Parenting Value: Responsibility, Not Blame

Self-reliance and Potential

Dinner Topics for Wednesday

Individuality. Awareness and development of gifts and uniqueness. Taking responsibility for own actions. Overcoming the tendency to blame others for difficulties. Commitment to personal excellence.

 Richard and Linda Eyre

Introduction

Our fifteen-year-old daughter, true to her age, her hormones, and her nature, had spent the evening alternating between hot anger, cool sullenness, agitated irritation at other family members, and woeful, sorrowful withdrawal. "I'm going to flunk math because the teacher is so weird. He never explains anything. He grades way too hard. He never calls on me when my hand is up. I don't care anyway, grades are way too important to most people. Actually, it's my brothers and sisters who are ruining my grade. They're so loud and noisy, I can't study around here. Forget about an A. A B- is okay. It's not best, but it's good, and no one should be dissatisfied with good. If you'd been around more to help me study, maybe I wouldn't be in this mess." It was a not-so-rare collection of statements illustrating self-criticism and the blaming of others that goes on so often with some adolescents. But it wasn't our daughter's truest self. We had learned that at such moments there was little to do but wait for that truer inner self to emerge.

It finally did, about ten-thirty. "I'm sorry, Mom and Dad. That was stupid. It's my class and my grade. It's my own fault about the last test. I'll go and see if I can make it up. I know I have the ability to get an A."

Jekyll and Hyde? So many adolescents are. The challenge for parents is to encourage the Jekyll and help it win over the long run. 

There are two separate but closely related principles involved here. The first is the self-reliance of accepting the responsibility for and the consequences of one's own actions and performance, rather than blaming luck or circumstances or someone else. The second is trying to be one's best self and asking the best from oneself -- the conscious pursuit of individuality and potential -- and the conscious rejection of avoidable mediocrity.

"Self-reliance and potential," as we have called it, is a powerful value. Those who have it help others by accepting responsibility and doing their best in the world. Those who don't have it hurt others by blaming them and by failing to develop the gifts and talents that could serve or enlighten or benefit other people. One who reaches his potential helps others in many ways as he develops himself. One who never seeks his full potential indirectly hurts others by not doing the good or setting the example he is capable of.

This value is about trying to know ourselves, to do our best, and to accept the consequences both of who we are and of what we do. 

One way to think of self-reliance and potential is as two sides of the same coin. Self-reliance has a lot to do with taking the blame or the responsibility for negative things that happen. Potential has a lot to do with taking a little credit and taking the right kind of pride in what we are able to become and what we are able to accomplish. 

When we take blame and responsibility, we resolve and grow and improve. When we don't, we become bitter, jealous, and defensive. When we take positive pride in what we're doing with ourselves and our gifts, we feel the growth of individuality and self-esteem. When we don't, we tend to become followers or plodders in the standard ruts of life. 

Good luck in making this your value of the month for October!

"Parenting-by-Objective"

Review the activities and stories that go along with this months value. Make sure everyone in your family understands the value so they can see how they can apply it in their own lives and situations.

Talk about the Monthly Value every morning and remind your family to look for opportunities to use the value throughout the day. They may also observe how others don't understand the value. Get your children to share their experience with the value each day at the dinner table or before you go to bed. Be sure to share your experience each day as well. It will help your children know that you are thinking about the value too.

Taxes: Time for Responsibility

Top Ten Reasons to Reform the U.S. Tax Code

By Steve Forbes

1. To put it in perspective: Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which defined the American nation, is 272 words in length. Our Declaration of Independence is some 1,300 words. The Bible, which spans several thousand years of human history, is 773,000 words. But the federal tax code, with all of its attendant rules and regulations, is 9 million words and rising.

2. Since 1986, the tax code has been amended 14,000 times, and its length has grown by more than 3 million words.

3. Americans spend 6.6 billion hours preparing their tax forms. By 2015, annual compliance will cost the American people some $483 billion a year.

4. The Internal Revenue Service employs more investigative agents than the FBI and the CIA combined, and with 144,000 employees, employs more people than all but the 36 largest corporations in the United States.

5. The proliferation of deductions, credits, and other special preferences in the tax law leads to unequal treatment of taxpayers.

6. The tax code reduces income through punitive taxes on saving, work, and entrepreneurship, which leads to a smaller and less productive economy.

7. Half of all Americans pay no income taxes.

 

8. A Small Business Administration study found that the tax compliance burden is 67 percent higher for small businesses than large businesses.

9. A short time ago, the IRS was so bureaucratically mired that it couldn’t even account for how it spent 64% of its own budget.

10. The federal government is borrowing 40 cents of every dollar that it spends.

Declaration of Independence and Leadership Styles

Read the Declaration of Independence 

Dinner Topics for Tuesday

Yes, I will be joining the “Read the Declaration” campaign for the largest-ever nationwide reading of the Declaration on July 4, 2012.
We must remember the legacy of liberty that our Founders entrusted to as we read the Declaration and help ignite a national conversation about our country’s founding principles as set forth in the Declaration and our Constitution.

Support Hillsdale College’s “Read the Declaration on July 4” campaign!

Get a Free copy of the Declaration of Independence

Leadership Styles

In my hometown is displayed a saying on billboards and bus stop shelters: Live your life. . . change the world. The local college is doing a 25-year national scientific study of the growth and development of children, from birth to adulthood.

This project would necessarily include an analysis of the environment, health and lifestyles of the parents and how it affects the children in the study.  As I continued to consider the saying, it evoked some interesting questions. Is my life changing the world? If I were one of those parents, would my life stand for something that others should follow?

A noted Christian leader, Gordon B. Hinckley, made this observation: “It is so obvious that the great good and the terrible evil in the world today are the sweet and the bitter fruits of the rearing of yesterday’s children. If you are worried about the future, then look to the upbringing of your children.”

Over the years, some parents have made choices which reflected no thought for the well-being of their innocent children. Whether those choices were dark and dramatic, or silly and trivial, they led to the breakup of their families. Even if the children were able to rise above the unrighteousness of one or both parents, they often blamed themselves and lived with heartache all their lives. This wreckage wrought by selfishness has indeed changed the face of society, but is it an example others should follow? What kind of adults have previous generations produced—noble leaders who have wrought great good in the world, or sociopaths who have left terrible evil in their wake?

Another question came to mind. Is it always good to “change the world?” In 1917 the Bolsheviks changed the world, forcing all to submit to their communist utopia. Those who disagreed were shot or sent to die in prison camps. The Bolsheviks’ utopian dream, their “worker’s paradise”, justified any means to achieve it.

The pages of history are bloodied with the atrocities of dictators and misguided religious fanatics who sought to change the world to conform to their warped vision of the “perfect world.”

The dictionary tells us that there was a legendary robber in ancient Greece named Procrustes. He was noted for stretching or cutting off the legs of his victims to make them fit the length of his bed.

The Bolsheviks, tyrants, and even current regimes—all have this Procrustean leadership style in common. If you don’t share their “vision” of a “perfect world,” then they will force you to stretch, shrink, pay, say, march, retreat, live, die, until you fit the mould they have set for you. If you don’t fit, then you are eliminated, sooner, or later, or as soon as possible.

Then there was Jesus Christ. He taught that whoever wanted to partake of the waters of life could do so freely, but would not be compelled to do so. All were allowed the freedom to choose, but at the end of the day they had to live with the consequences of those choices. (Alma 42:27)

Jesus never compelled anyone. He taught with parables. He showed in his stories the consequences of certain choices. To Jesus, the end or goal of eternal life was all about the means used to get there. The true winner was he who would lead by example. Anyone who used unrighteous dominion was deemed a cheater, and was disqualified from leadership.

Jesus pointed the way to eternal happiness, but would force no man to heaven. His followers always had the freedom to choose. He never forced anyone to change. Yet he changed the world. Millions through the ages have changed their lives, not because they were forced, but because they chose to change their own hearts.

If any of us would change the world, we can start with ourselves. Change our own hearts—to love, not to hate. To live, and to let live. Inspire, not incite. An outstanding leadership example is the one who allowed liberty, taught responsibility, and never forced the human mind.

Copyright © 2011 by Christine A. Davidson

Character, Traditional Family in Crisis

Dinner Topics for Thursday:Defending the Family in a Troubled World

By Bruce D. Porter

So vital is the family to the cycle of human life and the renewal of each generation that it is fair to say that if the family breaks down, everything breaks down. If families do not fulfill their divinely appointed purpose of carrying on the light of truth and the torch of civilization to the next generation, then we can throw any amount of money or ideas or programs at our world’s problems, and we will assuredly fail.

Those who honor the calling of righteous parenthood will find their souls refined, their hearts purified, and their minds enlightened by the most important lessons of life.Happy, loving families, though imperfect and falling short of the ideal, are the closest thing we have on earth to a small-scale model of eternity, a tiny seed of unimaginable glory to come.

The differences between men and women are not simply biological. They are woven into the fabric of the universe, a vital, foundational element of eternal life and divine nature.The family is intended by God as the great entryway into mortal life. It is central to the salvation of the human race, the perpetuation of civilization, and the birth and rearing of each new generation.

