“You’re OK,” utter many parents instinctively when a young child falls or bumps his or her knee. Typically, the child is unsure at first whether an actual injury has occurred. But the parent’s assumption that all is fine, combined with a lack of evidence (like blood), magically keeps the child from distress. Instead of crying or fretting, the child often follows the parent’s cue and moves on.

Now picture a child seemingly misbehaving. The typical parent’s first utterance is not “You’re OK!” Rather, it tends to be a way of conveying “you are not OK” morally — e.g., “Bad boy (or girl)! There goes my (insert unhealthy label) child!”

This is where it’s helpful to consider one of the best parenting mantras I’ve ever read.

When a child appears to misbehave, “attribute to the child the best possible motive consistent with the facts.” This quote comes from Alfie Kohn’s 2006 book Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason. (Kohn notes he learned the mantra from feminist and philosopher Nel Noddings.

Create auspicious cycles, not vicious ones

In those first moments of a child’s apparent misbehavior, Kohn say parents should refrain from catastrophizing, labeling or overreacting. For at first, “we usually don’t know for sure why a child acted the way he did.” Reasons beyond just “badness” may be at play. These could include immaturity, a lack of skill or an innocent desire to explore.

Another reason to attribute the best possible motive: parents’ beliefs about the child can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Kohn writes, “Children construct a theory about their own motives based in part on our assumptions about their motives, and then they act accordingly: ‘You think I’m just plain bad and need to be controlled all the time? Fine. Watch me act as though you’re right.’”

Rather than the vicious cycle of bad behavior that labels can foster, Kohn says assuming your child’s best motives from a young age can develop an “auspicious cycle” of moral development. He adds: “We can help kids to develop good values by treating them as though they were already motivated by those values. They thereby come to believe what’s best about themselves and live up to our trust in them.”

Because I’m a former English professor, Kohn’s parenting mantra reminded me of a similar formulation from the world of poetry.

‘First thought, best self’ parenting

The Beat Generation’s Allen Ginsberg believed in the poetic phrase “first thought, best thought.” For Ginsberg, the first thought humans have about a subject is usually the most truthful, authentic perception. His poetic philosophy championed spontaneous, uncensored lines as a way to describe reality most purely.

Granted, parenting is much different than writing poetry. And many parents’ first thoughts probably should be censored for the sake of our children. But a related, more fruitful revision of Ginsberg’s formulation for parents might be “first thought, best self.”

“First thought, best self” parenting would practice what Kohn preaches about always assuming a child’s best motives. It would also foster the growth of a child’s “best self” by fueling the “auspicious” cycle of self-esteem. In the process, we would be parenting with our “best selves” as well.

Of course, “first thought, best self” parenting is easier said than done. It is very challenging to slow our instincts, revise our assumptions and shift a mindset. But what if the facts do not end up being consistent with a child’s healthy motives? Then the misbehavior must be addressed.

But that initial moment of a parent’s reaction to children’s behavior is very important to their future morality and self-esteem. Just as we reassured children they were physically “OK” when they were little, as they grow we should also reassure them they are morally “OK.”

A final benefit of assuming a child’s best motives when they seemingly misbehave: as they grow older, they learn to attribute the same good motives to the people in their lives. For example, when their friends or even parents do things they don’t like, agree with or understand, they learn to consider possible reasons for such behavior rather than assume the worst before more facts are known. Our modeling can nudge children toward fairmindedness that fuel even more auspicious cycles. Ideally, we can help children learn to make their first thought with their best self.

Photo: © Miljan Živković /Adobe Stock.

Hey, my teenage sons — it’s time for your old man to give you a little more unwanted advice. I know the two of you are soon to start your sophomore year of high school and don’t really care for “words of wisdom” and that sort of crap; I can dig that. I also know that you are built on strong moral and intellectual foundations – cool. You are trusted and respected by the adults around you and in your peer group – well done. However …

You have been thrown into the most manic of maelstroms and the weirdest of worlds teenagers have faced in a very long time. Nothing is even close to the way it was just six months ago. Your school, your friends, your teachers will all be literally unrecognizable. There will be plexiglass everywhere, checkpoints, masks and distancing. There will be fear and anxiety in the air. Folks will be testy and it’s not gonna be a lot of fun, although you have the character to make the best of it. I think. Honestly, it’s all going to seem really unfair.

Unfairnesses, plural, are what’s being thrown at you. You know I’d take them if I could, every rotten tyrannical tomato and caustic cabbage and raunchy raw egg, but I can’t. I’m afraid it’s your turn to duck. But I’d like to help, so I’m going to tell a probably pointless story.

