Unloading my car after a trip to the local store, I noticed my five year-old son take a tin of lip balm out of his pocket. Lip balm that I’d never seen before. Oh wait, I had seen it. In a little box on the check-out counter.
“Hon, where’d you get that lip balm?”
He froze. A sheepish look came over his face. He stared at the ground as he nervously shuffled his feet.
“At the store.”
“Did you pay for it?”
“Um, no.”
Sometimes, as a mom, it takes every fiber of your being to keep calm when you want to shriek, “What were you thinking?!?” But as I looked at my little guy’s embarrassed face – and remembered he was only five – I took a deep breath, softened my reaction, and managed a gentle, “Honey, do you know that when we take something from the store without paying for it, that’s stealing?”
My son learned a good lesson that day when we returned to the store with the lip balm and he apologized (well, mom apologized on his behalf – his self-consciousness rendered him mute) for taking it. But a good lesson was also learned by me. What could I do as a parent to help my kids make better choices?
That day, and plenty of other days like it, knocked me over the head with the realization that my children weren’t going to magically grow up knowing right from wrong. I was going to have to teach them how to live virtuously. Which sounds perfectly obvious, but when you’re a new mom you’re pretty much flying by the seat of your pants.
The good news is that each day brings us countless occasions to teach our kids to live with virtue. The sibling fight, the reluctance to do homework or chores, the back-talk, the fill-in-the-blank-here. Each challenge is an opportunity to teach.
Building a culture of virtue
For those teaching moments to be successful, I’ve found you first need to build a culture of virtue in your home. Talking to your kid in a heated moment about honesty, fortitude, or respect isn’t going to have an impact if they don’t know what those words mean and what they look like in practice.
Anonymous
Virtue is like muscle: Use it or lose it.
Building a ‘culture of virtue’ may sound like a big undertaking, but it’s simpler than I expected. It’s more about consistency than a big time commitment. The single-most effective tool that’s helped us make progress and stay on track? A monthly virtue study.
The best part about a monthly virtue study is that it’s incredibly simple. You choose a virtue for the month, and find opportunities to talk about it as a family. That’s it.
The simplicity of it is what makes it effective – you’re more likely to do something when it fits easily into your life.
And it works! It’s gives us frequent opportunities to talk about the breath of virtues – fortitude, responsibility, integrity, humility, temperance, etc. – with our kids, developing a shared vocabulary and understanding that supports virtuous choices. Our children learn that living a virtuous life is important; that these principles are guiding forces that they should rely on and use for the rest of their lives.
Though our children still bicker like all kids do, when we talk about what went wrong we use this shared vocabulary to discover which virtue they should exercise to make up and repair their relationship – and which virtue to use the next time to prevent the argument.
All of us can attain to Christian virtue and holiness, no matter in what condition of life we live and no matter what our life work may be.
St. Francis de Sales
I should mention we don’t do this in a vacuum. Our Catholic faith is central to our lives and provides a strong framework for the study of virtues. In fact, the Catholic Catechism lists three theological virtues (hope, faith and charity) and four cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, fortitude, temperance). While our faith influences our virtue study and vice versa, this monthly exercise can be practiced with any belief system.
Jump-start your own monthly virtue study today
- Get a list of virtues: You’ll find one that includes basic definitions at the bottom of this post.
- Choose one that fits the month: It might be relevant for that month (love for February, gratitude in November), or it may be a virtue your kids really need to work on (respect). You can ask your kids for input, or choose one yourself. We’ve done it both ways.
- Hang it somewhere you’ll see it: Put it on a piece of paper on the fridge. Write it on your family’s white board. Place it somewhere that it will remind your kids – and you – what you’re learning about that month.
- Get out the dictionary: At the beginning of the month, get out the dictionary and look up the definition. Some virtues have definitions that go deeper based on your faith (for example, the Catholic catechism defines charity as loving God above all things, and loving our neighbor for the sake of God). Spend a little time talking about what the virtue means, and examples of what it looks like in everyday life. We often do this over dinner or at a Sunday lunch.
- Choose your own virtue adventure: From here, it’s really up to you. You can keep it as simple as talking about the virtue at dinner a few times a week, asking each family member to share an example of the virtue in action, or you can take it up a notch and find stories, quotes, and movies that further demonstrate the virtue. A few books that are excellent for this are those by William Bennett (The Book of Virtues, the Children’s Book of Faith, the Children’s Book of Heroes) and Thomas Lickona’s How to Raise Kind Kids.
- Look for examples of your month’s virtue in everyday life: For example, we recently studied hope during football season. We discussed how football players practice the virtue of hope every time they go out on the field.
Miss a month? That happens in our house too – just pick up where you left off. Simply by talking about virtue on a regular basis you will begin building a culture of virtue in your home.
It’s also good to rinse and repeat your virtues, we do this often. Come back to the ones your kids need to work on – responsibility, hard work, charity, etc. – to encourage the meaning of the virtue sink in and give them more opportunities to put it in practice.
As a parent, teaching my kids about virtue has been a rewarding learning experience for me too. Guiding them in building qualities like fortitude, hope, and humility has helped me not only internalize these virtues myself, but given me a renewed sense of purpose in my role as a mother.
And – so far – the tins of lip balm (and candy, and toys) have been left undisturbed by my kids at the checkout counter.
