How to Inspire Children to have High Moral Conduct

A friend asked me, "What would you do if you caught your chid stealing money from your purse/wallet ?" In response, I forwarded the following reply -

"I would find out where the child learned stealing from, and where we parents have failed in inspiring the child to be of high moral conduct? In fact, the parents inspiration should be so strong that the child does not pick up any bad characteristic from any source. For this, they must adopt the highest moral standards in their lives and let the child understand their significance."

This became the background of writing this page, to elucidate my viewpoint in detail with respect to this very crucial question to the future of humanity. Long before, this question and answer, I had written an article 'Sources of One's Inspirations' which is also relevant to this question.

All those persons who inspire a child thus, molding his/her character and conduct, are guides of the child, with the first naturally authorized guide being his/her mother followed by the father. As the child grows, more persons come in contact with each one influencing the child's conduct. This influence on the child goes on diminishing as the child grows and has his/her own intellect and experience to determine his/her conduct. Therefore the prime factors of molding the child's conduct are primary contacts in the role of his/her parents and sources of his genesis on the earth.

Since my living in a village in India for over one decade, I have been insisting upon villagers to conduct themselves within moral parameters to inspire their respective children to have good conducts and characters under inspirations from them and make healthy progress in their lives through concentrating on their education and later on their respective professions. I can't claim yet to have a considerable change in mindset of the villagers, yet my efforts continue and their influence trickling down.

As a routine practice, whenever, I come to know about parents having bad habits or conducts, I go to them to request amends for inspiring their children not to pick up bad things from any source. When I hear some child in the village behaving badly, I again go to his/her parents to request them to monitor and regulate the child’s conduct in a positive way through inspirations from their conducts.

Apart from guiding and inspiring the children as their most important duty and responsibility towards humanity, parents characters and conducts influence those of their children through inheritance of genetic information also. If, these information influence the children in good ways, the parents have the responsibility of maintaining the goodness and not corrupting it through inspirations from their bad conducts. On the other hand, if the genetic inheritance is suspicious, the parents have the additional responsibility of overcoming this bad influence on the children by positive guidance and conducts of very high moral standards.

A genetic inheritance can not be wiped out but can certainly be suppressed. The genetically inherited trait makes character of the child - an internal feature of his/her overall personality. Everyone and all the time, conduct of a person is not under direct control of his/her character, and it could be different. What is realized by others, it is not the person's character but his/her conduct. Therefore, conduct of a person has a greater significance than that of his/her character. The parents must pay attention to how the conducts him/herself with others, rather than what characteristics the child owns.

In any case, children can’t be blamed if they display immoral conducts, and they must be compassionately advised to refrain themselves from such things. As far as a child is concerned, his/her immoral conduct is not his/her own gift to him/herself but that of somebody else in his/her contact. Again, the parents have the responsibility of isolating the child from the source of misguidance and wiping out the bad influence through their own good conducts.

This provides the answer to the basic question cited above, that instead of punishing the child caught stealing money, it must be traced why he/she behaved in such a way followed by a three step strategy –

1. Isolate the child from the source of the bad influence,
2. Wipe off the bad influence through compassionate guidance, and
3. Inspiring the child with a conduct of high moral standard.