If you’re wrong with your children, you tell them you were wrong. You tell them why, and you can walk them through what your thought process was. But a simple “Hey, I’m sorry, I was wrong” is a great way to start. That’s just a matter of humility, and I think it teaches children more about judgment than most of what we say to them on purpose.
I’ve thought about this a lot as a father of 13. It’s easy to give children answers. It’s much harder to teach them how to arrive at a good one.
Answers aren’t judgment
A lot of what passes for education teaches children how to take tests and follow rules. Those things have their place, but they aren’t the same as learning to think. And I think many parents hand the formation of their children’s judgment over to someone else without really examining the standards that someone else is using. A child can know every right answer on the test and still have no idea how to reason through a situation nobody prepared him for.
Give them reasons, not just rules
I want my children to explore and be curious. I want them to understand why we believe what we believe, the foundations and the logic behind it, not just the conclusions. That means they’re allowed to question. There is a difference between a disrespectful challenge to authority and a child respectfully asking to understand, and I want to encourage the second. A child who is never allowed to ask why will either follow blindly or rebel blindly, and neither is judgment.
It also means accepting that different good choices are legitimate. Not every decision has one right answer, and a child doesn’t have to choose exactly what I would choose to have chosen well. What every choice does have to do is conform to reality. Preferences are allowed to differ. The facts don’t care.
Teach them how judgment actually works
Some things aren’t open to judgment at all. Clear obligations of justice are what they are, and you meet them. Most of life is more ambiguous than that, and that’s where children need to learn how to think it through. Test your assumptions. Notice your mood, and notice when you’re tired, because both change how things look. Give a decision time when it needs time. Seek counsel. Look at the facts, the people involved, their history and their intentions before you judge. And be honest that later information can show you that a decision that was reasonable at the time was still wrong. That isn’t failure. That’s how judgment gets better.
Character is formed over years
None of this happens in a single conversation. Character is formed over years, not in a moment in time, and you see it in the decisions children make and especially in how they respond to their own mistakes. With adult children, what a parent can say depends on the particular relationship. You pray for them, you help where you can, and when a conversation would help rather than harm, you remind them of the principles.
What I hope is that my children learn from my mistakes and become better than I was. The fastest way I know to teach that is to let them watch me be wrong and say so.