decided to make
a standard. So, this was our family standard, it was a list of rules that we had for our family
that they could follow so that they wouldn't fall into old ways that happened at their house.
This gave them something to hold on to and many of these rules, in fact all of them pretty much,
related back to a principle. So, a principle is forever. It's eternal, it's never changing
and it can be applied on a broad scale to literally just about
anything and everything. But a rule is different. Rules can be changed. In fact, if you think of
laws, you see laws shift and change all the time, sometimes based on one person's whim a law can
change. There might not even be a principle behind it. It's just what somebody wants or what they
think might be more effective and they're willing to try it out and then everybody has to bend
because of that. Well, those are rules not governed by principle. But in our family standard, we created
a list of rules that were governed by principle. These rules related to everything about the person.
What types of things we would take into our body, what types of things would come out of our body
like what kinds of words we would say. Would we gossip? Would we not? Why? What types of things
we would do with digital devices? So, what we would expose our minds to and not and how we would take
care of our bodies, health-wise, modesty-wise, all of those things were part of that family standard. Now
years ago, I did a BBC documentary. It was called "The World's Strictest Parents" so yes, I was called
one of the world's strictest parents. If you ever see that episode which you can see the entire
episode on my website teachingselfgovernment.com, you can click the "blog" tab and then you can watch
all the videos that are there and it's there in its entirety. Anyway if you ever see that, you'll
see that the two 17 year olds that came to my home from Britain actually had the hardest time with
our family standards. Things related to what we will take into our bodies and what we will put on
our bodies. So, I had to treat them as if they were my children and they came home different
and so that's why I ended up enforcing the family standard with them. But what does a family standard
do for a person? It gives them their "no" answers, it gives them their instructions. Honestly by the
very end of the BBC program, it was so amazing to see both of these two British 17 year olds saying
I love your house, I don't want to leave your house. I feel so safe here. I want to have this
language standard when I go home. People are going to die when I don't want to say that word but I
don't want to say it anymore, I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know what I was really saying, you
know, and they changed. Their hearts changed, their minds changed because they were exposed to values,
to principles, to standards. Anyway, having that family standard was incredibly powerful for them
and it can be for your children too. If you don't have a standard already in place, something that's
written down that gives your family instructions and "no" answers, I highly recommend making one
and I give all the details for how to do that in my teaching self-government parenting course.
Another tip I have for you is to pre-teach your child for success so if you are teaching
them these values, you're learning them, you're discussing them, you're creating a list of them
and rules associated with them for your family in that family standard, then you've got to prepare
your child to use those values and appeal to them in certain situations. So, I call this pre-teaching.
So when your child is going to go to school, maybe it's the start of a school year or maybe they're
going to go to a youth group meeting at your church, so all the people there might not have the
exact same values and standards that your family has. So, you need to prepare your child for that
and explain hey, when you're there, what might the environment be like? What type of language do you
think we could maybe hear that doesn't match the type of language we choose to use? Okay, well how
are you going to handle that? So, then you can teach them the skills that they need to successfully
handle that situation. So, in our family there are multiple skills. One of those key skills
that we use is accepting a "no" answer. We can't change everybody else all the time so sometimes
we just look at the situation or the person, we keep a calm face, voice and body, we say okay to
that or we disagree appropriately with them about whatever it is that they're saying or doing, which
sometimes is useful too and that's a whole other skill. Oh, and then we just drop the subject so we
don't spend our time getting angry about the fact that somebody else has a different standard than
us and we don't over process it. The last thing you want your child to do is be comparing and
comparing and getting prideful and over processing, that becomes anxious for the child. So, it's better
for them to just go I can drop the subject, people can be different than me but I know who I am
and where I stand, that's called confidence and a parent can prepare a child to live according
to their values and have that confidence if they have conversations with the child before they go
out in other social situations and interact with people who might have different values than them.
Our values are a vital part of who we are. In fact, they're part of our identity and they are
formed in our home, unless the home doesn't care in which case they open the door to all of the media,
friends and everybody else to do the formation of those values. I know most people don't want
that, I know you probably don't want that. You want to teach them the values that you know to be true
not just things that are trending or make people feel comfortable
but real true values which means that they're constant principles that last forever that they
can hold on to their entire lives. They've got to live according to values for a long period of time
for those values to become part of who they are and to be a truth that they can hold on to forever.
So give them those values, discuss more, talk about the things that are going on and know that they
want that conversation they can handle it even if sometimes it seems a little bit embarrassing.
If you've liked this video, I know you're going to love the next video which is called
"The Expectation Trap versus The Cycle for Success." It's actually a full class that I'm
giving you completely free, anyone on this channel can see it and it will help you have more calmness
and connection in your relationships at your house. Click on the link no. We'll see you there.