*Shush* Silence Please

I have been spending a fair amount of time in church off-late and the experiences have been mostly one of obtaining serenity. However, on a number of occasions, it has also been on that is most trying on one's patience. Sunday was no exception, and it left me short of going up to two sets of parents and slapping them squarely across the back of their heads. For they were entirely oblivious to the fact that their rugrats were behaving exactly as the term use: RUGRATS!

Now being a parent of two young-uns, I fully appreciate that it is difficult to get children to sit quietly through anything other than a cartoon or a story-telling session. And that would have to be within the 30 minutes time-frame. But surely, there must be ways where one can make the child understand as to why they should not be playing Ultraman while others are trying to worship.

We have all, at one point or another, come across the lament of "What is society becoming to?" or that "Young people these days have no values." We blame the media, the entertainment industry, the Internet, the schools, etc. We blame everyone but ourselves - the parent. And Sunday's outing in Church is a fine example as to why the adults out to be smacked and sent to the corner, and not the kids.

One of the 6 Pillars of Character Education is none other than RESPECT (alongside Trustworthiness, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring, Citizenship). And the Josephson Institute seeks to use this pillar as a basis in teaching children to:

• Be tolerant of differences
• Use good manners, not bad language
• Be considerate of the feelings of others
• Don’t threaten, hit or hurt anyone
• Deal peacefully with anger, insults and disagreements

I am a firm believer that children are not as ignorant as we make them out to be. Their minds work at actually an amazing speed - explain something to them in ways that they understand, and it goes in forever. Which is probably why most feedback from my friends and family with regards to Lydia and Luke are that they are extremely well-behaved.

I know for a fact that I have not found the secret recipe (or weapon in some cases) to handling my kids. Afterall, I learnt it from someone else. AND it is merely a case of not shoving values down their throats without helping them understand why things should be the way you want them to be.

Alas, not everyone has had the good fortune of citing Early Childhood Educators as their group of friends. So if only they had Character Education for adults. Maybe then the world wouldn’t be in the state that it is. Or at the very least, I wouldn’t have to go around giving strangers dagger looks in church while muttering in my head a vehement *shush*

Which in itself, is meeting the tenets of this pillar of CE.