Editor's note: This month of July the Meridian Family Value of the month is Honesty . Click here to read this month's overview article). Each week during the month we will post an update in Meridian, illustrating a couple of the Eyres' favorite methods for teaching this important value to each age group. Remember that you can also go to http://www.valuesparenting.com/ for still more ideas and teaching methods. Thanks for your interest and participation. There are tens of thousands of parents concentrating on this value this month. It is a way of saving this somewhat unkind and unfriendly society of ours — one family at a time! Send us your feedback, and if you want a free children's CD on the value of Honesty, see the instructions at the bottom of this article

Methods for Preschoolers

Give Effective, Elaborate Praise

This encourages honesty on a day-to-day basis. Preschoolers will repeat behavior they receive attention for. They prefer positive attention (praise) to negative attention (reprove or punishment), but they prefer negative attention to no attention at all.

Therefore, when small children lie, try to give them as little attention as possible (other than quietly letting them know that you know it’s not the truth). When they tell the truth, praise them extravagantly. And when they tell the truth in terms of admitting they did something wrong (“Who wrote on this wall?”), make the praise you give them for telling the truth outweigh the punishment or redress you give them for what they did. Preschoolers can understand the distinction and the separation between your displeasure with what they did and your pleasure with their truthfulness.

One interesting development in our family efforts to teach honesty occurred when our twenty-month-old baby, Charity, learned two new words. She already knew how to say the names of each of her eight brothers and sisters (or at lease her version of their names). Then one week she learned two new words: did it. With those words and her siblings’ names she became an instant, expert tattletale. Whenever we asked, “Who made this mess?” or “Who squeezed the toothpaste out?” little Charity, who is a marvelously observant child, would tell us the answer.

One result was that the older children became more thoughtfully honest — or at least more quickly honest about what they had done. Charity the Enforcer, one of her brothers begin to call her.

Methods for Elementary School Age

The Honesty Pact

Decide in advance, within your family, to be strictly honest with each other. Toward the end of this month on honesty, get together as a family around the dinner table or on an outing. Thank the children for their help in thinking about honesty during the month. Review what everyone has learned. Ask if anyone knows what a “pact” is. Suggest that the family have a pact of strict honesty so that every family member can explicitly trust every other family member. Write up a short pact, starting with the words, “We promise each other…” Let everyone (parents and children) sign the pact.

The Honesty-Under-Pressure Award

This is a motivational way to get children to evaluate their personal honesty every week. On Sundays (or whatever day you most often get your whole family together for a meal) ask, “Who had a situation this past week where it was a challenge to be honest?” Have an “award” on hand to give to the person who remembers the best incident of being honest. A piece of construction paper or colored card with a neatly printed H.U.P (Honesty Under Pressure) will do nicely as the award. Let the child (or adult) who wins put it on his bedroom door during the week until it is awarded again the next week.

After a couple of weeks of “getting used to,” you will find that children are willing to think hard about their behavior of the past week in hopes of winning the award. And it is this kind of thinking and recognition that strongly reinforces honesty.

Methods for Adolescents

Opposite Word: Which Helps? Which Hurts?

This activity can help children grasp the effects of honesty and of its opposites on other people. Ask your children for antonyms or opposites of dishonesty. Go beyond dishonesty to words like deceptive or lie or cheat, then ask how these words hut and whom they can hurt. Ask how honesty helps and whom it can help.

The acceptance of “white lies” may be one reason that many people discount the whole notion of values. There is a feeling of inner confidence and security that comes with uncompromising honesty, and we should help our children to have that power even if we have not always had it ourselves.

Share Your Own Honesty Dilemmas

This can help demonstrate to older children that you are willing to be honest with them — even about your own struggles with honesty. Be brave enough to tell your children about time when you have had a hard time being honest. Tell them “positive” incidents when you were honest and negative ones when you weren’t — and tell them about any current situations where you are struggling to be completely honest.

This kind of sharing is quite a compliment to your older children because it expresses your confidence in their maturity. Nothing will inspire more trust from them or encourage them more to share their struggles with you.

Nothing impresses young adolescents more than drama… and the dilemmas that certain kinds of drama can depict. While living in London, we took our twelve- and-fourteen-year-olds to the marvelous stage musical Les Miserables, based on Victor Hugo’s great work of fiction. In one scene Jean Valjean, the fugitive and former convict whose life has been changed by the love and generosity of an old priest, learns that another man who resembles him as been apprehended for his crime and is about to go on trial. The other man is a drifter of no consequence, while Jean Valjean has become a wealthy and important man on whom many depend. He sings a song about the agony of his conscience: “If I come forward, I am condemned. If I stay silent, I am damned.” Then he does step forward, saving the other man and preserving his own integrity.

After the show we asked the children what they liked best. “The part about the conscience,” said our twelve-year-old. “He did what was right. He told the truth, and that’s the reason everything worked out in the end.”

 Closing Note: Many have asked if there are actual teaching tools to assist parents in teaching the Meridian family value of the month to their children. The Eyres have been involved with a series of values-teaching CDs called Alexander's Amazing Adventures, which give 5- to 14-year-old children a vicarious (and dramatic) experience with each month's value. By special arrangement, Meridian readers who have been following this column and participating in the value of the month can now receive, as a free gift, the HONESTY CD from this series. Simply send a self-addressed, stamped 5 X 7 or 8 X 10 envelope (the padded ones are best) to the Eyres at 1098 Augusta Way, Salt Lake City, Utah, 84108 and they will send you the gift CD. (You will need to put $0.87 [87cents] in stamps or postage on your return envelope.) Please respond only if you have been reading and following the column, and please do not ask for more than one copy of the CD. We hope this gift will help make the value-of-the-month concept even more effective within your family.