How I Teach My Children Character

In our home, we teach our children table manners, phone manners, how to chop vegetables, how to ride a bike and countless other practical life skills. But at the core of everything we do with and for our kids, ideally we’re seeking to teach and cultivate character.

I discovered a tool earlier this year that has helped us tremendously in identifying and articulating the character traits we hope to instill in our children and foster in ourselves.

It’s called Character First Education and all the resources we’ve used are available FREE online. It takes very little prep work and has had a significant positive impact on our home.

What We Love About Character First Education

– The character traits on their list are practical and powerful. The short definition is something my 4 year old can easily grasp.

Example: Attentiveness is concentrating on the person or task before me.

– Each character trait has five “I wills” – things you can do to help foster that trait.

Example: Attentiveness includes looking at the person speaking, not drawing attention to oneself, guarding against distraction, sitting or standing up straight, and asking questions to help you understand.

– The videos we watch (more about these later) are engaging, fairly short (~5 minutes), and very high on content. They are 5 minutes well spent.

My kids were riveted by the story of the white-tailed deer who was attentive and avoided a predator. We now all know the poem about attentiveness with hand motions by heart, so I can actually discreetly cue my kids from across the room to be attentive by using a specific hand motion (to look at the person speaking, for example).

Why I Love Studying Character Traits

I believe the very best way to teach character to our children is to model it. However, explicitly teaching what constitutes good character makes our kids more observant of their own actions and more motivated towards self-improvement. If they learn what it means to be compassionate, for example, they’ll be able to identify it when they see it, and they’ll be equipped to evaluate their own behavior.

The definition and five simple “I wills” outlined by Character First Education provide us with a vocabulary we can use to articulate our expectations. Our kids know what’s expected of them when we ask them to be diligent, and we can prompt them further to finish their project, etc. This does not mean they are perfect at it, of course!

We as parents aren’t perfect at these either, and focusing on character is an excellent reminder that we need to model these things ourselves. If we’re asking our children to be attentive, for example, we should be looking at our children when they’re asking for our attention, and turning off devices instead of being tempted to multi-task while carrying on a conversation.

Before the beginning of each new month, Scott and I chat about what character trait we’d like to focus on as a family for that next month. These conversations are brief and worthwhile because they increase our family’s unity and give us a regular time to reflect on our children’s needs.

How We Use Character First Education’s Resources to Study Character

I believe that good things done consistently over time yield great results. For me personally, I know that in order to do things consistently, I need to keep them as simple as possible and I need to do the legwork in advance so that things can run on “autopilot” through the vicissitudes of life with young children.

To that end, I do the following:
Once or twice year: I make up posters in Photoshop using the definition and five “I wills” and a picture of the animal associated with that quality. I do a whole bunch of them at a time, and they’re pretty fast.

Here are a few examples. Click on one to see it bigger:

I print our posters out on 8.5 x 11 cardstock.

Once a month: Scott and I flip through my stash and decide which trait to focus on for the next month. I tape it to our wall by our kitchen table. (Maybe some day we’ll upgrade to a frame?)

Once a week: Mondays during breakfast are our character days, and I just pull up the website on my iPad and we all watch the Poem video or Nature Story video, or both. We follow along with actions to the poem. If we don’t catch it on Monday at breakfast, we just do it when we think about it later in the day or week. By pegging it on Monday morning, it’s a near certainty we’ll get to it by Friday afternoon! 🙂

Nearly every day: Character comes up in conversation! I love it. Caitlyn will be goofing off during scripture study and apologize for not being more attentive. I’ll encourage Mackenzie to take responsibility for her mistake and make it right and a light will go on because it’s something we’ve discussed before in a very positive way. Someone will quote the poem about gratefulness and do the silly hand motions for “When I go to the store, I’ll be glad for what I have instead of always wanting more!” I’ll call for a “giraffe” who can help me out with something in a hurry (the animal for availability).

Occasionally when we’re in the car or doing chores we’ll just review the poems we’ve learned in the past.

That’s it! So far my time invested is ~1-2 hours for a year of printouts, 5-10 minutes per month taping something on the wall, and 0 minutes of prep work for video clips each week. We are consistent because it’s simple and the legwork is done in advance.

I’d love to hear in the comments if you have any questions or helpful suggestions about how you teach character in your home. Here’s the link one more time to the free resources we use: Character First Education. A new character trait is added every month.