Character & Parents
Back to School
It takes character to succeed both in school and
in life. And parents are the primary source of
kids’ character. So make sure you start packing
character into your kid’s life now!
Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n
Roll
Parents have the greatest influence on important
deep values even in adolescence. Adolescents’
moral, religious, and political values have much
more to do with their parents’ values than with
their peers’ values.
Ain't it the
Truth?
Honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, or whatever
you want to call it, is a cornerstone of good
character. So what is a parent to do? How can we
help foster honesty in our kids?
Adjust the Apron
Strings
As parents, we need to think hard about juggling
the balls of freedom and control. We need to
think about what is really safe and what is not,
but also what will breed the healthy form of
independence that all our kids need to have to
make it in the world.
Parenting for Good
By Dr. Marvin Berkowitz
Parenting is not for the faint-of-heart. In this
new book of essays, Dr. Marvin Berkowitz, one of
character development's leading educators,
offers his wit, wisdom, and experiences on the
joys, surprises (and everything else in between)
on raising children. We've put together a
compilation of the best of Dr. Berkowitz's
syndicated newspaper columns, offering insight,
advice, and strategies for parents with kids of
all ages.
Order this book
Contact Dr. Marvin Berkowitz
Parents as Partners
By Drs. Marvin Berkowitz and
Melinda Bier
Published in Educational Leadership, September
2005, (vol. 63, no. 1)
Fostering students' social-emotional and
character development is an essential but sorely
neglected duty of public schooling amid
excessive focus on students as academic
performers, Berkowitz and Bier maintain. They
report finding eight strategies in common among
33 character education programs they profiled in
a 2005 study conducted with the Character
Education Partnership. Family/community
participation is one of the eight elements
schools need to improve. Berkowitz and Bier
pinpoint two main successful ways parents can be
brought into character education meaningfully:
as partners and as clients receiving resources
to help them raise children as individuals of
exemplary character. The authors describe models
from the CEP study of how schools can overcome
barriers to parent involvement.
Order this article
Fostering Goodness: Teaching Parents to
Facilitate Children’s Moral Development
By Marvin W. Berkowitz and John
H. Grych
Journal of Moral Education, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1998
© 1998 The Norham Foundation
Although moral development of children has long
been ascribed predominantly to the effects of
parenting, there has been little systematic
examination of the specific nature of this
relation. In this paper, we identify four
foundational components of children’s moral
development (social orientation, self-control,
compliance, self-esteem) and four central
aspects of moral functioning (empathy,
conscience, moral reasoning, altruism). The
parenting roots of each of
these eight psychological characteristics are
examined, and five core parenting processes
(induction, nurturance, demandingness, modeling,
democratic family process) that are related
empirically to the development of these eight
child characteristics are identified and
discussed. Finally, we consider the implications
of our analysis for teaching parents to
influence positively their children’s moral
development.
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