Morals teaching to children/teenagers

[SilverDNA]

I made this topic up because this emerged surfaced as a sister / brother topic of "Topples Equality" that we might have a biases in gender equality because of wrong moral standards we give to our children.

 

1st I have no children. I have maybe more questions due to that circumstance as someone who has children. So please be indulgent with me.

 

I made the observation that a child that is open doesn't view the world with the same morals adults have. In fact they are mostly are more open on how and why things work and like to ask questions or try out things out of curiosity.

 

I'm no expert but I think curiosity is more valuable than blind obedience and a hard drill regimen, for it might lead a child to openness and an own independent intellect so they can be more and more be self-confident to think on it heir own when they become a teenager and more or at least as an adult. So it is the opposite believe of the book now published by Amy Chua.

 

I believe the morals come from those who raised us in combination with a group mentality we develop as well as the personality of the child. On viewing my own changes in moral ways and believes I have come up to the conclusion that wrong morals that are very early raised are the hardest to fight back in later live.

 

And I know it takes a lot of time to raise a child today, but most parents today have jobs and might not have the time to raise a child this way. So this is a component as well that should be taken in account.

 

For many children media have take over education and giving them moral values that lead at least in one point back to our Sister/ Brother debate "Topless Equality" In the media you can see mostly beautiful people in expensive fashioned clothing that give a wrong general view of the people and fashion of our world and thus implementing a wrong moral imperatives of beauty and fashion with the children. In extreme this can lead to health and life threatening illnesses and disabilities to someone who grows up.

 

So I raise simple question of what can we do better?

Why we should do it?

And to close the circle of my post:

Can it be done right?

Edited February 5, 2011 by SilverDNA

[WastelandAssassin]

this is a wonderful question, and is sure to be an interesting debate

 

now, i am just 18 (19 soon), so i can't say much about raising children and educating them, but i can tell you what i see with people i know, and how the youngsters of today seems to me

 

to me, as someone who recently graduated from highschool, it seems that there are two main groups that are meant to educate children

this is the family (from the small family to however far you want to go, as long as you see the people often enough) and school

however, both of these are problematic

 

if you look at your parents, or even more so, at your grandparents, it is without doubt that they grew in a different age, and so have lived a very different life

so whatever they have grown on (in terms of morals and ways of life), many of these just won't fit with children today (aside from the basic morals like basic human rights)

with your parents it may not be so bad, but there is still a gap, and this one is quite hard to breach

 

with school, it is even worse

consider the fact that children are rather rebellious, they usually find it hard to accept morals thought in schools (or even in pre-schools), and that is after putting aside the age difference (and so the moral difference)

there is also another factor, and that is peer pressure, which is another major problem

kids need to fit in (it is much harder to be an outsider when you are young), and so kids will do many things (even horrible ones) in order to find "friends", which is another block on the way to learning good morals

 

and as a last, but possibly worst problem, this is the (usually virtual) environment

i know that for the newer generations, TV and computers are just as normal as food (maybe even more than other basic needs)

kids today are born with a TV remote in one hand, and a joystick in the other

and to tell the truth, the content that children absorb today is just a disgrace (at least on many cases, if not most cases)

kids today, if allowed to learn from TV, will grow up to be a bunch of whiny idiots who believe they own the world (and hence will have nothing)

 

so there are many problems with properly raising children

what can be done?? i don't really know

however, i can tell what i think is a good place to start

 

like you said, children are curious by nature

so allow them to learn from their curiosity, but don't let mistakes go without just punishment (it could be anything from being mad at them, to giving serious punishments for the extra horrible deeds)

also, force your children to work (on school, on reading, and other educational activities), or even to go and play with friends

anything that will limit how much BS they absorb will do a lot of good

 

and one last thing, i would say you should encourage uniqueness

i have seen many people dressing up in the "cool way" and talking in a specific way and all, and in the end, it only makes us look like mindless robots

so give them some free leash, but also hold the boundaries, otherwise you will raise a generation of violent rebels and marauders

 

that is, at least, my perspective as an man-in-the-becoming

[Harbringe]

I think life has a way of being the final teacher of morality and all the strictures our parents or society tries to instill in us are more like guidelines.Those who don't discover that morality life has to offer ,will for ever have their lives and actions being dictated by another .Suffering I think is a great teacher ,because through suffering you can learn empathy and once you can have empathy for another creature or human being, morality becomes easy to see and know.