I knew a girl in college, the girlfriend of a very close friend of mine. She was nice, a little aloof, pretty, and very focused on her dream of becoming an actor. I got to know her well enough. We had classes and did shows together. I was around her a lot and, by the third year of school, we were fairly close. That summer we ended up in a crowd that played a lot of euchre, the card game we still play regularly. Almost every free night we had was cards and beers and music and … well, you get the picture.

And that’s when I started to notice that, well, she cheated.

Euchre is pretty easy to cheat at, especially if you can count cards, which is made even easier because you only use half the deck in the game. I’d watch carefully and see her check the bottom card, shift cards in the deck, and even move clearly ear-marked cards into her hand as she dealt. I saw that she like to pick her chair, sometimes adamant about it, and came to realize that she wanted to be next to someone who didn’t protect their cards from the eyes of others.

I didn’t call her on it. I knew that would be drama fodder for her. So, I just made sure I never sat next to her, and if I partnered with her, I played poorly. And, I knew I couldn’t trust her.

She went on to grad school I think, and we lost track of each other years ago. Recently, I reconnected with another friend from those days and we got to talking about the old times and the gang we hung with, as one does, and the cheating girlfriend came up. I said that it always bothered me that she cheated at cards and never felt I could trust her. She laughed and told me she cheated at and on everything. Tests, papers, boyfriends, friends, taxes, husbands, bosses, coworkers, games – everything.

I wasn’t terribly surprised, but I did wonder aloud why she was like that. My friend said, quite simply, that she chose it. Apparently, she’d been a good and honest girl all the way until she got to high school. Then she lost a brother in Vietnam. Her parents divorced. A dog died. All sorts of unfairnesses plagued her and, she decided if life was going to be so cruel and arbitrary, she’d stop playing fair. She made a decision to change her life for, well, the worse.

Forgivable? That’s your call, but I don’t think so.

So, what’s my point here?

Don’t cheat, that’s all.

I know, I know, you are both not wired that way. I’ve seen both of you actively not cheat: calling your own foul ball in a baseball game, telling the ref the ball was out on you on the soccer pitch, realizing you’d seen another’s hand in a card game.

Here’s the problem, boys, you’re going to see some folks cheating this year. With the mix of half in school and half online learning the stage is set for it. I’ve seen article after article on the problem in magazines and online in the past few weeks. And, to make matters worse, you’re going to see a lot of kids justify it by saying if life can be this unfair, why should I care if I cheat? Why does it even matter?

One word. See if you can get it from its definition: The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.

Correct: integrity.

People see integrity in others, I guarantee it. I see integrity in you.

You will, also, see the lack of it in others for the whole of your lives. In swampy politics, sketchy business models, even in salacious, pointless entertainment shows and a broken music scene. People are dishonest, people cheat, people use others and disregard resources and do not follow rules (I am looking at you anti-maskers). For the honest among us, that hurts and, worse, tempts us toward the same devious chicanery we see others blithely get away with.

I see the potential for this year challenging your integrity. I don’t know how to tell you to defend it, but I know you need to try. Defending it will ask for courage, decency, honor and truth in a world that devalues all those values.

Good luck and come to us when you are struggling, I was a bartender for 30 years and have some stories to tell about cheats and frauds and how things worked out for them — honestly, it never well. I’ve also seen the best people lead the best lives because they protected themselves and their souls — that place where integrity lives.

C.S. Lewis said: “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”

I say it all the time: Just do the next right thing. That’s always what you need to do. And sometimes, that is a very difficult call. I know you’re up for it, and I think your generation is as well.

***

Advice is hard … Here, this one’s easier and succinct: Don’t fry bacon naked. You’ll thank me for that someday.

Peace boys, it’s a tough time to be 15. I’m truly sorry for that.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bill Peebles left a 30-year career in the restaurant business to become a stay-at-home dad to twin boys. He writes a blog, I Hope I Win a Toaster, that makes little sense. He coaches sometimes, volunteers at the schools, plays guitar, and is a damn good homemaker. He believes in hope, dreams, and love … but not computers.

Photo: © Zoran Zeremski / Adobe Stock.

Editor’s Note: Pairing religion and raising children is a feat many parents struggle with handling. But not guest columnist Bill Peebles, who writes about his attempt to teach faith to his sons.

The light lingers over the lake, the boat bobs, tubing is done for today. My twin boys and their new friend from school are using towels as capes. The sun has kept us out later than we should be, and we have a 45-minute drive home. It’s time.

“Let’s get going, boys, it’s late and you’ll have to get up in the morning,” I shout down the hill from the deck we’ve been enjoying. They are done, sunburnt and weary. They head our way.

“Watcha gotta do in the morning, dude?” the new friend asks.

“We have to go to Mass.”

A blank stare from the boy.

“You know, church.”