In families more than anywhere else children learn the values, practical life skills, manners, and fundamental truths that enable them to rise up and be successful in the world. They learn the all-important attributes of love, unselfishness, sharing, giving, and hard work that someday will be essential for them to form families of their own and to rear up a new generation in order that the great wheel of life may roll onward. 

So vital is the family to the cycle of human life and the renewal of each generation that it is fair to say that if the family breaks down, everything breaks down. If families do not fulfill their divinely appointed purpose of carrying on the light of truth and the torch of civilization to the next generation, then we can throw any amount of money or ideas or programs at our world’s problems, and we will assuredly fail.

The Family Is in Crisis

. Those who defend the traditional family, who stand for fidelity and chastity and all that once was considered wholesome and praiseworthy are mocked and ridiculed. On the other hand, those who see no problem with fatherless homes, who advocate abortion, who fight all attempts to limit pornography, and who seek to redefine the very essence of what a family is, are praised and upheld as champions of tolerance.

In no known human society, past or present, have children generally been raised outside of an intact nuclear family.

 

The disintegration of millions of families has taken place in part because popular media and culture have glorified the pursuit of self: of the wholly autonomous individual unconnected with social or moral obligations, free to pursue whatever ends he or she chooses so long as it does not cause direct physical harm to other aggrandizing selves.

Happiness through Selflessness and Obedience

The family by its very nature is an institution based upon righteous self-denial and sacrifice.

Successful families require that men and women make substantial and long-term sacrifices of their time, money, and personal fulfillment in order to dedicate their efforts to rearing the next generation.

. Many today find it irrational to devote so much time and energy to the welfare of the next generation, but if this commitment is not deeply rooted in society, civilization will decline and perish, while children grow up in a moral wasteland, confused, unguided, and unloved.

His laws and commandments are intended to bless us, to uplift us, and to bring us joy. They mark the path of safety amidst the storms and mists of mortal existence. 

To some the very idea of a strait and narrow path will seem intolerant of those who choose different paths. By holding up a divine ideal of what family ought to be, they claim we are guilty of intolerance toward those who choose other paths, other standards, other definitions of right and wrong. But is this really true?

The Shifting Definition of Tolerance

Until recently in our national history, tolerance referred to racial and religious non-discrimination. It meant civility in the political arena; in other words, respecting the right of others to express their views, even if we do not agree with them. It meant treating all people with decency and respect. Such tolerance is an important and vital part of our American heritage.

Today, however, the world is in danger of abandoning all sense of absolute right or wrong, all morality and virtue, replacing them with an all-encompassing “tolerance” that no longer means what it once meant. An extreme definition of tolerance is now widespread that implicitly or explicitly endorses the right of every person to choose their own morality, even their own “truth,” as though morality and truth were mere matters of personal preference. This extreme tolerance culminates in a refusal to recognize any fixed standards or draw moral distinctions of any kind. Few dare say no to the “almighty self” or suggest that some so-called “lifestyles” may be destructive, contrary to higher law, or simply wrong.

When tolerance is so inflated out of all proportions, it means the death of virtue, for the essence of morality is to draw clear distinctions between right and wrong. All virtue requires saying no firmly and courageously to all that is morally bankrupt.

Curiously enough, this new modern tolerance is often a one-way street. Those who practice it expect everyone to tolerate them in anything they say or do, but show no tolerance themselves toward those who express differing viewpoints or defend traditional morality. Indeed, their intolerance is often most barbed toward those of religious conviction. But let there be no misunderstanding or deception: the First Amendment right of free speech applies to religious speech as well as to other kinds of speech. Believers of all faiths have every right to participate in and share their convictions in the public arena.

 

Repentance

God’s love is sometimes described as unconditional. It is true that God loves all of His children on earth no matter how often or how far they may stray. But while God’s love is all-encompassing, His blessings are highly conditional, including the very blessing of being able to feel and experience His love. The further human beings stray from the path of righteousness, the less they will be capable of feeling divine love, because it is conveyed into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. This does not mean that God loves us less when we stray, only that we, by our choices and actions, have distanced ourselves from His love. How wondrous, then, is the gift of repentance, by which we can be brought back into accord with His will and feel again of His love.

Our Responsibility to Defend the Family

“We warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.”

We ought to give our best efforts, in cooperation with like-minded persons and institutions, to defend the family and raise a voice of warning and of invitation to the world.

Regardless of what the future may hold, God has ordained that in the dispensation of the fullness of times, the parents of the Church will be given power to help save their children from the darkness around them.

 

May we sacrifice and labor to rear a generation strong enough to resist the siren songs of popular culture, a generation filled with the Holy Ghost so that they may discern the difference between good and evil, between legitimate tolerance and moral surrender.