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INSPIRATION PARENT INSPIRATION Teaching Christian Values Teach the Values T eaching reinforces your living model of God’s values. Your teaching needs to be forceful, positive, passionate, and frequent. Strong family leadership provides a model your children cannot ignore. It’s crucial for teaching values. Make your propaganda early! Look ahead at what your child will confront. Teach with an eye on the future and on today. 1. Focus. Have a plan for teaching values. Focus on one value at a time - maybe one a month, or one your kids are confronting right now, or one they will confront soon. 2. Teach. The most successful teaching strategies combine thinking and feeling. • Stories are powerful. All ages like them. They have emotional pull and a nudge to thinking. Stories remembered impress the heart in moments of decision. Children can identify with characters in the story. Dialog about what each person in the story thinks or feels. Don’t moralize. Let the story speak for itself. The best stories are your stories what you experienced growing up. • Everyday situations make ideal teaching situations. Grab the moment and run with it. •Questions usually teach better than scolding or lectures. Children need to learn to think about what they’re doing. Follow these guidelines for questions to be effective: Ask only one question. Wait for a response. Keep your voice normal, or lower than normal. Be respectful of the child. Do not give up. Questions take more time, but they build moral understanding and reasoning. Your children need this to internalize values. Begin by asking, What are you doing? Wait for an answer - it may take awhile. Followup questions depend on the situation. • Act-it-out or role playing is very effective for teaching values, especially for teaching children how to deal with peer pressure. Act out different peer pressure situations what to say and how to act - alternating roles. • Drawing is an easy way for children to express their feelings. Never tell the child what to draw. Don’t hover. Don’t comment about the drawing. Just say, “Tell me about your drawing.” Then listen. Express how you think your child felt. Afterwards she may want to talk more. • Key guiding phrases frequently reinforce your teaching. Post them around the house. Selected Bible verses convey God’s wisdom: “Even a child is known by his actions” (Prov 20:11). Remember what your mother used to say? “Birds of a feather flock together.” Use the ones you learned from your parents or your own favorites. • Posters and pictures are valuable teaching aids. Christian bookstores have posters that teach values. Change frequently. Make some on the computer or draw or paint. Post on your family bulletin board. 3. Think. Even young children can be guided to think about their actions. Thinking about an action raises it to a conscious level and helps kids make the right decisions. 4. Adapt. Consider your child’s age, understanding, and learning style. During early childhood children are learning what is right and what is wrong.Make your teaching very specific with clear consequences for doing wrong. In late childhood (ages 6-12) focus on teaching values in a serious way. During adolescence help your teen rework the values he learned earlier so he can truly claim them as his own. REFLECT These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Deuteronomy 6:6-7 NIV The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values. William Burroughs If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values - that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control. Martin L King, Jr It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. Frederick Douglass LEARN MORE • God’s wisdom: Proverbs 31:30; Proverbs 22:29a; Proverbs 21:23; Proverbs 20:3b; Proverbs 16:3; Proverbs 15:1; Proverbs 14:30b; Proverbs 14:12. • 10 Christian Values Every Kid Should Know: A How-to Guide for Families by Donna Habenicht. See chapter 4 for specific how-to-do-it ways to teach values. • The Moral Intelligence of Children by Robert Coles • Values Education Practical Ideas and Websites k12. hi.us/~mkunimit/page13.htm • Recommended Values & Character Education Resources circle.adventist.org/ browse/?browse_node=41 Get started this week by trying one of the teaching ideas. circle.adventist.org Donna Habenicht © 2012 | Parenting Teens | circle.adventist.org/4parents This newsletter was created by CIRCLE, a service linking Seventh-day Adventist educators and resources globally.