What Are We Teaching Our Children?
BY: SUA
When I think about the things we teach our children, I keep coming back to the basics.
Be kind.
Treat people with respect.
Don’t bully.
Don’t intentionally hurt someone.
Don’t make fun of people because they’re different.
Treat people the way you would want to be treated.
These are some of the simplest lessons we learn as children. And lately, I find myself wondering if somewhere along the way, we’ve started losing the meaning behind them.
Not because parents suddenly stopped caring about raising good kids. I think it’s more complicated than that. Our children are growing up with access to more information, opinions, communities, conflicts, and influences than generations before them ever did. Adults are surrounded by it too.
There always seems to be another explanation for why someone is right, why someone else is wrong, why one side deserves sympathy and another doesn’t, or why certain behaviour is justified under certain circumstances. Maybe we’ve become so good at explaining why we behave the way we do that sometimes we forget to ask whether the behaviour itself is okay.
Because the basics were never supposed to be complicated.
Don’t be cruel to people.
Of course, even something that simple becomes complicated when we ask what cruel means. Our families influence us. Our cultures influence us. Religion can influence us. Our communities, traditions, experiences, and even the generation we were raised in shape what we believe is acceptable.
One family might teach that respecting an elder means never challenging them, while another might believe respectful disagreement is healthy. One culture might place greater emphasis on the individual, while another emphasizes family or community. Religious traditions can shape how people understand compassion, forgiveness, responsibility, and justice. And even within the same culture or religion, people won’t necessarily agree.
So perhaps expecting everyone to share exactly the same definition of right and wrong is unrealistic.
But underneath all those differences, is there still a basic level of human decency we owe one another? And how do we know when we’ve crossed the line?
Disagreement isn’t automatically disrespect. Anger isn’t automatically cruelty. Holding someone accountable isn’t bullying. Protecting yourself isn’t unkind. And kindness doesn’t mean allowing people to mistreat you.
But I also think there comes a point where we have to stop explaining behaviour and recognize what it has become.
Maybe it’s when disagreement becomes dehumanization. When accountability becomes humiliation. When criticism becomes cruelty. When belonging requires participating in someone else’s suffering. Or when we know something would devastate us if it happened to our own child, but somehow find a reason to accept it when it’s happening to somebody else.
That’s where I start thinking about what we’re actually teaching our children.
Because children don’t only learn values from what we tell them.
They learn from what we normalize.
We can tell a child not to bully and then let them watch adults publicly humiliate someone they dislike. We can tell them not to judge people and then let them hear us reduce an entire person to one mistake, belief, background, or label. We can teach them to stand up for someone being picked on and then stay silent ourselves because speaking up would make things uncomfortable.
So which lesson does the child remember—the one we said, or the one we demonstrated?
I think that’s where some of the meaning behind the basics has gotten lost. Kindness can become conditional. Compassion can be mistaken for agreement. Basic respect can start to feel like something reserved only for people we believe deserve it.
But respecting someone’s humanity doesn’t mean agreeing with them.
You can disagree with someone and still recognize their humanity. You can hold someone accountable without enjoying their suffering. You can walk away without humiliating them. You can protect yourself without becoming cruel.
And you can belong to a family, culture, religion, organization, community, or group while still asking yourself:
Do I actually believe this is right?
Maybe that’s another basic lesson worth protecting: teaching our children how to think, not simply telling them what to think.
Would I consider this acceptable if it were happening to someone I loved? Would I be comfortable watching someone treat my child this way? Would I want my child treating another person this way? Am I participating because I believe it’s right, or because everyone around me is doing it?
Those questions won’t give us one universal answer to every moral disagreement. But maybe they’re a place to start.
Our children will grow up around people from different cultures, religions, backgrounds, and beliefs. They’ll meet people they don’t understand. People they disagree with. People they don’t like. And sometimes, people everyone around them dislikes.
We can’t prepare them for every situation. But we can give them a foundation to carry into those situations:
Be kind. Have boundaries. Stand up for yourself. Think for yourself. Don’t participate in cruelty just because other people have made it acceptable. And remember that another person’s humanity doesn’t disappear because you don’t like them.
Maybe those lessons sound almost too simple for the world we live in now.
But perhaps that’s exactly why we need them.
Somewhere between all the labels, sides, arguments, explanations, influences, and justifications, I think we’ve made basic human decency far more complicated than it ever needed to be.
Maybe teaching our children the basics was never really about giving them a list of rules. It was about giving them a foundation strong enough that when the world eventually gives them a hundred reasons to abandon those values, they can still recognize the line they don’t want to cross.
Because eventually our children will make their own choices. They’ll decide what they believe and what kind of people they want to be.
And perhaps one of the greatest things we can give them before that happens isn’t an answer for everything.
It’s something much simpler:
A strong enough understanding of basic kindness and respect that they don’t need someone else to tell them when they’ve crossed the line.