Dr. Elizabeth Berger says a child’s character develops out of his love for his parents, and their love for him.

THE TODAY SHOW

April 18, 2001 — According to experts, there are some key qualities that all excellent moms and dads share, and all week, “Today” and Parents magazine, are taking a look at some of them. In part three of this special series, the focus is on how parents can raise children with character. Elizabeth Berger, M.D. is a member of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the author of “Raising Kids with Character: Developing Trust and Personal Integrity In Children.”

She offers some advice below...

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE BEHAVIORS THAT WE, AS A SOCIETY, DEFINE AS CHARACTER?

As a society, we are remarkably clear about “character.” It’s nothing esoteric or fancy or professional. We mean the Girl Scout virtues of kindness and responsibility and loyalty and commitment. We mean courage under fire, integrity, and concern for others. One of the encouraging things about America is that everyone knows what we mean by these things and everybody values them as ideals, even if we don’t put them into practice with complete success.

HOW DOES A CHILD’S CHARACTER DEVELOP?

A child’s character develops out of his love for his parents, and their love for him. Morality is the eventual fruit of that human relationship. The parents’ natural joy and devotion to the infant sets the stage for the infant’s character — his expectation that people can be trusted, and that life is good. The parents’ love for each other, of course, is part of the environment in which the child grows also.

HOW SOON DOES THIS BEGIN?

Character grows from the first day of life! At birth, every baby is ready to love you, and not the maternity nurse, no matter how useful and efficient she may be. That’s because the parent’s eyes and voice and touch are personal, right from the beginning. The infant in the next bed, born an hour before yours, is a lovely baby of course. But he’s not yours. Love is personal, irreplaceable, sacred. In a sense, the parents have a relationship with their own baby before it is born, a relationship that bursts into bloom the minute there is a real baby to love.

WHAT ROLE DO PARENTS PLAY IN THIS EARLY DEVELOPMENT?

The parents transmit their own steadfastness, patience, loyalty, and faith in the human heart through everything they do, every day, in caring for their child’s body and spirit. The parent is respectful of the child’s feelings and concerned about the child’s well-being. This is how children come to be, in time, capable of respect and concern for others.

HOW IMPORTANT IS THE EXAMPLE PARENTS SET FOR THEIR CHILDREN, WHEN IT COMES TO CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT?

Since children grow through imitation of people they love and admire, the parent’s example is the backbone of the child’s growing character. But the parents don’t have to look for artificial opportunities to exhibit their character to their children. Their character is probably far better understood by their children than by anyone else. You can’t pull the wool over your own kid’s eyes. But for the parent to try to be a good person — especially in his interactions with the child — is terribly important.

IS IT EVER TOO LATE TO MAKE A CONSCIOUS EFFORT TO HELP CHILDREN WITH THEIR CHARACTER?

Helping the child with his character isn’t something you can do directly. It’s like helping him with his ability to fall in love. In fact, it is very much like helping the child with his ability to fall in love because character is closely connected to the whole issue of love and hate — how human beings relate to one another, and especially how they handle conflict. How does the parent handle conflict with the child? That’s one of the areas where the parents own self-control, self-discipline, and wisdom are called upon the most — and the area where the child learns about self-discipline and wisdom from the parent. That’s how character gets transmitted from one generation to the next.

WHAT COMMON MISASSUMPTIONS DO PARENTS MAKE THAT ONLY GET IN THE WAY OF THEIR CHILD’S CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT?

Parents who try to do something about the child’s character usually launch into a campaign of preaching, or list-making, or trying to “make” the child be more responsible, or disciplining or some other tiresome thing that the child experiences as dreary and depressing. These well-intentioned and effortful measures on the parents’ part only make the child itch to get away from the parent and everything the parent stands for. Parents can have complete faith and confidence in this: that the child’s innate capacity to be concerned and respectful and responsible grows out of one thing only, the love relationship with the parent. Thus anything that enhances the intimacy between parent and child is certain to make the child a richer and stronger person in time. Anything that makes the child wish he were somewhere else is a waste of time, or worse. Honesty and communication, including honest anger, enhance intimacy. The child does not necessarily want to be elsewhere because the parent is honestly angry (usually the child wants to stand his ground and pursue the honest argument.) But lecturing, scolding, punishing, and nagging are utterly useless in enhancing the parent’s relationship with the child, just as they are useless between man and wife.

The conscious effort that parents need to make, if they want to make a conscious effort at all, is to use their own mature self-discipline as much as possible whenever they are with the child. This means being respectful and patient and tender towards the child. It means the parent is committed to controlling his own boredom, irritability, burnout or whatever it is that might threaten — in that moment — to undermine the child’s natural joy in being close to someone he loves.              

WHAT’S YOUR BEST ADVICE TO PARENTS WHO ARE STRUGGLING WITH THIS ISSUE?

My advice to struggling parents is to take a long hard look at why there is a struggle. Many parents have gotten the idea that the child is a piece of clay that has to be pushed and pulled into shape. What a lot of work. Or they have the idea that anything the child wants is bound to be wild and dangerous, messy and selfish. Many good hardworking people believe that children are naturally bad and have to have “goodness” lectured or beaten into them, and that parenting is the story of how this is accomplished.

These are underlying attitudes that the parent himself may not even be aware of, yet have a powerful influence on their relationship with the child — the music behind the words. Parents who try to make children “mind” are likely to end up in a power struggle with their children because they do not recognize that the child’s desire to be like the admired parent is the motive behind growth — it doesn’t occur to these parents that the child would actually want to be like them.

WHAT WOULD YOU TELL PARENTS WHO ARE JUST BEGINNING TO RAISE THEIR CHILDREN?

The tips for parents that I think are most valuable, are to love your child each day as if you knew you’d be fatally run over by a truck tomorrow morning, and plan seriously as a family around priorities. Often a family experiences an increase in psychological well-being if the parents are willing to give up some degree of financial success — more time to be relaxed and loving instead of burnt-out, irritable, and depleted.