Do you teach your kids compassion, morality and tolerance or do you try to instill superiority of your race and religion in their minds? How much does parental efforts really matter in raising their children as better human beings?
Yes, I do work hard at compassion and morality in my life and with my children. Maybe not so much in tolerance, but that’s my failing.
Given my family background, pretty hard to be bragging about any superiority of our line.
My kids are so dissimilar, I have been humbled into wondering if I had any part of it at all.
There is “teach” and then there is “adopt”. I hope we all “teach” morality and compassion…but if kids choose to “adopt” these virtues is a different question.
It would be a much more pleasing compliment for someone to tell me my child is compassionate and tolerant than to say they are “smart”.
I would say with confidence that “yes” we have taught them these things. We have and also other significant people in their lives - including past teachers, situations and situations where they observed people NOT being moral, compassionate or tolerant - those are perhaps the most influential situations of all.
In this case the admonition “if you can’t say something nice about someone then don’t say anything at all” seems to be the lesson he missed. That isn’t morality or tolerance but simple etiquette.
Today’s lesson version is stay off twitter and facebook.
I try to model compassion and tolerance and solid morals for my girls. They are wonderful young woman and I’m sure it didn’t hurt that I found these things to be important, but I’m not sure I can take credit for my kids either. My upbringing was very different from how I raise my kids and I turned out the opposite of what my parents had hoped/expected.
I don’t think that having pride in one’s heritage is necessarily incompatible with compassion, morality, and tolerance. You simply have to realize that other people can have pride in their heritage, too, even though it’s different from yours.
And I don’t think parents trying to teach values is worth much. But how parents live their lives is. Kids learn much more from what you do than what you say.
Anyone who follows the news these days is painfully aware that morality can be interpreted subjectively, and that can significantly influence one’s views on who and what they have compassion and tolerance of/for.
For instance, if one believes interracial marriage is immoral, then what they believe should be tolerated is probably going to be significantly influenced by that belief. If a baker is sued for refusing to make a cake for a same-sex marriage ceremony, ones views on gay marriage is going to have a significant influence on which parties they feel are being discriminated against and who they have compassion for.
Gosh, @gouf78 I don’t know about that. If I thought my kids were even entertaining the use of that kind of language, not just the one word but the attitudes towards women, Jews, etc., it wouldn’t be okay if they just didn’t “say” those things, while thinking them. So I vehemently disagree that it’s just “etiquette.”
To answer the question, we embedded discussion of values and how to treat others into every thing we did and said with our kids. We always emphasized empathy, kindness, and respect. And luckily, it took with both of them.
Indeed, Jonathan Haidt’s *The Righteous Mind/i is about differences in moral values and how they relate to political beliefs. He mentions various moral axes of care/harm, liberty/opperssion, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation and compares how liberals, libertarians, and social conservatives value each one (see page 13 of https://www.righteousmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Figures-for-The-Righteous-Mind.pdf ).
I think having pride or shame in your heritage (even though you have nothing to do with it so it’s pointless) is different than thinking it’s somehow superior or inferior than others.
I see grown ups spewing such hatred, specially on internet about others, it’s frightening to think it can taint human psyche. There is no such thing as selective compassion or optional morality.
I don’t want this thread to go towards politicians as in the end decision is one’s own to make.
I disagree.
For example, I might know two people who are out of work – one of whom was laid off because the company he worked for closed and one of whom quit because he was angry at his boss over something trivial. Both may be suffering as a result of not having a job, but I might feel more compassion toward the one who was laid off.
And lots of moral questions are “optional” – meaning that some people think that an action is morally wrong but others don’t. Consider two unmarried adults who have consensual sex with each other. Some people consider that morally wrong. Others don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.
Different people define morality differently, as noted in reply #9.
Even in the same dimension, people may define morality differently. For example, in terms of the “fairness” dimension, how should a college set tuition and financial aid? Would an $81,000 list price, with financial aid for students from families below the top 4% income (possibly up to $76,000 grants for those from bottom 50% income) be more or less “fair” than a $55,000 list price with no financial aid?
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Two figures of speech come to mind: don’t judge another until you’ve walked in their shoes, and experience is the best teacher.
We’ve had no strategy, but the way it has worked out is our kids go to school with everyone kids from the richest and poorest corners of the earth, different races, religions, etc. (I hate the d——ity word) They see almost everything in their schools.
We talk a lot about their interactions and experiences, and explain why some kids are the way they are, which helps them understand and be compassionate.
No religion, but also no political correctness in our home.
You can be a moral person and still object to things that do not align with your religious beliefs and you can be a compassionate person and disagree with someone’s POV politically. I think we conflate morality, compassion, and a number of terms these days and want to apply labels to every aspect of life if it doesn’t align with an individual’s perspective. We taught the kids to be compassionate or empathetic but never attached that to our religious or political beliefs.
Somehow, we have raised a child who has more compassion and tolerance than either of us. We have learned from her, and continue to learn.
@Marian But would you feel more compassion for a person of one religion who was laid off because of a closure, versus a person from another religion?
Most people likely would, whether they admit to it or not. People normally feel more compassion for people who are more similar to them. The only way that you can avoid this is to teach yourself to think of all human beings as being similar to you.
Most people have a large capacity for empathy, because, luckily, psychopaths are extremely rare. However, most people find it easy to avoid empathizing with people who are different than they are. Mass atrocities are usually not committed by monsters who are incapable of empathy, but by human beings who have successfully dehumanized other human beings.
We modeled and taught using reason (biology, logic). I’m not sure if nurture vs nature makes a difference, but we have a lot of satisfaction from knowing our kids test “not prejudiced” from online tests (found from a college class) and every single person who talks to us about them from friends to “staff” (hotels, janitors, servers, etc) to professors to in-laws has told us how wonderful they are.
At youngest’s recent wedding, the most satisfying comment we got was, “You folks are real people.” When I married him, H’s parents were the most racist folks I know. His dad has changed (a bit). His mom never did. Their grandson is quite happily now with his different race spouse. I love dousing the racist part of the heritage.
All three are still strong in their/our faith and still don’t even remotely think about discriminating against those who choose to believe in (or not) other faiths.
Still, I can’t tell if it’s genetics or nurture or a combo of both. I know we wouldn’t have changed a thing though. We traveled. We interacted. We consider all humans equal and only look down on anyone if they deserve it by their actions vs who they are. (eg We don’t care for those who litter, etc., regardless of what they look like or claim for faith.)
Probably not, because I don’t care about religion very much.
But I might feel more compassion for a person whom I identify with in some other way. And I know that’s not fair.
Somehow, we raised a child whose main goal in life is to help other people. I’m not a selfless person, so maybe he got it from his dad??