How The Moral Premise Influenced My Parenting

As a parent, I want to know how to raise my kids the best way possible. Parenting doesn’t come naturally or easily for me. So I am always looking for tips and advice on how to best parent my kids. Specifically, I get tired of getting on their case all the time. It drains me to always have to say, “stop that,” “get down from there,” “put that away,” “get your room cleaned,” or “you better hurry up and eat.” And I really hate getting angry with them. Sometimes they can push my buttons and really send me over the edge. I know they are young and I do my best not to raise my voice but sometimes I feel that’s the only thing that will get their attention.

I ran across a book recently called Parenting with Love and Logic by Foster Cline and Jim Fay. The byline of the book is “Teaching Children Responsibility.” One of the main principles of the book is that responsibility is caught, not taught. In other words, kids learn best when they learn the lessons themselves. “Let the consequence be the teacher” is a popular phrase used in the book, which means that children learn responsibility best when they make the choice themselves and experience the consequences, whether good or bad. You can preach at them until you are blue in the face but they won’t take it as true for themselves until they learn it on their own.

I wasn’t sure I believed this principle until one summer I saw it actually work (proof also that it’s true). My three-year old daughter kept walking up close to the edge of the swimming pool without her life jacket on. I must have told her a dozen times to not get close to the pool without her life jacket because she might fall in. Yet, she continued to get closer and closer to the edge, even with me standing right there! So I finally decided that she needed to learn for herself. I watched as she leaned over the edge to look at the water and I knew right away what was about to happen. I quietly walked up behind her and sure enough, she leaned over too far and fell in. I jumped in right next to her and pulled her up just as her head was about to go under. I put her back up on the edge and her eyes were huge from the shock. After that, I never again had to tell her to put her life jacket on when she got close to the pool. Every time she came within six feet of the pool she would run and grab her life jacket and put it on. I could have continued to preach and get angry and send her to timeout but it wasn’t until she learned for herself that she actually changed her behavior.

I recently read, The Moral Premise, by Stanley Williams. The Moral Premise argues that every movie has a message, which can be stated as follows: “Vice leads to undesirable consequences; but Virtue leads to desirable consequences.” Every movie shows the main characters making moral choices, which then determine how they behave. Their behavior either leads to consequences that are desirable or consequences that are undesirable. This principle is present in every movie because it accurately reflects the human experience. Every day we make choices upon which we then act and which then have consequences, whether good or bad. What better way for me to raise my kids than to start now helping them to practice making choices and understanding that those choices have consequences. After all, this is how life actually works.

So now, as a parent, I look for opportunities to give my kids choices. I allow them to make the decision on what their behavior will be but also help them understand that they will experience the consequences of that choice. This has greatly helped take the anger and preaching out of disciplining my kids. For example, if my kids are jumping off the back of the couch, I could get mad and yell and send them to their rooms but now the focus for them is on my anger and not their behavior. Instead, I look for ways to give them a choice with consequences. Now, I tell them they can either stop jumping off the couch and continue playing in the living room together or they can jump off the couch again and go play in their bedrooms by themselves. I have now given them a choice of behaviors but have also informed them of the consequences of their choice. Now the focus is on their behavior and not my anger.

So if you want to control their behavior, give them a choice between a behavior with desirable consequences and a behavior with undesirable consequences. I am sure you know your kids well enough to know exactly what are desirable and undesirable consequences for them. As I am also sure you well know, it’s different for every kid. The hard part as a parent is allowing them to suffer the undesirable consequences if that is what they choose. However, better they learn life lessons about responsibility at age six with a toy car than at age sixteen with a real car.