“Wait, you guys go to church?” the new boy asks.

Without missing a beat, my other son says, “Wait, you don’t?”

We teach children faith how we were taught

I grew up going to the Heritage Presbyterian Church, on, you guessed it, Church Street in the great Midwest. I’ve never not gone to church, even in my groggiest college days. I’m not talking every week, just as often as I could.

My wife grew up attending Catholic schools, sang in choirs, and was one of the first girl altar servers her church allowed at the time. She was a youth minister for a number of years and works in ministry still. She’s gone to Mass regularly for as long as she remembers.

There was no doubt our kids were going to church. You’d probably guess there was some difficult decision-making that had to be done. Nope, not really. We went with the one with incense and water and coded garments and saints.

It’s time for me to be a bit more honest. I’m not a good Christian. The dogma borders on myth to me. I’m uncomfortable with some of it, unsure. Religion asks a lot of a man, in my opinion. It sets him up for failure, doubt and pain. So, why do we go to church?

The sunset is spectacular out my rear­view; high cirrus clouds take the red light and bend them pink here and orange there in stripes across the sky. The familiar, comforting voice of Marty Brennaman calls the Reds game on the radio, three to two in the seventh. The country road cuts through cornfields, forgotten little towns with unnecessary stoplights, and down a long hill that leads us home. It is pastoral, serene, simple, right.

A boy sighs audibly, the scent is grape Jolly Rancher. The other boy says in a quiet voice, “Thank you, God, for this beautiful day.”

I whisper, “Amen.” They doze off and I am left to contemplate in the quiet, now sacred, cab of an old F-150.

The simple beautiful basics of faith

You see, if you set the theology aside and forgo the dogma, there is great simplicity in faith. In seven words, my son pretty much summed up where 50 years of hard thinking got me. Prayer, thanksgiving, beauty.

I want my sons to pray. Not this specific prayer or that one. No, their own prayer. I hardly believe prayers are answered — people die, lotteries are lost, tests failed­ — and I learned long ago not to ask for things. But prayer makes you listen. When you ask Yahweh or Mary or Buddha or Ra for answers, you have to find them. They’re between your heartbeats, behind a setting sun, between the stars. They are there in the moment between the breaths of two dozing man-­cubs in the backseat of a red Ford truck.

I want my sons to give thanks. My question for those unfaithed ­– for lack of a better word –­ has always been, “To whom do you give thanks?” In this crazy, selfish world, it is easy to become the center of everything.

Giving thanks changes that. It is an admission of vulnerability, of need, of humility. The joy of giving thanks, outwardly, overwhelms the vague smugness of self-praise. It’s never mattered where the thanks go –­ upward, downward, inward –­ what matters is the search for thankfulness in the rooms of the heart marked “Love and Kindness” and “Truth and Beauty.”

I want my sons to see beauty. Sunsets, trees, cathedrals, oceans, faces, eyes, hearts ­– it is everywhere. In beauty, one sees the mask of, well, I’ve tried to avoid it, but, God, and behind the mask is … I dunno, truth? Somethingelseness?

One of my sweet boys, 3-years-old at the time, thought a dethorned rose was so beautiful he carried it around like a touchstone for a whole day. The next morning it was wilted and he was sad but thought it was “still sorta beautiful,” I’m still not sure if he meant the rose or the rose’s story. Another time, we sat on a soccer pitch on a warm fall evening and watched the sunset. The other boy, then 8 years of age, said it was “glorious,” which it was. He knew the science of it all, but he still offered the question, “Why would God do this for us?” Grace, I whispered.

Children are ill-prepared for theology and dogma. Without the benefit of experience, the tales of commandments and compassion and resurrection and redemption are jumbled in detail and mystery. What a child learns from these stories­ — common across cultures — ­ is that there are rules and justice, that love is way important, that renewal and do­-overs are possible. It is not the “redeemed one” that’s important, it’s that there is a redemption song.

I don’t know, then, if I can teach faith to my sons.

I can show them mine, though.

And, they can show me theirs.

It is dark in the driveway. I open the back door. My breath catches as the soft light shines on two slumbering, sweatshirted, rosy little boys, and I offer up a quiet prayer of thanksgiving for these beautiful, beautiful boys, and, before my breath starts again, I know it has been heard.

One little boy stirs, “Oh, thank God, we’re Home.”

And yes, he did capitalize “Home.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bill Peebles left a 30-year career in the restaurant business to become a stay-at-home dad to twin boys. He writes a blog, I Hope I Win a Toaster, that makes little sense. He coaches sometimes, volunteers at the schools, plays guitar, and is a damn good homemaker. Bill believes in hope, dreams, and love … but not computers.

Photo: Ernesto via photopin (license) Tag: Teach faith