As a parent, your role in parenting is much greater than milestones or learning. Parenting is about the shaping of your children into kind, compassionate, and responsible citizens, and it all begins at home with you as their first role model. One of the greatest gifts you can give your children is to instill values at young ages. This blog demonstrates parent-based practical ways to teach children values and how the family can support preschoolers in their moral education through the rhythm of daily life and interactions.
Why Teaching Some Values at Home Is Important?
The Foundation to Character
Values are the building blocks of character. It is values such as honesty, respect, kindness, and responsibility that allow a child to engage with others and meet challenges that come their way. Teaching child values at a preschool age and practice at home is essential to raising children who are socially aware and emotionally healthy people.
Supporting the Learning at the Preschool Level
Preschool is an entry point for children to experience moral education. While preschool is an educational experience, home is the child’s primary learning experience. The primary learning experience of daily home interactions can reinforce and support what is learned at preschool school on social and moral values. Continuous and consistent practice to support positive traits at home leads to supporting positive social and moral learning at preschool. For children who are focused on developing as people, moral education is aligned with academic growth.
Long Learning Experience
Values learned at a young age form the foundation for decision-making for a lifetime.For example, values learned in the preschool years help a child develop friendships in preschool, carry children into work tasks as adults, etc. Character building in preschool is a lifelong connection.
The Importance of Parents in Teaching Values
Modeling as a Parent
Children will do what they see or know. When parents model values such as honesty, patience, or kindness, they are providing children with valuable examples to take along. Modeling values in each interaction during daily living, rather than just telling children what they should do, is a more effective approach.
Create a Supportive Home Learning Environment
When a child is in an environment of respect, openness, and empathy, it may be easier for them to feel supported and to learn in that environment too. Children generally learn best when their voices matter, their feelings are validated, and kindness is part of their day-to-day life.
A Loving and Disciplinary Tone
Without using proper boundaries, values eventually will not grow, and discipline is how they are enforced. Good discipline practices that embrace loving and firm guidance give children that moment to think about the message while still allowing children and adults to develop trust in one another. Discipline is never about punishing the child, but helps parents and children work toward developing a sense of responsibility and being accountable.
Values You Can Reinforce at Home
Honesty and Integrity
Honesty creates trust! Teach children honesty, admitting mistakes, and consideration for being honest over convenience.Whenever you can, use a common occurrence (a toy that broke) to help create a teaching moment about preschool values.
Respect and Empathy
Respect of the feelings and opinions of other people, as well as a person’s personal space, affects the retention of every relationship. To assist children in learning, listen and reflect, while thinking about how another person felt helped children learn empathy, one of several value-based characteristics during preschool.
Responsibility and Independence
Children operate with more confidence when simple responsibilities (at appropriate ages) are given (picking up their toys etc.). Responsibility and independence help develop value characteristics and continue to strengthen preschool character education.
Kindness and Compassion
Small acts of kindness (similar to sharing toys, or admiration for a pet) teach a child compassion. Parents can reinforce and praise children when they express themselves using those characteristics and demonstrate the kind person they are to the world around them. This is yet another way to help make the world we live in a healthy and nurturing place.
Suggestions for Parents of Teaching Values
Using A Simple Routine
An example of using routine events as a real-world opportunity to teach values. For example, a simple everyday routine event is turning off a light when you leave a room. Turing off that light is a fairly simple example of taking responsibility for our world. Eating meals and joining one another can promote thankfulness and family connection.
Literature
Literature can be very meaningful to children.Fairy tales, fables, or moralistic books give us common examples of our values like fair, brave, purposeful kindness, and respect. Discussing the moral when read aloud helps children learn norms about values and incorporate those values into their preschool lives.
Family Routines and Traditions
Little family habits like thanking each other at meals, showing elderly adults respect at school, donating clothes no longer fitting, and being helpful to others reinforce respect and kindness. Family routines give values into children’s everyday use of living, and contributing to children’s learning and education at home.
Ideas for Parents to Practice:
Encourage dialogue
Encourage dialogue! If children have inquiries like, ” Why do we not lie?…”, then sure to give reasoning and examples of the why; that will help children use their own sense of the morality of the value message. Rather than relying on a script to respond with a value.
