In the introduction to this, his latest book, Tom Lickona tells a story about the man who taught a parenting class. He called his class Ten Commandments for Parents. People came from far and wide to benefit from what he shared. The man got married, and soon he and his wife experienced the joy of seeing their first-born enter the world. A couple of years with this child led to the teacher’s felt need to downsize his syllabus. He called the updated version Five Suggestions for Parents. At about this time, child number two blessed their lives, and as that second child entered toddlerhood—the older sibling now in early childhood—the teacher thought deeply about his course and ceded to the need for further changes. He now focused on Three Tentative Hints for Parents. When a third child came along, the man stopped teaching altogether.
It’s not just a nice story with a tad too much truth for those of us with more than one child—or for any parent or educator who’s been around long enough to observe families—it’s a fitting beginning for a book with the lofty aspirations of that teacher’s initial course, yet written by a man with the humility that develops somewhere between child two and child three. To our good fortune, Tom Lickona is a father of two; he never stopped teaching.
Tom Lickona needs no introduction for the vast majority of the Journal of Character Education readers. For newer readers, he was for more than 40 years a professor of education at the State University of New York at Cortland, a key figure in the foundation and ongoing work of the Character Education Partnership (now Character.org), and founder of the Center for the Fourth and Fifth Rs (Respect and Responsibility), which he continues to direct. More germane to this Journal, Tom Lickona is perhaps the best known character educator in the Western world (some might say the rest of the world, too). How to Raise Kind Kids is his ninth authored or coauthored title—and in the eyes of this writer, his best thus far. It is his second book for parents, following the 1983 publication of Raising Good Children: Helping Your Child through the Stages of Moral Development—From Birth Through the Teenage Years.
There is a second reason why that teacher’s story so fittingly introduces this gem of a book. It is a metaphor—albeit incomplete—for the threads that run through the book so tightly. How to Raise Kind Kids benefits certainly from experience accumulated by a writer not only with children of his own, but with a host of grandchildren he has clearly spent ample time with. Beyond experience, the book is a product of wisdom, the wisdom gleaned in professional practice as a psychologist/educator, and that handed down by the sages of old and more recent times: the classic Greek philosophers on molding character, Cicero on gratitude and self-control, and later voices like the altruism of Samuel and Pearl Oliner and the insights of Mark Twain. But intertwined with personal experience and wisdom, the thread of scholarship runs equally as strong: Lickona supports his recommendations with the data from large surveys, the research findings of tightly constructed experiments, and recent neurological studies.
Per the author’s suggestion, How to Raise Kind Kids can be read “in whatever way you feel is most useful.” Though there is a logical progression, Lickona points out that he wrote his chapters to stand alone—the reader can feel free to jump to whatever seems most interesting (or perhaps most pressing). Several chapters in the latter half of the book focus on issues of a specific nature that might draw parents because of something happening in a child’s life or in the wider society. “Getting Control of Screens” (Chapter 9) or “Helping Your Kids Avoid the Dangers of a Hypersexualized Culture—and Find True Love” (Chapter 15) are examples of topics parents in the Internet age might feel an immediate need to jump to. These chapters and those that surround them—on the value of family meetings, on how to have difficult conversations, on how to diminish complaining while increasing gratitude—are to my mind the strongest in the book because of their myriad wonderful suggestions. After a first reading, I tried to review mentally, in attempting an educated guess about how many truly feasible, practical suggestions Lickona offers: is it hundreds, or only scores? I planned to keep track in a second reading (well over a hundred is a truer estimate than scores), but I soon lost track, falling victim to the book’s many engaging anecdotes and examples.
Lickona’s invitation to read-as-deemed-useful notwithstanding—and despite the fact that practical suggestions await in these latter chapters—I am in favor of a more traditional procedure, starting from the beginning. I say this because the early chapters of How to Raise Kind Kids touch at the real heart of the matter. Readers who jump ahead in search of specific suggestions or possible solutions risk missing out on what Tom Lickona does best here, that is, ground specific parental concerns in a purpose-focused rationale. He wants his readers to immerse themselves in all-important questions like “What can we do to nudge our children out of their comfort zone when being kind takes courage?” and—probably first and foremost— “the most important question we can ask ourselves … What kind of person do we want our child to be?”
Our job as parents is, after all, to “feed our children’s capacity for kindness”; kindness is the ultimate goal. Specific strategies to liberate children from video distractions or to diminish complaints certainly make life better for family members, but these specific improvements, albeit welcome, are only incidentals in the quest for what Lickona sees as essential for what we and our society need: a family culture where all members are challenged to live up to a high ideal. The greatest loss in jumping to chapters of immediate concern without taking a more holistic look at this essence is that of missing out on things like “your single most important tool for building a positive family culture,” a phrase Lickona uses to refer to family meetings, on why they are so important and on the effects such meetings can have on families. This chapter sits both in the conceptual heart of the book and, precisely, at its geographic heart, as the eighth of 15 chapters. It would be a shame to risk missing it.
Given that Chapter 8 includes “tips” for the success of meetings, I could not help wonder if the Lickona family’s earliest forays into the practice did not follow a restricted number of “tentative hints” some predecessor had passed along, and then—in the light of their experience—if perhaps those hints grew to perhaps five more solid “suggestions” worthy of transmission. In contrast to the fate of the Ten Commandments the parenting teacher started his career with, Lickona’s more humbly outlined “Ten Tips for a Good Family Meeting” represent a magnificent—and probably enduring— blend of best practices in a variety of fields, from group process to collaborative problem solving to 21st century classroom management and the latest recommendations for facilitating moral development.
In an early chapter, Lickona sets the tone with the story a grandfather tells. It is the epic battle between two wolves: the wolf of cruelty and anger and the wolf of kindness and peace. To his grandson’s question about who will win, the grandfather replies “the one you feed.” Suffice it to say that How to Raise Kind Kids: And Get Respect, Gratitude, and a Happier Family in the Bargain is nourishment for the wolf we want to win. None of Tom Lickona’s family meeting tips—or any of the several other thoughtful suggestions that so enrich this book—is a hard, fast, guaranteed prescription for instant success. But unlike the parenting class instructor, most of us, parents or educators, do not have the luxury of quitting when the going gets tough or doubts set in. How to Raise Kind Kids has much to replenish ideas and keep hopes high.
David Streight is a school psychologist currently serving as Resident Scholar at heartofcharacter.org
