The Meridian Family Value of the Month — Introduction
By Richard and Linda Eyre

Today is a red-letter day for Meridian and for LDS families, because today Meridian will launch a program that is designed to strengthen families.  The Meridian Family Value series will feature a new family value every month, together with suggestions on how that family value can be taught in the home.

We are honored to be involved in this program, because we believe that

1. The family is the basic unit of society.
2. Society will change only as the families within it change.
3. Families are strengthened by the ingraining of fundamental values.

We are personally more aware than ever before of the powerful forces that unite the families of the whole world despite the forces that are trying to divide and destroy them.  On a recent speaking tour, we went around the globe twice and spoke in 38 different locations on parenting and on Teaching Children Values. (Look at the picture of the back of a "world tour” t-shirt that our concert-going kids had us put together.) 

Family values “world tour” t-shirt

We were in Budhist, Muslim, Hindu, and Christian countries, in places of affluence and poverty, in very liberal and very conservative societies, and were with parents from vastly varied circumstances and perspectives. 

And guess what?  When it came to their children, to the concerns and hopes and emotions they felt for them, and to the basic values they wanted to teach them, they were all the same!  Whatever it may be that divides us on this planet, none of it is as strong as what unites us when it comes to our feelings for our children and our desires about what they should learn and how they  should live. 

One father in Thailand said, "A good definition of a conservative is 'a flaming liberal with a teenage daughter.'"  A mother in Indonesia said, "What I want most is for my children to be better people than I am, and live a happier life than I have."  And a couple in India who were planning to send their children to the U.S. for college but worried about them losing their identity, paraphrased our old Mormon cliché almost word for word when they said, "We want our children to be able to operate in the bigger world, but not to be of that world." 

Men and women all over the world want the same things for their families.

What a joy to be part of an effort what essentially says, "Since all of us parents essentially want the same values for our children, let's unite and work together in teaching those values — sharing our ideas, our worries, and our methods as we focus and concentrate and work on the same value each month"!

The Meridian site is the perfect place to do it.  We all log on often, we read the articles that interest us, and while we are here, we look at the Meridian Family Value of the Month and pick up on the ideas that we think will work with our kids.  And when we each discover something that works in our own home, we take a minute the next time we are on Meridian to submit it so other parents can try it too.

Sometimes parenting can be a pretty lonely proposition.  We sit in our own home in our own little part of the world, and we think no one else has quite as hard a time with getting a child to mind, or to pick up his stuff, or to stop fighting with her brother, or to stop spending so much time with kids who are a bad influence, or to stay off the X-Box or the wrong part of the Internet.  And much of our parenting is reactionary or "defensive" — just trying to correct and to discipline and to stop bad things from getting worse. 

The idea of the Meridian Family Value off the Month is to empower and unite us as parents, to give us the motivation and encouragement of knowing that tens if not hundreds of thousands of parents, spread throughout the world, are working with their kids on the same value that you are working on this month. 

And the other idea of it is to give us an offense that lets us be proactive as parents rather than reactive and always on the defense.  Teaching our children specific values — really ingraining basic values into their souls — is an initiative of the first order, and it will prevent many of the problems that we would otherwise spend forever trying to defend against.

The Meridian Family Value program will strengthen your family tree from the roots to the highest leaf.

This whole program is based on four basic premises:

1. There are certain universal values that are part of every religious and moral tradition and that parents everywhere want for their children because they know that they lead to a happier and fuller life. LDS parents are particularly attuned to these values and can take a leadership role in making them available (and attractive) to parents everywhere.
2. These specific values can be clearly identified and taught to children.  What it takes is focus and concentration on each value for a defined period — with methods that are tried and proven.  And it takes repetition.  This focus and this repetition can be facilitated by defining and refining moral principles into twelve Values — one for each month — and then by concentrating for a full month on a particular value.  At the end of each year, the twelve values can "start over" in families where each child is now a year older and will learn the same values on a new level each year.
3. Different methods for teaching each value will work best for different families with different age children in different situations.  Parents do best when they have a lot of ideas and methods to choose from, and when they can both receive and share methods from and with other parents.
4. There is no better place to share and to mutually motivate than on the Internet.  Meridian Magazine starts with nearly a million readers, nearly all of whom are parents or have a special interest in children.   Many will just "consume" or use ideas that are presented, but many others will also want to share their own ideas and experiences on line.

So — here we go.  Starting tomorrow, we will introduce COURAGE, the first Meridian Family Value of the Month, and will share the first crop of ideas for teaching it to your children.  Then, as the month of August rolls by, we will add additional ideas, thoughts, and techniques here on Meridian a couple of times a week, and you will be able to click, at any time, to the Meridian Family Value of the Month Workshop where you can read the inputs of other parents and add your own.

We look forward to sharing ideas with you, and to learning what you can teach us all.

All the best, Richard and Linda Eyre