Especially for Families

by brigitte
In my own childhood and over the years, I have come to understand how children use experimentation to figure out what’s right and wrong. As an Early Childhood educator, I saw many 3 year-olds try out biting, to strong feedback from the victim and adults. They learned immediately that biting was not acceptable. I also did my own amount of testing as a kid. In first grade, I entertained my neighbors in California with an elaborate lie about how I was going to be on TV. My dinner table conversation with my parents that night made it clear that truth telling was a better way to go. Then there were my attempts at shoplifting a stick of gum, crawling into an abandoned house and other experiments of adolescence. C.S. Lewis calls integrity “Doing the right thing when no one is watching.” I certainly was trying out doing the wrong thing, hoping no one was watching. I don’t think I was extraordinarily bad. Just curious and a bit creative.
And that’s the spirit we hope pervades your experience this month: curiosity and creativity. Too often integrity is framed in terms of good and bad people, of people knowing what’s right and either following or ignoring it. But we know that it’s more complicated than that. Doing “the right thing” is rarely clearly cut. Every situation is different, and complicated. So it requires curiosity and creativity to sort it out. Maybe what our children need most is adults who talk with them about “the adventure of integrity” more than “adherence to integrity.”
Katie, on behalf of the entire Soul Matters Team
DRE for Soul Matters
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