Week
4 of July: The Value of Honesty
In
Connection with Richard and Linda Eyre
Editor's note: This month of July the Meridian Family Value of the month is Honesty. Click here to read this month's overview article). Each week during the month we will post an update in Meridian, illustrating a couple of the Eyres' favorite methods for teaching this important value to each age group. Remember that you can also go to http://www.valuesparenting.com/ for still more ideas and teaching methods. Thanks for your interest and participation. There are tens of thousands of parents concentrating on this value this month. It is a way of saving this somewhat unkind and unfriendly society of ours — one family at a time! Send us your feedback, and if you want a free children's CD on the value of Honesty, see the instructions at the bottom of this article
Methods
for Preschoolers
The Honesty-About-Feelings Game
This will help small children realize that feelings are caused by what has happened — and that it is okay to feel things and okay to tell others honestly how we feel. Go through a magazine (one with lots of ads and colored pictures) and point at faces saying, “How do you think he feels?” Then say, “Why do you think he feels that way?” Then say, “Is it okay to feel that way?”
Help children to identify feelings and their probable causes and to know that it’s okay to feel those things and to tell other people how they feel.
Methods for Elementary School Age
Story: “Isabel’s Little Lie”
Tell the following story to help your children understand how one lie can lead to another and produce serious consequences:
One day Isabel told a little lie. She wasn’t supposed to feed her dinner to the dog, Barker, but she did, and when her mother came in and saw her plate all clean, Isabel said that she had eaten it all. (That was a little lie, wasn’t it?) The dinner was chicken, and Barker got a bone in his throat. Pretty soon he started to cough and snort and act very uncomfortable.
“Do you know what’s wrong with Barker?’ asked Mother. ‘No,’ said Isabel. (That was another lie, wasn’t it? But Isabel had to do it so that Mother wouldn’t know she told the first lie.) Mother looked in Barker’s mouth but couldn’t see anything. ‘Did Barker eat something, Isabel?’’I don’t know, Mommy.’ (That was another lie, wasn’t it? But she didn’t want her mother to know about the first two lies.)
Barker got worse, and Mother took him to the animal hospital. Isabel went too. ‘What happened to the dog?’ asked the doctor. ‘We don’t know,’ said Isabel. (That was another lie, wasn’t it? But if Isabel had told, then Mother and the dog doctor would know she had lied before.) The doctor said, ‘If it’s just a bone, we could get it out with an instrument, but it might be glass, so we may have to operate.’
Isabel decided it was time to tell the truth. She said, ‘It’s a bone, and I did know Barker ate it, and I didn’t eat all my dinner, and I did give it to Barker, and I won’t tell lies anymore, because if you tell one, you might have to tell more and more.’ Isabel started to cry, but her mother loved her and she decided she really would tell the truth from then on.
Methods for Adolescents
The Scenario Game
This game will help children think through situations in advance. Define scenario as “a projected possibility with consequences.” Then define possibility and consequences (appeal to the adolescent desire to use big words and “speak grown-up”). Then, in your own words, expand and elaborate on the following “case studies.” The more dramatic and story-like, the better.
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Cheating. You’re sitting in your English class, taking the final exam. You’ve studied hard, and the first two sections of the test are easy. The last section is much harder, and you realize it is from a book you forgot to review. You’re pretty sure the teacher never told you to read that book. You feel mad at the teacher and that it’s not your fault that you don’t know the answers. The questions are multiple choice, and it’s extremely easy to see Jim’s answers across the aisle.
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Exaggerating. Your family has just moved to town. You’ve started at a new school and made some brand new friends. In the lunchroom they are asking what you did in sports at your former school. You were actually only a substitute on one team, but they don’t know that. You wonder if you should tell them what you wish had happened, instead of what actually did.
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Protecting yourself. You got in an hour later than your parents had requested. They had fallen asleep, so you didn’t disturb them. It’s the morning after, and they ask you what time you came in.
Think of other scenarios (or use actual situations that you know of). Help your children (through discussion) arrive at the conclusion (and project it into each case study) that most dishonesty seems to solve a short-term problem or create a short-term benefit but leads to less confidence in self over time.
Closing Note: Many have asked if there are actual teaching tools to assist parents in teaching the Meridian family value of the month to their children. The Eyres have been involved with a series of values-teaching CDs called Alexander's Amazing Adventures, which give 5- to 14-year-old children a vicarious (and dramatic) experience with each month's value. By special arrangement, Meridian readers who have been following this column and participating in the value of the month can now receive, as a free gift, the HONESTY CD from this series. Simply send a self-addressed, stamped 5 X 7 or 8 X 10 envelope (the padded ones are best) to the Eyres at 1098 Augusta Way, Salt Lake City, Utah, 84108 and they will send you the gift CD. (You will need to put $0.87 [87cents] in stamps or postage on your return envelope.) Please respond only if you have been reading and following the column, and please do not ask for more than one copy of the CD. We hope this gift will help make the value-of-the-month concept even more effective within your family.