 

Strangely enough my first understanding of this came from the Bugs Bunny Looney Tunes cartoon when I was four years old. That Wiley E Coyote had been trying to get that Roadrunner using dynamite and no matter what he did that Roadrunner would outsmart him and give him back the dynamite and kaboom would go the Coyote.Well this happened over and over again to the point where I as a child was talking to the TV saying, Why Mr Coyote do you keep taking the dynamite don't you know whats going to happen.So Coyote comes up with his big final plan to get Roadrunner and of course Roadrunner watches him every step of the way and at end yet again hands coyote the dynamite and is about to run away but stops looks at Coyote all shivering there waiting to go kaboom ,gets sorrowful look ,sighs and zips in and snips off the fuse with his beak and gives his meep meep and runs away.Coyote was so happy at not going kaboom he forgot about Roadrunner and trotted off whistling a tune and clicking his heels.

 

So in my own life I learned you didn't always need to squish that bug or take that tadpole out of the pollywog pond ,maybe I should think about those guys and what its like to be squished or taken from your home .Also learned never take dynamite from a Roadrunner .

[marharth]

I think modern society makes teenagers look like they are retarded and can't make decisions on their own...

 

 

 

I think that morals are taught wrong, but if your around 13 and don't have a good set of morals already then your pretty much screwed for life.

[crimsonedge11]

Children have a more naive view of the world, due to their lack of wisdom and understanding that adults possess through real life experiences. I started to change my view on lots of things the older I got. At 28 I look at the world way differently than I did when I was 18. Mostly due to the wisdom gained in those 10 years. Everything from political views, to general outlook on the world changed. Edited February 5, 2011 by crimsonedge11

[Aurielius]

I agree that children have a more naive view of the world but also one without preconceptions. In most cases a child's view of they various types,races and variety of people is colored by their environment. By that I mean the parents, localized society and peer groups form patterns of response behavior that in the main follow them through life. The question of nature versus nurture has been going on for as long as people have been raising children, personaly I think it's a blend of both. Though the psychological make up of a child can be highly biased in one direction or another within the first ten years of life as noted by Thomas Aquinas on the moral side and Hitler on the less moral side. All in all there is no manual for raising children that guarantees a perfect result, it is very much a flying by the seat of your pants affair.

[BlackBaron2]

Another interesting point, perhaps:

Little kids aren't body-phobic. I'm talking about toddlers, really, not so much school-age kids. Body phobia and self-loathing based on body image come later, or so it seems. I don't understand why people teach their kids, even indirectly, that the body is shameful and disgusting, but it happens. :(

[RobCoPublicReassurance]

I don't believe morals should be taught to anyone. Children should be given the critical thinking skills and the information needed to draw their own conclusions, instead of having their parent's morals programmed into them.

[marharth]

I don't believe morals should be taught to anyone. Children should be given the critical thinking skills and the information needed to draw their own conclusions, instead of having their parent's morals programmed into them.

I take back some of what I said.

 

I agree with you.

[SilverDNA]

I don't believe morals should be taught to anyone. Children should be given the critical thinking skills and the information needed to draw their own conclusions, instead of having their parent's morals programmed into them.

Since critical thinking can't be thought without a basic set of morals such like the moral concept of respect for your teacher give you the values of free well and thinking, and since the word programming was uses as negative example on teaches from parents I assume the concept must be based on the social morals of society and the socialization concept of a person on that value is to cannot be be right, because I don't know any nation on this world that has not only the moral concepts of lawful and unlawful but as well the tendencies to rate social behavior as good and bad on the moral level.Never one nation has it gotten it completely right and can be scientifically proven to makes here and there errors, as well on more than a single level of morals, because the moral concepts is not constantly overlooked in a scientifically way, and according to that is basically overruled by the behavior of the broad mass of society it self and society views are biased there aswell so this can't be set as standard as well. This leads me to the conclusion that there are not principal good or bad moral values ll can agree upon.

 

Thinking on further on the way of the words I quoted above I would like to approach them now in a hypothetical in a science fictional / Franke'n'Stein way to explain why I think this not a argument that could work:

If there would be to programed a chip with critical thinking only but without morals and implanted to work in a little child or baby. (leaving the morals quarrels against such a method would arises because it would be soon there after abused by those who have power and and money to have some loyal slaves. or the way George Orwell described in 1984) then it would in this society question all things that are going on and this would lead to a repulsion to the person who is having a chip in his brain that works this way because people that criticize (opportunism) aren't held up in high esteem by todays society. I believe such a treatment of a person with critical thinking chip would either lead to that point where the person commit sooner or later suicide or that the person would on the other hand choose the path of a sociopath.

The hypothetical approach on that all can have astrophysical effect and side effects on the whole society as shown so i think it is not usable method as a stand alone concept of values to be the critical thinking model cannot stand alone without moral values. I personally would rather approach the method of free spirit and free thinking more as basis in combination with basic morals, but never without morals.

 

Therefore my personal opinion is that this is not the right way of approach to the moral education problems of today.