Character Education - My Journey (so far) in Learning to Train Children of Good Character

A little over a year ago, I realized that my parenting was undergoing a major shift. Or maybe I realized that my parenting needed to experience a major shift.

What happened last year? My oldest child turned 5. Up until then, I had millions of weaknesses as a parent, but I felt like I (mostly) knew what I was doing. As hard as it was to be consistent in training and disciplining my children, I knew what I was supposed to be doing.

And then my child turned 5. I talked to a few different people at that time. All I could say was, "Something has changed and I have no idea what it is or what to do about it." 

The issues were more complex. I began realizing that up until that point, all of my parenting was centered around establishing authority in my child's life. My young children and I have had countless conversations like this:

"Who's in charge?"

"God."

"And who did God place in authority over you?"

"Mommy and Daddy."

"Are you submitting and obeying to Mommy and Daddy's authority right now?"

and so on. (One of my children is brutally honest with their thoughts. When asked who's in charge, this child had a long season of usually offering their own name.)

Anyway, as I began slowly learning, at some point (around the age of 5 or 6), children begin to experience a larger world with more freedom and more decisions.

I re-watched Getting to the Heart of Parenting by Paul Tripp. He described my situation perfectly. As we were working to train our children's hearts, we were moving from authority to character. This explanation was so perfectly what I needed to hear.

And then he laid out a brilliant theology of what character issues truly are. They're a question of worship.

"Your children don't so much need character management as they need worship realignment. They don't first have a character problem; they have a worship problem that produces a character problem. Because of this they need more than character critique; they need to be given insight into the worship function of their hearts and how it shapes the way they react in the relationships and situations of their daily lives.... They need to grace of insight, the grace of wisdom, the grace of patient instruction, and the grace of daily forgiveness. And our ability to give this grace to our children starts by acknowledging that the list we have considered not only describes them but us as well. The worship of our hearts gets kidnapped, too, by something in the creation, and when it does, we don't respond as we should to the people and situations in our lives. Like our children, we need a patient Father who will help us to see our hearts so we can confess what is there and reach out for the change that only he can empower. Parents who are humbly willing to confess their need of parenting care don't resent those moments when they are called by their Father to give the same care to their children."  - Paul Tripp in Parenting: Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family.

This big picture vision was necessary. I walked away thankful and renewed in my parenting efforts. But as I continued in my parenting, I found myself a bit lost and confused again. I understood what I was trying to do now and that was a major relief. But I was still a little lost as to how to get there.

I had conversations with friends. We talked through different ways of memorizing scripture, pinpointing what aspects of character to work on with our children, and various programs that are out there for studying character with our children. But I still felt like I was treading water in the middle of the ocean. These thoughts were nice, but they weren't helping me see what I needed to be doing with my children in the midst of the daily grind.

Enter Andrew Kern.

This is really the ironic part of my story. Usually when people talk about listening to Andrew Kern, they say they love listening to his philosophy, but he's just not practical enough. But when I started listening to Andrew Kern, I found all of the practical advice I needed at just that moment (I'm just going to assume that was the Lord's guiding hand).

I've learned about a million things from Andrew Kern, but for the sake of this discussion, I can pretty  much boil it down to two things. He gave me a brand new vision for what education should be. And he gave me one simple tool for daily working to form character in my children.

I quoted this definition before, but here it is again (Click here and here for a more thorough fleshing out of this definition):

I just read an article by Mystie Winckler and she put it like this:

"Character building used to be called education, but now it is talked about as some subset, an add-on we use to supplement."

Mystie says many more beautiful and incredibly practical things about how that works daily in the home so if you're working this out for yourself, I'd strongly encourage you to go read the article.

Andrew Kern gave me one simple tool for how this works in the school day. It's called the "Should Question." It works like this. Read a story together. Choose a character from the story and something that character did. Ask this question: "Should ______ have done ______?" (Click here for a little more about the "should question.")

I started using this advice immediately. And I started having beautiful conversations with my daughter. She was 5 at the time. And I was asking some pretty big questions. I didn't intend to. It just happened. Suddenly my 5 year old daughter and I were discussing world hunger and how to help the poor (You know: Give a man a fish...). But here's the thing. I just asked some simple questions. It was my 5 year old daughter talking it through. I wasn't lecturing, preaching, or offering counsel. I became the mentor. I learned to ask follow-up questions to steer the conversation. I learned to insert small thoughts here and there. And I started learning a lot from my daughter. Five-year-olds don't have all the baggage we adults do. Their innocent perspectives are lovely to consider.

