Ethics 101 Conversations To Have With Your Kids

Ethics 101 Conversations To Have With Your Kids

Would you rather your child was smart or good?

Academic achievement is not the only important aspect of raising children. We also need to think consciously as to how we develop the next generation to be ethical thinkers and decent members of society.

Ethical thinking has brought the world many things: democracy, freedom of speech and the end of slavery together with Monty Python, bikinis on Bondi Beach and Free Range Eggs. It is vital to the continued development of our world.

The main place children learn basic morals and ethics is not from school or religion but from their parents in the home. In the new book Ethics 101 Conversations to have with your Kids, author Michael Parker prompts discussion by posing 101 ethical questions and their logical progressions.

The questions are perfectly pitched to the world of the 10 to 15 year old: from friendships, sport, parties and bullying, through to animal rights and climate change.

Ethics 101 Conversations to have with your Kids is the guidebook every family needs to navigate their world with thought, reflection and understanding to live an ethical life.

Michael Parker received Arts and Law degrees from Sydney University and worked briefly in a corporate law firm before retraining in Education. He has a Master's Degree in teaching Philosophy to children and has written six textbooks in the areas of Legal Studies, Philosophy in Schools, and English. He is the author of two Young Adult novels, including 'Doppelganger', which was shortlisted in its category for the NSW Premier's Awards in 2007. His picture book 'You Are A Star' will be published by Bloomsbury in the US in September this year. When he taught at Newington he was a subject of the SBS Documentary Series 'Inspiring Teachers', screened in 2008 and 2009. He is now the Deputy Headmaster and Head of the Senior school at Cranbrook School in Sydney. He is married with two children.

Ethics 101 Conversations To Have With Your Kids
Jane Curry Publishing
Author: Michael Parker
ISBN: 9780987227515
Price: $24.95

Interview with Michael Parker

Question: As a teacher, why did you think it was important to write this book?

Michael Parker: Firstly, because I think that the best place for Ethics to be talked about is in the home. It is where children do so much of their processing about the day, and I think it would be great if these conversations acted as springboards into really substantial ethical discussions. I also think that it is terribly important for the next generation to have an ethical compass because they have some pretty big issues coming down the freeway towards them.


Question: Who has the book been written for?

Michael Parker: Two groups of people. Parents of children from about 9-15. Also, the kids themselves who may get sucked into some of the 101 conversations without any encouragement from their parents. Indeed the back of the book has an alternative cover '101 conversations to have with your parents'.


Question: Can you talk about the importance of parents presenting basic morals and ethics?

Michael Parker: I think it is fundamentally important. Parents are the role models, the templates, on which children model so much of their behaviour - both consciously and unconsciously. To have the parents actually speaking about ethics explicitly is fantastic role modelling. It also allows the children to tease out and think through these issues themselves in a really secure environment. At school or the rugby team or the chess club it's a ratio of 25-1 or 20-1. At home it can be 1-1. Your child can have the stage, or at least the dining room table, as she or he thinks through these issues.


Question: How can parents present the best ethics to their children?

Michael Parker: Part of it is by acting and thinking ethically. This does not mean charging ahead and acting all the time on the assumption that everything you do is automatically ethically brilliant. It would be better for your children to see you stop, and think and thrash out difficult questions. I think too that if parents were able to explicitly bring up ethical ideas with their kids the children would see how seriously parents take the ideas.


Question: How does the book manage the fact that different families have different morals?

Michael Parker: It doesn't impose ethical answers on people. But by providing lots of dilemmas, hypothetical questions and scenarios it does give people a framework to discuss and tease out ethical problems around the dining room table. I am pretty convinced that if you shine a strong critical light on questions and accept that they can be difficult, then you usually end up with something ethically sustainable. As long as there is a liberal commitment to actually have a discussion with your kids rather than just lecture them, the book should work a treat.


Question: What types of conversations and questions are in the book?

Michael Parker: From the most domestic to the most wordly. On one extreme it asks you whether you should lie to your grandmother about liking the terrible sweater she knitted you for Christmas . On the other extreme it asks you when you would go to war if you were the American President. And everything in between. It also looks at some of the Ethical philosophies and reasonings that are the invisible floor we walk on every time we make an ethical choice.


Question: Why was it important that you left out the 'answers' to the questions, in the book?

Michael Parker: Because if I thought I had the right to label all my views to the 890 questions in the book 'the right answers' I would deserve to be taken away in a straitjacket.

Question: How can parents approach these questions, with their family?

Michael Parker: You can raise them at the dinner table each week. You can leave the book in the car's glovebox for some long distance trips- it beats 'I Spy' or an iPod. You can leave the book around the house and have the conversations as kids take an interest in them. Or you can use the questions as a spur and a reminder to really latch on to ethical questions when they come up.


Question: Why did you decide to give profits of the book to the Aboriginal Indigenous Scholarship Fund at Cranbrook?

Michael Parker: Because I am a big fan of the project and care about it a lot. It is great to see these thoughtful and talented indigenous kids come up here from Nowra, enrich our school community and get so much out of the school themselves. Many of these conversations we use as part of our Ethics programme at Cranbrook too, so it is keeping the whole thing within our community.


Interview by Brooke Hunter