The moral values every child needs

Edwin Locke, PhD Psychiatrist & Author, shares advice for parents on the most important values to teach your kids and the best ways to teach those values
Teaching Values To Children - The Moral Values Every Child Needs
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The moral values every child needs

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Something that's very important to teach children is moral values because moral values, directly or indirectly, affect everything you do in life, you and your children. So if you don't have the guidance of moral values, you're at the mercy of random emotions or things that are popular with peers, you can go in 20 different directions, so you need moral values. Now, I personally, am not religious but I'm a strong believer in the need of moral values, so I'll give some examples. One of them is the virtue of honesty. If a child tried to fake reality, a child is hurting himself or herself. Faking reality always fakes out the faker, so it just doesn't pay. So teach your child honesty, unless they're protecting themselves from a bully who might physically hurt them, then it's okay to lie their heads off to escape harm. But in a normal discourse, they should tell the truth. Another virtue is integrity which means acting in accordance with your values, an example being, keeping your promises. Don't make a promise that you can't keep unless something happens totally out of your control. A third virtue is independence. A child needs to learn to use independent judgment because if not, the child is at the mercy of every last TV show, every last newspaper article, every last peer pressure, every last teacher's comments and they'll be going in 20 directions at once and desperately trying to conform and they won't have a self, there'll be no self left. So they need to make independent judgments in accordance with their age and ability, and the parents could help them to do this.

Edwin Locke, PhD Psychiatrist & Author, shares advice for parents on the most important values to teach your kids and the best ways to teach those values

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Edwin A. Locke, PhD

Psychologist & Author

Edwin A. Locke, PhD, is Dean's Professor (Emeritus) of Leadership and Motivation at the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his BA from Harvard in 1960 and his PhD in Industrial Psychology from Cornell University in 1964.He has published over 300 chapters, notes and articles in professional journals, on such subjects as work motivation, job satisfaction, incentives, and the philosophy of science. He is also the author or editor of 12 books, including The Selfish Path to Romance: How to Love with Passion and Reason, Study Methods and Study Motivation, Goal Setting: A Motivational Technique That Works, A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance, Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior, The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators  and Postmodernism and Management: Pros, Cons and the Alternative. He is internationally known for his research on goal setting. A recent survey found that Locke's goal setting theory (developed with G. Latham) was ranked #1 in importance among 73 management theories. His work has been supported by numerous research grants, and he has served as consultant to research firms and private businesses.Dr. Locke has been elected a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Academy of Management, and has been a consulting editor for leading journals. He was a winner of the Outstanding Teacher-Scholar Award at the University of Maryland, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the Career Contribution Award from the Academy of Management (Human Resource Division), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Management (Organizational Behavior Division), and the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science. He has been a writer and lecturer for the Ayn Rand Institute and is interested in the application of the philosophy of Objectivism to behavioral sciences.

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