5 Tips for Nurturing Your Children’s Values

Moral identity and values are relatively unstable or fluid until self-regulation and perspective-taking capacities emerge in later middle childhood. Over time, children’s views of themselves begin to solidify as they internalize values in the context of their friends, family, and other influences while they are also developing their executive function (thinking) and emotional control capabilities.  

Amid all of these influences and factors, their values become more abstract, consistent, stable, and connected to behaviors, according to a study published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Parents and families play central roles in how children sort out and internalize the values they ultimately adopt, even though there are never guarantees in parenting. Here are five tips for parents and caregivers to shape or influence children’s values.

Put Your Relationships First
As with most aspects of parenting, the quality of the parent-child relationships is the basis of a caregiver’s influence on a child’s values development. When these relationships are supportive, they provide fertile soil in which roots of moral development can grow. 

Walk Your Talk
Parents act as role models for their kids and have an impact not only on how children internalize moral values but also on how they navigate moral decisions over time, according to a study published in the International Journal of Behavioral Development. When parents consistently model traits such as empathy, fairness, and moral reasoning, they have the ability to reinforce these values as children grow and encounter greater influence from peers and society at large.

Talk Your Walk
Our children may not be learning what we hope they’re learning from us if we don’t talk with them about it. Why do we make the choices we make? Was it hard? Are we glad that we did it? When we make a mistake, do we apologize and seek to correct it?

What’s important is to tell our stories (and other stories from our families), not to turn ourselves or anyone else into a flawless hero or saint. It also opens a space for our children to tell us their stories — both when things go well and when they don’t, which also helps them internalize their own experiences and what really matters to them. 

Learn Together and From Each Other
One of the blind spots in much of the past scientific research on values and moral development is that it focused almost exclusively on how parents “transmit” values to children. In reality, research published in the book Parenting and Children’s Internalization of Values: A Handbook of Contemporary Theory suggests that it is more accurate to think about “exchanging” values or, perhaps, a give-and-take in shaping values.

At the same time, children bring their own personalities, tendencies, and spirit to the relationship, and they also influence, even change, the values of their parents. In small and large ways, children change our values, too. 

An important gift we give to our children is the opportunity to articulate what’s important to them and, when we want to encourage those values, ways to put those values into practice. Even more powerful is to learn from them and walk with them as they internalize values that clearly reflect and express who they are. 

Be Realistic
Each of us believes things are valuable or virtuous that we simply don’t do (or do as we’d like to do). 

We now know that actions aren’t based only on cognitive reasoning and beliefs; they are strongly shaped by feelings, instinctual reactions, habits, racing thoughts, the environment around us, and many other factors. 

Personal willpower doesn’t generate a wellspring of life-giving values. Memorizing lists of virtues won’t provide the wisdom needed when faced with pressure-filled or perplexing choices. Instead, living out values grows from a deep well of relationships, experiences, commitments, and influences that accumulate over time. These values are lived, modeled, talked about, practiced, and expected all around us, becoming part of who we are — our character. They become intuitive, like riding a bicycle or swimming.

Thus, our fervent hope as parents and caregivers is that children will, over time, discover the wisdom in discerning their way centered in their connectedness: a connectedness to their core identities, to others in supportive families and communities, to the world around them, and to a sacred power or spirit, whom they may know as God. Together, these bring our deepest values into focus with clarity, meaning, and purpose.

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Click here to read the original article.