Ethics Newsline®

Last week, in a quiet setting here on the Maine coast, seventeen of us spent two days focusing on a topic as commonplace as it is complex: ethics and parenting.

Our group included parents and grandparents, as well as a just-graduated future parent and several non-parents who had helped raise nieces and nephews. But we had several things in common: We’d been parented ourselves, we knew parenting was in trouble, and we sensed that the answers lay in the domain of ethics. We weren’t here to create manifestos or craft policies, to reform bad parents or help good ones manage unethical kids. We weren’t even here to discuss the ethics of parenting. We were here to develop a language for talking with children about the ethical issues facing today’s youth — and ultimately to help produce a book on how parents and children can have deeply satisfying conversations about tough moral issues.

Why is that so important? Because it seems that just when children are facing inordinate moral confusions at ever-younger ages, parents are increasingly unprepared to address those confusions. Through the centuries, a fundamental goal of parenting has been to pass on the moral values of the culture to its younger members — a task for which so many parents today feel inadequate.

That feeling isn’t new. Raising good kids has always been challenging. But it was never meant to be lonely, threatening, or futile. Parents were never meant to be solitary voices crying in the wilderness, but part of a great collective effort carrying youth into adulthood with its moral compass well calibrated. It was always assumed that the values, standards, and ethical practices of parents would find some kind of support in a surrounding fabric of religious institutions, formal education, extracurricular school-based activities, civic and volunteer groups, work relationships with adults, and a community of other parents.

In our time-deprived age, that fabric is rapidly fraying. The very idea that parenting should involve conversations about ethics has come under intense challenge from a media-drenched culture of moral lassitude. A fashionable ethical relativism has made parents fearful of standing up for ethical clarity lest they come across as old-fashioned, preachy, or naïve. The result has been a growing parental uncertainty about how — and even whether — to intervene when issues of integrity and character are at stake.

To be sure, there have been encouraging signs. Ethics has risen rapidly up the public agenda, pushed by high-profile scandals but pulled as well by increasing recognition of the value of a life lived ethically. Surveys suggest that compared to previous generations, today’s teens take more overt interest in ethics, are more explicit about their values, and are more apt to say they genuinely enjoy their parents’ company and feel close to them. In schools, the character education movement is bringing new vitality to programs that explicitly promote integrity and ethical decision making.

In this context, parents are reaching out. They are looking for greater understanding of their own roles as ethical exemplars and teachers. They need encouragement to seek opportunities for ethical conversations. And they need tools, tips, practical steps, and meaningful examples to bolster their confidence about engaging in such dialogue. Above all, they need to understand that they themselves don’t have to be angelic embodiments of perfection in order to lead the next generation to deeper considerations of ethics.

All of that was on our minds as we launched into our workshop. We started with a basic question: What are the five most important attributes of “good parenting”? Two hours later, with flip-charts filled with a fascinating collection of bullet-points, I asked if anyone would take a stab at synthesizing what we’d found.

Who knows, in moments like that, where creativity comes from? We might have just stared at the charts, groping for some way to make sense of it all. But I’d noticed that for the previous few minutes, one of our participants — Larry Wolfe, a second-grade teacher and parent from Concord, New Hampshire — had fallen silent, scratching away on his pad. When he said, “I’ll go,” I sensed he had put something together. What he said was so exactly right that it took our collective mental breath away.

“A good parent,” he said, “is one who

• listens,
• learns,
• laughs,
• limits, and
• loves.”

We’d talked a lot about the need for parents to say less and listen more — to have humility, curiosity, and a deep awareness of the child’s interests and talents. We’d talked about parenting as a learning curve, needing a capacity for laughter to keep things in perspective. We’d talked about the need for parents to set limits without being overbearing and tyrannical — another participant had already used the term “gentletarian” to suggest the merging of the gentle and the authoritarian. And of course we’d talked about love, which no one could quite define but which everyone recognized as crucial.

One could do worse than Larry’s list as the basis for good parenting. With that as the broad outline, and with a full quiver of conversational arrows based on ethical frameworks — a list of the core moral values, a right-versus-right decision-making process, an understanding of moral courage — parents need not shrink from addressing the toughest ethical questions their children can pose. That, at least, is the case that our book will be making.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics