The fact is that it is not easy to teach values today. To teach a child Mathematics or language, one requires ample expertise of that field. However, teaching a child ethics may sound very simple on the surface but it requires the whole society to educate a kid on proper grounds of liberty, equality and solidarity.
Teaching values are made even more difficult because of the competitive and consumer culture humans live in today. However, here are some things parents can do to make their kids learn in a world that won't be fair towards them.
Happiness is the foremost value that should be taught to children. To live is to be happy despite how the society tends to create misunderstandings about happiness and living peacefully among others.
According to Aha Parenting, happiness is not to have it all. Being ambitious is positive but given that, not everything will be to our liking all the time. We must learn to overcome adversity. Happiness can only be achieved in a manner where one becomes the cause of others' happiness. People need others to live and be a little happy.
There's a search for happiness that ends up being self-defeating. This happens mostly when happiness is taken as a means to an end rather than an end itself. According to the Huffington post, children most often learn that the satisfaction of every whim, the use of gifts as a solution to boredom and limitless consumption is the way to achieve instant gratification. In this way, the child ends up convincing themselves that just having and buying things can make you happy.
Happiness is not the same as humor but can be one of the manifestations of happiness. Humor is, above all, a sign of intelligence and is a resource to accept himself and to overcome the adversities. Humor helps surviving in a fickle world and makes one feel liberated.
People tend to think that character is immutable. A child is one blank page that gets written down and filled by their genetic information, heredity and just being born into a specific culture. However so, the end result is always unknown. But then how is character formed? Teachers know this well: inculcating the habits of a child with the repetition of acts.
Parental education has no choice but to tell a child that pain inexorably awaits them. Teaching to confront and respond to pain, to accept it as inevitable when it can produce a greater good, or reject it is very important for every parent. Accept the inevitable pain is the first lesson. The second goes in the opposite direction: there is much pain in the world and it's avoidable as it depends on people to diminish or disappear.
The ultimate goal of education is that the person is able to fend for himself without too much difficulty and with maximum satisfaction possible. That order means something fundamental, which is self-esteem.
No one will dare to live at their own risk if people do not love themselves and they lack confidence and security in their abilities. It is very important for a child to accept himself and to start accepting their parents. Educating is trying to extract the best out of yourself. And that is the best and the child hardly recognizes himself, come to find out with the help of their parents if they know how to give the most favorable and less false self-image.
