Editor's Note: This month the Meridian Family Value of the month is LOVE. Click here to read this month's overview article). Each week during the month we will post an update in Meridian, illustrating a couple of the Eyres' favorite methods for teaching the powerful value of LOVE to each age group. Remember that you can also go to http://www.valuesparenting.com/ for still more ideas and teaching methods. Thanks for your interest and participation. There are tens of thousands of parents concentrating on this value this month. It is a way of saving this disrespectful society of ours - one family at a time!
Methods for Preschoolers
Secret Services
This can help young children taste the delight of anonymous giving. With your little ones, decide on something you can do for someone anonymously. It may be baking cookies and leaving a little basket of them on Daddy's pillow or on the bed of an older brother or sister. It may be leaving a bowl of fruit on the doorstep of an elderly neighbor or sending a grandparent a new pair of slippers with no return address on the package.
Methods for Elementary School Age
Pets
Pets can be a great method for teaching children to love (although many a mother has thrown her hands up in exasperation as she cleans up the "outside dog's" messes in the house time after time and finds the food and water bowl empty again). But great lessons of love as well as dependability and responsibility can be taught through teaching children to care for pets.
We speak with some authority (or at least with some experience) on the topic of pets.
Being foster parents to Esmeralda, a puppy; Pearl, a kitten; BaBa, a turtle; Brumbie, a cockatiel; Banner, a horse; Cosette, a bunny; Geneva, a cat; Slimy, a snake; and a never-ending parade of tropical fish and gerbils, we can give endless example of wonderful experiences though successes and failures, births and deaths, regarding pets. However, the bottom line is that pets are a great tool in teaching love.
Methods for Adolescents
Care and Organizational Involvement
These can teach a love for self and for the community. For some adolescent boys the Scouting program is a great way to boost self-esteem and develop a love for the community. Community-service projects and carious other aid and "help" organizations can provide similar opportunities for involvement.
For many years Richard has served on the board of organization called the Community Services Council. The organization operates a food bank, and our children have had the experience or delivering food to needy people. We also developed a "sister community" relationship with a region of poor villages in drought-stricken Mali in sub-Saharan Africa, and our children now feel a certain bond of compassion with the African children whose pictures I have brought back with me.
But I think the most powerful (and certainly the most personal) experiences our children have derived from this community-service organization was their relationship with Mr. Boyle. Mr. Boyle was an eighty-six-year-old who had no children, no spouse, no living relatives, and lived alone in his tiny and somewhat unkempt home. One project of the council is to locate such individuals and link them up with families who will visit and befriend them. We were assigned to Mr. Boyle.
We went over every week to mow his lawn, clean his kitchen, or just to sit and chat (we should say listen, because the main thing Mr. Boyle needed was someone to talk to, and he had a great deal to say!). Sometimes all of our children would go, but more often just a couple of them went at a time. Whenever Mr. Boyle saw us on his doorstep, his eyes would fill with tears, and a big smile would fill his lovely old face.
After a six-month absence (when we were living abroad to finish some writing), we returned to find that Mr. Boyle's health had worsened and he had been moved to a rest home. I'm sure he misses us, but perhaps not as much as our children miss him - and miss the warmth and love that come from giving service and meeting another person's needs.
