I almost hate to admit it, but I enjoy country music. The songs talk about everything that matters—my momma, my young ‘uns, my hometown, my friends, and of course, my hubby. But as much as I love country music, every now and then I hear a completely bizarre song that makes me wonder about my choice of listening material. Gretchen Wilson hit the charts hugely last year with “Red Neck Woman”, which I like. But when I heard her love ballad, I initially thought it was a joke. The message is, “when I think about cheating, I think about you leaving.”
Right. I can just imagine how well that would go over with my husband. Just picture it: he’s sitting comfortably in a chair, and I start rubbing his shoulders, whispering, “oh, honey, sometimes I’m checking out other guys, and they look really good, I mean really good, and I think about what it would be like to be with them, and I’m tempted to go, but then I think, you’d leave, so I let the guys go.” Is that the picture of domestic bliss, or what?
Psychologists actually have a term for this. It’s called arrested moral development. We humans are supposed to pass through several moral stages in childhood. First, we don’t do things out of fear of getting punished. Next, we want to do what’s right, so we try to ascertain community standards and live by them. The third stage is rarely reached. It’s when people try to live according to universal principles of moral behaviour, regardless of what the community believes, because these principles produce a better community in the end.
Gretchen Wilson, then, appears to be morally four years old. Instead of not cheating because it’s the wrong thing to do, because it would hurt her spouse, and because it would cause her emotional pain to be a cheater, she simply doesn’t cheat because he might leave. She doesn’t want the punishment.
Some love song. Yet I wonder how many of our children are stuck at that first stage, too. After all, we don’t only want to teach our kids the rules (don’t cheat), we want them to internalize them (I don’t want to be the kind of person who cheats). If all they do is try to avoid punishment, then when the threat of punishment is gone, they’ll do all sorts of horrible things. And one day you won’t be there to give out those punishments.
It sort of reminds me of slippery fingers Svend Robinson, who only showed remorse for stealing when he was caught on video. And then he had the gall to blame a medical condition, rather than his own lack of integrity. He didn’t care about being the kind of guy who steals; only about being the kind of guy who gets caught.
To get our kids to stage two, so that they can surpass Grethen and Svend, we have to teach them the importance of doing what’s right. Ironically, this initially requires focusing on those first stage punishments, because that’s what teaches kids right and wrong. If our punishments are well thought-out, explained, and consistent, our kids are more likely to understand these distinctions. If we randomly mete out punishments, kids won’t know what’s right and wrong. They’ll feel that it’s arbitrary, and they’ll spend their lives not trying to find moral rules, but trying to gauge how likely you are to blow up at them. So if cleaning one’s room is important to you, for instance, then set a rule that the room has to be cleaned before they do something fun, and stick to it. If you let the rule slide for a couple of months, and then yell loud enough to lift the roof when your patience is gone, kids learn not that they have to clean their room, but that they have to avoid your tantrums.
Next, make sure punishments are fair. Kids know when they’ve done something wrong, but punishing them exorbitantly for minor offences doesn’t teach them good lessons as much as it breeds resentment. So don’t ground a kid for a month for calling his little brother names, but don’t let it go, either.
It’s not easy to think up creative punishments, and it’s even more difficult to be consistent, especially when there are other things you’d rather be doing. But you have to teach them the rules, so that one day those rules will become their own. So be consistent, be fair, and tell them why you think moral behaviour is important. It’s a lot of work, but hey, maybe then they’ll grow up understanding what a real love song is.
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