Every child in his/her student life faces many challenges, growth and changes. During this process he/she imbibes a lot of positive and negative traits on to which they stick for the rest of their lives. Children with high ethical values are responsible for the right and wrong doing, abide by it and those who lack values threaten themselves and others.
Though the process of teaching values start from home at an early age, children come in contact with many people who influence them a lot. This phase makes them question the values they have already learnt. For example; a child who is told not to say lies seeing some other child who is fearlessly lying and getting the work done, ends up confused and might indulge in lying. Hence when people talk about values, today’s generation is highly influenced by social media. The real values are limited and portrayed only through posts, reels or stories. Apart from virtual life, the values portrayed in real life are shallow and children do not even know why some kind of values need to displayed.
The reasons behind these are many: One major thing with young children are once they touch the adolescent age, they think the world revolves around them, and that they can control it. So the values such as being grateful, respect, managing time and money or self-discipline are underrated and least appreciated by them.
When children talk about exhibiting values, we can start with the simple things like saying thank you, sorry, please in the respective situations but do they mean what they say is really questionable.
So here is how one can really teach these values to children.
Start with stories
Most of the kids in today’s generation end up sleeping watching programmes on TV or mobile phone. With younger children you can make conscious effort of staying with them at least for 15 minutes and make them listen to different moral stories. Incidents where these values need to be showcased, tell them why and how those characters behaved in such situations and how different it is from real life. You can also discuss the practicality of holding on to those values.
Say what you mean and mean what you say
When a child does some mistake, we expect he/she should apologise and that is what good behaviour is. But in general apologising or appreciating happens for the sake of saying when a child is insisted. Instead when you talk about these good words, make sure that whether it is meant to the person who says it or reaches the person who receives it. There is a huge difference when you say Oh Sorry! And I’m really sorry for what happened. Are you feeling okay now? The latter one confirms whether the person is fine.
Ignoring or not maintaining time or respecting other’s or one’s time are the important red flag when it comes to disciplining one self. Children tend to waste their time hanging onto phone or social media which hampers their productive work. Engaging children into various activities of their interest will be always useful. This is how you can initially divert their attention to something positive, and later you can add up above said values into them.
However today’s generation do not expect gyan from their parents. If you focus on their positive side they are quite practical and quite uncertain about what is needed and not needed. Upon that adding/teaching these values are really challenging as they have many questions which sounds practical. But no matter what, learning moral values and knowing the importance of these values at an early age is really a golden character crown for their personality. There is no loss, when they are aware and act according to the situation. Hence it’s parents responsibility to scrutinise the wrong behaviours and teaching them the right thing is a must and should.
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