As the fifth of our six children moved into her new apartment, I couldn’t help but pause for a moment to celebrate the giving person she has become. This daughter of ours spends hours dreaming up wonderfully imaginative birthday celebrations for others because she knows how much it will make them smile. When she heard that a person she knew couldn’t afford a Christmas tree one holiday season, she anonymously left a tree outside her friend’s door. This young woman is filled with a generous spirit, and like all her brothers and sisters, her mother and I are both so pleased about the adult she has become.
Twenty-five years ago, I heard a casual comment at a conference that still resonates with me today. The speaker wondered why parents aren’t more explicit about defining what they want their children to be like as adults. She wasn’t talking about preparing a child to be a doctor or to master the skill of playing the violin. Instead, she was talking about values. She asked me to imagine my then infant child as a 24-year-old adult. What did I want that person to be like? What kind of values did I hope would guide their decision making? She suggested that if we parents cannot define those core values during our children’s earliest days, how can we possibly expect to nurture those values within them as they learn and grow.
Thus, my lovely wife and I sat down and defined three fundamental values that we wanted our kids to hold most dear when they became adults.
We want our kids to be generous, confident, and happy. We turned those three core values into active statements which we then framed and placed throughout our home, many of which still hang to this day. Those prints remind our kids to be generous, to believe in themselves, and that family is everything (which we hold to be central to happiness). Our great hope was that when our children are confronted with life’s many questions, their answers would be shaped by these values.
What we didn’t anticipate was how much writing it down caused us to change our own behavior. If these values truly are the most important characteristics we want to nurture in our children, then by definition, everything else is a secondary consideration.
In practical terms, it means we’ve learned to accept that the bedroom of one of our daughters is going to be messier than we’d like because being neat and orderly isn’t on our list of most cherished values. But that same daughter in high school volunteered to work with children with developmental disabilities without any prompting from us. We didn’t complain when one of our sons dyed his hair green because appearance isn’t a central value for us. Yet when one of his siblings was experiencing a personal crisis completely unbeknownst to us, our son was the rock upon which his sibling relied.
Live deliberately. Spend some time thinking about what is most significant to you, then write it down. Resolve to work toward those goals. Doing so will help you focus on what is truly important in life.
