Character acquisition

How are good behaviors acquired? This is certainly a neverending question across generations. Trying to answer this question, I tried to look back on the way my parents reared me. I remember that my family had a series of DOs and DON’Ts. Even in my thirties now, I still remember them very well, since any failure to comply with the rules set up by my father would certainly end up with some kinds of punishment. Raised in a hilly, rural, remote area (with no electricity and phone lines), my siblings and I were quickly introduced to survival skills since our early age. We were trained to do many physical activities, such as bringing water home using jugs (about half a kilometer away from home), gathering woods to cook our meals, handwashing our cloths, cleaning our house, tending and harvesting clover, gathering grass for our goats, and other household chores. When the evening came, we swarmed around an oil-lamp to study. It was always in the livingroom. My father was so strict that nobody of us could slip away from this study period, no matter how tired and sleepy we were.

For my father, there was no need for extended explanations. He just instructed us to do something, and no question was allowed (let alone questioning!). His words were short and disobedience meant harsh punishment. As an elementary school teacher, he lived a simple and disciplined life: getting to his work earlier than any other teacher, avoiding too much talking with other teachers in the teachers room and getting back to his own classroom when the break had ended, and finishing the class exactly when the bell rang. After lunch, he would spend the whole afternoon in the farm, tending the clover trees, vanilla vines, casava and coconut trees. No much talking, just actions! In a sense, I thought that we were so fortunate to have a communicative mother. She was great at explaining the reasons behind our father’s instructions. Sometimes, she would tell stories to accompany our sleep. Thus, we were certainly brought up in balance. Our father taught us the hard work, our mother taught us the reasoning skills that laid behind the hard work.

When one generation has gone, the next generation replaces. The problems of child-rearing constantly appear to challenge young parents like me. Today’s challenges are certainly more various and require a strong foundation to appropriately respond to. With all facilities available in our modern life, we are tempted to neglect physical hardship! Cell-phones, TV, entertainment, and the Internet are powerful tools to make our life comfortable. But they are like a double-edged sword that can easily distract our attention to the very nature of how a character is shaped.

Human beings are subject to do things the way they experienced something before. Teachers teach the way they were taught. Parents bring up their kids the way they were brought up as a child. And I am like other people. I rear my son the way I was reared by my parents. Anyway, modifications apply. Instead of merely instructing, I discuss the reasons why I ask my kid to do something. I still keep giving real examples: handwashing our cloth, mopping the floor, and doing other household chores. My wife will read him a series of story books.

Skeptics might question whether my approach to developing a character in my son would certainly bring positive and durable results in the future. However, my parents were great at teaching us to see more potentials in many things that we did, rather than any drawbacks that might appear. Thus, I believe that involving our kids to acquire the habit and attitude of positive thinking, hard work, and perseverance since their early age will eventually establish a strong foundation for their character development. It is the strong character that allows them to take the right things when a dilemma appears. I do believe that children need real examples, as Kristen Pelster, assistant principal at Ridgewood Middle School, says: “Kids can’t learn respect and responsibility by someone putting those words on paper or on a wall. Character education is not a program. It is a way of life.”