How to make a compass for living

Developing integrity is a lifelong journey

April 14, 2002|By Joanne Trestrail.

Name: Joseph Di Prisco

Background: In "Right From Wrong: Instilling a Sense of Integrity in Your Child" (Perseus, $25), Joseph Di Prisco and Michael Riera encourage parents to actively help their children develop and act on a sense of integrity that will guide their choices as they grow older. Di Prisco has worked as a teacher and school administrator for more than 20 years. He lives in Berkeley, Calif.

Q. How do you define integrity?

A. It's as difficult to define as love, virtue, identity or anything else that really matters to us, but I can point to a few things--a sense of wholeness, of authenticity, of being one's self. It's something we know, if we're honest with ourselves, that we're never going to perfectly achieve.

Integrity cuts across all lines--developmental, moral, existential, political, psychological, emotional--and at the same time it's also very practical. If parents keep it in mind, it can guide them in all their dealings with their kids. In fact, it matters more than anything else.

Integrity is something we can give away, but no one else can take it away from us.

Q. Learning integrity seems like at least a two-part operation: First you have to get bearings, then learn to keep them when the going gets rough.

A. Absolutely. When I was a vice principal dealing with kids who were in trouble for plagiarism, cheating or whatever, I began every conversation by saying it's pretty hard to be honest all the time. And 99.9 percent of the time, that opened the floodgates. It enabled kids to see, "I made a mistake. I'm not a failure." And with that, you can get a lot of good work done. Those are always transcendently interesting and moving conversations.

Q. Teaching kids to do the right thing when no one's watching seems huge.

A. When kids are very young, you say, "Don't cross the street here." "Don't put your hand on the stove." It gets more complicated when they start school and have increasingly complex relationships with their friends, their peers, teachers, other adults, their extended family. But you need to get them to understand that when they cheat, for instance, they didn't just break the rule. They didn't just disappoint parents. They disappointed themselves.

Q. It's not about parental approval or disapproval.

A. The older kids get, the less effective disapproval is as a weapon. You're not going to be there when your kid is 16 years old and someone opens a can of beer in the car. But your kid is there. And if she has her sense of integrity, she knows what she needs to live up to. And that's the best bet you can make.

Q. How should parents react when their kids screw up?

A. Try to see what's really going on. A shoplifting incident isn't only about instant gratification or flouting the law or whatever. If you look at it in the context of kids' emotional and psychological development, this is something they're trying out. They want to see what kind of reaction it gets.

We hate to see our kids in pain, and we worry about them, but when they make a mistake, we need to let them feel lousy for a while. It's not about punishment; it's about discipline and leading them to understand who they are. The kid is asking himself, "Am I the kind of person who can cheat?" They need to find out.

Q. Don't examples work better anyway? What does the parent do if a clerk hands back too much change? Think, "Hey! This is my lucky day!" Or give it back?

A. As kids approach adolescence, they inevitably try to see what it feels like to not give the change back. They're scientists, and they've got to experiment. We wouldn't want it any other way. The problem with so much of what passes for character education is that it really consists of lots of hectoring of kids, explaining the rules of the road. But they know the rules.

Q. Does it make sense to start with rote laying on of rules and elaborate as the kids get older? Start with "Tell the truth," and down the road, you can point out that telling the truth is actually easier than concocting and remembering a lie.

A. There was a study reported about a year ago about brain activity, and what they discovered was that when people were telling the truth, certain quadrants of the brain were active, but when people lied, much more of the brain got involved. It used up a lot of energy.

Q. Lying is hard.

A. We're talking about kids gaining access to themselves. That's our goal. Handing down rules is a starting place, but life is complicated, and there are many more competing agendas for kids as they grow up. Often, in my experience, kids cheat to help a friend--the friend can't do the work, is going to get cut from the team, get suspended, not get into the right high school or college. Friendship and loyalty are tremendously important to kids, and we want to endorse that. But as adults in kids' lives, we have to get them to understand that this is not helping their friends.

Q. You make the point that not lying isn't the same as acting with integrity. Integrity isn't about looking for loopholes.

A. When we're parenting for integrity, we're being visionary and pragmatic at the same time. We stand our ground but at the same time we're ready when the ground shifts. Kids are kids; they need help.

Teaching integrity involves long conversations and lots of them, spread over days. It's a lifelong journey and we're never going to totally get it, but there's no alternative. What else matters? Nothing.