Character is the Key

How to unlock the best in our children and ourselves

By Sara Dimerman

There’s no rehearsing being a parent. We’re just thrown on stage, without a lot of training. There’s no pre-written script, no lines to memorize. And each child is different, so it’s hard to see how there could be a script that would cover them all. That’s what makes being a parent so challenging. Parenting requires a lot of improvisation— being able to pick up on cues and read between the lines. So we make it up as we go along, hoping for a happy ending. We do the best we can. But it’s a hectic world and many of us are spread pretty thin, trying to parent and earn a living at the same time. And there seem to be a thousand influences on our children that are not easy for us to control, from school to play to TV and movies to computers and electronic games. Then we look around one day and our children are not acting like the kind of people we hoped they would be. They’re displaying all sorts of behaviours that we don’t like and never wanted. And it seems very hard to turn things around.

Most parents that come to see me are pretty exhausted (I’ve been a psychotherapist for 20-plus years). They’ve run out of ideas to bring about change. They’re tired of having to offer rewards for Good behaviour. They want their children to co-operate because they care. They find themselves in a tug of war for power—they ask their children to do something and are faced with “Make me!” If you’re like these parents, you may be feeling hopeless, helpless, or on the road to giving up. Let’s run down some of the common problems that you may be seeing in your children: not fulfilling everyday responsibilities like:

• getting up for school on time, doing homework, cleaning bedrooms, and other chores
• not following the family’s rules: breaking curfews, climbing out of windows after being told to stay in, sneaking onto the computer after they have been asked not to, pretending to go to school and then spending the day at the mall with a friend
• not wanting to spend time together as a family
• calling their parents ugly names, or expressing hate for them
• when out in public, showing bad manners; having no consideration for adults or younger children who may be with them in an enclosed space such as an elevator or a bus shelter
• being mean to other kids (including siblings) or to small animals; taunting or teasing others mercilessly; acting violently in schools and outside them
• being lazy: wanting to get the most goodies for the least effort
• lack of patience and perseverance, short attention spans, giving up too easily on a task
• behaving with a sense of entitlement, as if the world owes them something
• being overly influenced by others: being coerced into behaviours like drinking, smoking, and promiscuity because of peer group pressure.

Faced with this litany of misbehaviour, what you may be wishing is that your children would act like different people. That they would have an inner compass that would guide them to make better choices, and would motivate them to meet you halfway, acting more like you were all on the same team. You may also wish your own performance could be better. When asked to critique themselves, many parents tend to say that they don’t want to be constantly nagging and yelling and getting angry, and they wish they could act more like their true selves. “The person I show to my kids isn’t really me,” one parent recently told me. “I lose patience with my kids and get frustrated.

I say things I don’t mean and fight for rules even I don’t think are fair, just to win. I’m a better person than that.” There’s a simple way of summing all this up: it’s all about character. We wish that our children (and ourselves) would do a better job of demonstrating good character. There are various traits that we think of as being part of that, like integrity and honesty and consideration for others. We feel that if our children could somehow get an injection of good character, a lot of the practical details would take care of themselves. A teen with more integrity would remain more true to herself, and not feel the compulsion to drink alcohol or use drugs just because the “other kids do.” A child who was more honest would not lie about whether he was going to school. Children with more consideration for others would be less likely to tease, taunt, and be mean. It’s a worthy goal: to instill better character in our children. Is there a way to do it—to help our children become persons of character?*

Yes there is, and the clue to it lies in another thing that parents often report to me. They say that they find themselves imitating the very things their own parents did, often not to good effect. One mother reported to me, “I swear I’ll never borrow from my own parents’ tired old lines or scream as loudly as they did, but then I do, without intending to. It’s as if their words are recorded in my brain and played back through my own lips. I hear their voices echo through me, like I’ve become them.” This simple fact—that we tend to imitate our own parents’ behaviour—turns out to be the guidepost we need. It points to a major key to successful parenting that is the central pillar of this book, and a growing international movement. That key is called modelling character, and it simply means showing your children what kind of person they should be, by being that kind of  person yourself.  The most basic and powerful method of all, without which the others won’t work, is to lead by example—to demonstrate those traits yourself, in a way that communicates their value to your children.

 
Excerpted from Character is the Key: How to Unlock the Best in our Children and Ourselves.  Copyright (c) 2009 by Sara Dimerman. Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd.

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