Clear your desks, please. Get out your pencil and put away your books. Here’s a pop quiz on supply chain behavior: Values in the pipeline our kids may have witnessed.
Do you talk about other people in demeaning ways?
Is it normal to hold grudges in your household?
How about competition? Always imagining someone else has a better break.
How do you describe your children? Do they measure up to your standards of performance or beauty?
Few can build confidence by hearing parents discuss merits or deficiencies.
Either way, there aren’t many of us — young or old — who feel good overhearing ourselves discussed.
Even praise of children is awkward when they’re struggling. Our kids know when they’re being pumped up, just as they know when they are being demeaned, especially with faint praise.
Loving kindness may be better expressed without appraisal.
People are also reading…
Friends were shocked when they discovered that I was an avid fan of “The Sopranos,” the HBO series on the Mafia. What? I watched a violent show?
But assassinations take place all the time. Sometimes, we participate by the words we use, attitudes we convey, the stand we fail to take, or the lie we allow.
Children are watching. Children are listening closely even if, or especially when they feign indifference. Children are reading us even if they don’t like reading library books.
Our young ones know which attitudes are acceptable to us. They absorb our tolerance for holding grudges or constant competition and blame. On the other hand, they also recognize if we understand such chain reactions as ways to diminish our own lives.
When parents talk about their siblings in their families of birth, they are teaching their children how to treat their own brothers and sisters. Sometimes families must navigate terrible dilemmas — addiction, disease and sudden disaster — that feel too awful to face.
I commend those who have the courage to express empathy and give the other the benefit of the doubt rather than shaming. Every time we extend mercy, we aid our young in learning the complexities they will encounter in their lives.
“Well, I wasn’t there,” is one of the phrases I hope I’ll choose to use in questionable situations. Or, if I was there, my trust is that I can find a way to respect the human qualities of those involved rather than assume I know what I probably do not.
When I’m angered beyond measure I take myself to a place apart from people to stomp, brood and scream. Better yet, I find someone I respect who’s licensed to listen and tell it all. Dump the angst, heartache or severe disappointment where no one else will be contaminated.
The social services for a domestic violence division in a district attorney’s office of a large city once asked me to help formulate a series of programs for public awareness. We titled it “Children Are Watching.”
As the director gave details of the collateral damage a child can accrue just from being part of an abusive living space, the profiles she related sickened me. Even when the small ones are not being targeted themselves, they may sustain lifelong injury.
Children need to witness our bravery in taking a stand even if it means we stand alone.
We can choose to build each other up through compassion, mercy and forgiveness. Making such habits in ourselves will be evident in the atmosphere of our homes. The opposite is always possible too, of course.
So, dear friends who are parents, teachers, pianists, bankers, techies, realtors, pilots and vintners, store keepers, retirees, business people, restaurateurs, librarians, singers, poets and preachers: we’re a supply chain of values for which we can take credit. One way or another.
Audrey Ward wrote the column “Regarding Children” for six years as the founder and executive director of HomePeace and subsequently, The Children’s Council, in a rural county of Northern California; during this time she was also a United Methodist pastor. She again offers it as a retired mother of two daughters and a son; four granddaughters and two grandsons, all of whom she considers her true educators.
