March Value Honesty

Kids of all ages need opportunities to explore the effects of honesty and dishonesty. Start teaching them early, at about 3 or 4 years old. Teaching Your Kids to Be Honest, shows that you let them know you value honesty and truth-telling.

It's important to help your children realize victory earned dishonestly is not worth the loss to personal integrity. Enhance the honesty games and activities your children play by open discussions about the games and their feelings.

Three-year-olds have difficulty distinguishing between make-believe and reality, so find opportunities to reinforce the distinction. For example, when you are watching television together, point out which characters are not real such as dragons and witches or fairies. Make a memory game out of it by collecting pictures of these characters and pasting them onto cards. Make another set of cards from old family photographs. Shuffle the cards and turn them all face-down. Ask your child to guess whether the next card is a real person or a make-believe character. Then turn over the card and see if she can correctly identify it. Alternatively, make silly statements such as, “We live in a castle,” and have her tell you whether the statement is true or not. Reward correct answers with points, stickers or a chocolate chip.

Young children can relate to stories with moral dilemmas. Turn the stories into games by presenting two versions of the same story, one that reflects honesty and integrity and one that does not. Ask your child to identify the honest one. For example, in the “Goldilocks” story, instead of walking into a stranger's house uninvited and helping herself to food, Goldilocks sits outside and waits for the bears to come home.

Alternatively you could use a suggestion from the Values Education website, a version of Snakes and Ladders for older children. Prepare a set of cards that describes honest situations such as informing a store owner that you received too much change. Prepare another set that describes dishonest actions such as lying to a parent. A player draws a card when they approach a snake or a ladder. If the child pulls a “dishonest” card when he's at the top of a snake, he must go down, but can't descend if he draws an “honesty” card. Similarly, if she gets an “honesty” card at the foot of a ladder, she can go up, but not if she draws a “dishonest” card.