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What does your family value?

February 7, 2009 by Kelly

This post may contain affiliate links. Read my disclosure policy here.

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Kelly Curtis - Professional speaker, writer and counselor*** Monthly Feature Column ***

Positively Speaking
Building Assets in your Kids

by Kelly Curtis, M.S., author of Empowering Youth: How to Encourage Young Leaders to Do Great Things.

Family values.

It’s a catch phrase that gains momentum during an election year and then gets pummeled every time a politician falls from grace. Values can be controversial, emotion-charged and completely different from one family to the next. Any episode of Wife Swap will remind us that what is fundamental to one family, is often foreign to the next.

But despite the controversy and extremes that exist, certain values are a critical and research-based foundation for child development.

Search Institute has identified “Positive Values” as one of the 40 Developmental Asset categories, which means research shows they are characteristics of healthy, caring, resilient kids. The more assets youth have, the more likely they’ll resist risky behaviors in the future. Positive values assets include caring, equality and social justice, integrity, honesty, responsibility and restraint.

There are endless values we might claim as important in our lives. My family values time, education, efficiency, and travel. But here I’ll focus on the research-based positive values identified to help raise asset-rich kids.

Honesty
Last week I wrote an anecdote that illustrated our family value of “honesty.” Honest isn’t something we became overnight. It’s just the way my husband and I were each raised, and something we expect as a fundamental truth in our own home. It’s taught sometimes by doing, but usually in very small ways every day, or every hour.

Caring
Parents teach this in the way we treat our family members, talk about our friends and reach out to needy strangers.

Equality and social justice

We communicate our values about fairness by the way we react to poverty and hunger in our communities, when we drop coins in the Salvation Army bucket or contribute to the food pantry.

Integrity

Adults pass on our integrity when we help a friend stand up to a bully, and when we speak out about our beliefs even when they’re unpopular.

Responsibility

We raise responsible kids when we expect them to contribute to the family, right a wrong, and fix what they broke.

Restraint

And parents communicate values about drug and alcohol use by how we imbibe, and in the candid talks we have with our kids.

The tagline on my blog is, “The better ME I can be, the better MOM I can be.” We’re all works in progress, but sometimes our job as parents is less about what we do, and far more about who we are. What does your family value? How do you pass it to your children?

Thanks for joining in to build assets in your kids! I look forward to seeing you again next month for Positively Speaking.

Kelly Curtis is a Wisconsin school counselor and author of Empowering Youth: How to Encourage Young Leaders to Do Great Things. To read more about Kelly, please visit her Weblog, Pass the Torch or follow her on Twitter.

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5 Comments

  1. BlapherMJ says

    February 22, 2009 at 6:48 pm

    What a wonderful post. The values in my household are so similar to what you talk about…. Respect for each other, honesty, responsibility, caring for each other. Thanks for a great article.

    Reply
  2. Audrey says

    February 11, 2009 at 8:10 pm

    That is a tough question…what do we value. It’s time. Time together, time apart, time for our favorite activities time to share, it’s all about time to us. It’s so nice to come visit the blogs from the Bloggy Carnival now that I have time to both read and comment.

    Reply
  3. Kelli says

    February 10, 2009 at 6:13 pm

    Great post! Thanks so much. GIves me plenty to think about.

    Reply
  4. Amanda says

    February 9, 2009 at 7:35 pm

    Thank you for a great post! Your statement about responsibility is right on! I struggle with making my children do chores around the house, but I know that they NEED those things to help them grow into responsible adults.

    Reply

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