This is what my daughter and I now do every day. It is the heart and soul of our education and it brings lots of joy into our relationship. Now, when I'm pre-reading the stories she'll be reading on her own (Yes, my 6-year-old child reads well enough to read all of her school books on her own - though I still choose to read some to her), I think of questions to ask her. I don't necessarily think of a question for every reading and I rarely ever think of more than one. They're not always "Should Questions" (which can be worded more creatively as well by the way), but they're always questions which work toward building a relationship with my daughter.

All of this was really helpful, but I still hadn't gotten all the way to character education in the daily grind. This is where Charlotte Mason came into my story. As I was listening to Andrew Kern, he made some references that pointed me to go back and look at Charlotte Mason again. I then spent the rest of the spring and summer beginning to study the many things this brilliant woman had to say about educating and training children.

She said this:

"We who teach should make it clear to ourselves that our aim in education is less conduct than character."

I read most of the first of Charlotte Mason's series of books on education while on vacation with my family. This one is focused on children through age 9. Here I found the next incredibly practical advice I needed to hear. In this book, Miss Mason describes a number of scenarios (Clickhere to read it yourself.) and talks through how our role as a parent (or governess, etc.) should be to continually reinforce good habits in our children because:

"The habits of the child form the character of the man." -Charlotte Mason

Stop and think about that. It really makes sense, doesn't it? I'm pretty certain everyone on earth has lied at some point, but it's the person who has a habit of lying that we label a liar.

Anyway, I said I got helpful advice. But I didn't say it was easy advice. She describes a scene where a mother is teaching her son to shut a door when he leaves a room. What is the mom to do? Remind him every time he forgets to shut the door until the habit is trained in him. But she's not to be a nag. They should be on the same team. She is always to be there as the coach - providing helpful reminders - not angry shouts (Ahem).

"Every day, every hour, the parents are either passively or actively forming those habits in their children upon which, more than upon anything else, future character and conduct depend." - Charlotte Mason

Charlotte elaborates on this concept even more in an articlewritten for The Parent's Review (a magazine she edited):

"What common error do people make about the formation of habits?

They allow lapses; they train a child to "shut the door after him" twenty times, and allow him to leave it open the twenty-first. 

With what result?
That the work has to be done over again...

...How long may it take to cure a bad habit, and form the contrary good one?
Perhaps a month or six weeks of careful incessant treatment may be enough. 

But such treatment requires an impossible amount of care and watchfulness on the part of the educator? 
Yes, but not more than is given to the cure of any bodily disease-measles, or scarlet fever, for example. "

Do you have any idea how convicting this is and how hard it is for me to hear? Anyone who knows me at all knows that I am not the type of person who will even notice that the door has been left open (or care). If I'm training a child to shut a door, it is most likely because they're driving their dad crazy by letting hundreds of flies into our house (that may or not be a real scenario from this last summer). And comparing it to caring for my sick child was not encouraging. (Do you have any idea how much I dread caring for my sick children!?)

So I found myself contemplating all of this. How can I train my children to have good habits when I don't even have good habits? How can I be consistent with this every day? How do I train my children to have good character when this whole conversation just convicts me of all the areas my character is sadly lacking?

Four thoughts came to mind:

The first was quite simple: How can I? I can't.

From Gloria Furman in Treasuring Christ When Your Hands are Full (If you haven't read this book yet, then you need to stop reading, drop everything and go find a copy RIGHT NOW):

“When we acknowledge our inability to mother our children apart from the Lord’s provision and strength, we honor God. Of course we are not able to do this work of raising children and training them in the instruction of the Lord. That’s why we desperately need the Lord!

And from Paul Tripp: "Like our children, we need a patient Father who will help us to see our hearts so we can confess what is there and reach out for the change that only he can empower. Parents who are humbly willing to confess their need of parenting care don't resent those moments when they are called by their Father to give the same care to their children."

The second had to do with what Charlotte Mason said. She emphasized that we be our child's ally: "But the little fellow has really not much power to recollect, and the mother will have to adopt various little devices to remind him; but of two things she will be careful––that he never slips off without shutting the door, and that she never lets the matter be a cause of friction between herself and the child, taking the line of his friendly ally to help him against that bad memory of his."

Since, we're in this together, I need to remember to be on my child's team. (So all that yelling I've been doing....? Yeah.)

The third thing brought me back to the beginning. What am I worshiping? What are my children worshiping? We don't first have character problems. We have worship problems that produce character problems.

And the fourth was... grace. We all need it.