Positive Reinforcing
The number one thing that you may do is recognize the behavior. A simple smile, hug or good job recognition in values, will validate the more important positive situation. The mere fact you are the adult who recognizes the child may do something inappropriate wrong is not as powerful as recognizing or positive validation in the moment of a recognized situation. Once you get into the swing of not recognizing the inappropriate behaviors, support them in honest behaviors with an additional rewarding value since we are supporting them in acting on behalf of honesty or kindness toward other children.
Be a united parenting team
Both caregivers need to be united when parents intervene on a child’s actions or behavior.If one parent is fine with dishonesty and the other does not want to model dishonesty, a child might be confused and a teacher would also be unsure how to model that value.
Support Your Child’s Preschool Teach Values
Communicating with Teachers
Consistency will be established when there is open, regular, and healthy communication from home to school. Teachers whom we give home strategies on how each child learns values too at home, and also let parents know what activities they use in preschool to practice for example, sharing, respect, etc. all demonstrate this reflection.
Preschools Learning Activities for Values
Role-playing, group games, cooperative play, they are all valuable learning activities for preschoolers to practice learning values in the lives of the children. For example, provided a group story (with interconnected stories) that allows the children the opportunity to model fair and teamwork skills.
Read more : Top 10 Activities Every Preschool Curriculum Should Have
Helping preschool character development
When a preschool makes a point to model manners, empathy, and being responsible followed by parents modeling for children to emulate or echo the preschool learned lessons, the preschool value become important storylines.
Discipline Suggestions for Values
Say what boundaries clearly
Boundaries give children the chance to be taught self-control a way to respect rules. Parent can provide a clear and simple picture what it expected and why.
Allow for Natural Consequences
Using natural consequences instead of punitive action is more effective with children when it is a mistake. For example, if a child is asked to clean up their toys, but doesn’t, once it is time to pick up the toys and playtime is lost, the natural consequence of their actions is that they feel a loss of time to play with their toys later. This is simply the natural consequence of not picking up their toys, as things are no longer in order/expected state.
Teaching Problem Solving
When children are learning to think about thinking about possible solutions, it helps build independence and resilience. For example, if some siblings are fighting over a toy, ask them how they can work it out! How can they come up with their own compromises, and/or take turns, etc. Helping children grok about fairness, as well as, the social expectations of empathy, and fairness with peers develop children’s norms for interacting with others.
Barriers to Addressing Children’s Values Education
Impact of Technology
Technology can provide distractions of varying amounts of time for children in a day- such as: watching a program, or, playing a game on an app. But technology could also offer opportunities for things like educational shows, apps, or books to read that could educate your child around things like empathy, cooperative play, and kindness.
Pleasing Friends
Children can learn rules for behavior from peers. As a parent, they can counter negative or misleading behavior and/or concepts, through discussion and reinforcement of values that they have learned. For example, if a parent is aware their child had problems with their friends, they can facilitate a conversation around the child’s earlier behavior.
Time Constraints
Busy parenting is a struggle/challenge that many families experience. However, busy parents can teach some values to their children, irrespective of how chaotic or busy their life may be. For example, a 5 minute conversation before bed, or, involving child in something like meal prep, can provide multiple points of learning values or manners throughout the day.
Long-Term Benefits of Teaching Values
Strong Character
Children that are raised around consistent values will find they are as a whole more confident, self-aware, etc., thus, are expected to be more ethical thinkers and/or decision makers about their lives as well as building meaningful relationships.
Becoming Citizens
In summary, teaching values in the home setting serves the dual purpose of providing benefits to society. Therefore, children who grow up valuing empathy, kindness, and honesty are positioned with an expected increased potential to become valuable citizens and contributors to their communities.
In Conclusion
Values are not taught in a day, they are taught over time when you have love, modeling, and practice around these values in you child’s day to day throughout their childhood. Parents can model good behavior while they are talking children down/up from an anxiety-provoking experience around behavior. Parents might also reinforce their child’s daily upbringing at home by increasing the rules of the house related core values.
Parental involvement in engaging with children around discussing values is great as toddlers all the way to 12 years. When kids experience that their siblings/friends behavior in comparison to the core values they experience at home, is disruptive to their new learning around moral character and citizenship.
When children delight in the empathy, kindness, honesty, and social responsibility that is learned about home, they fortify the purpose of moral education.” Moral education “and core value teaching. “to improve the world through a child”.
Read Also : Preschool Teaching Methodology: Find the Best Approach
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