Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You

with their earliest exposure to defaults. When your children see influential people in their lives—and you are, by far, the most important people in their lives—act a certain way in various situations, they internalize those reactions as their own defaults. You can see the power of this role-modeling effect in simple ways, such as the body language and vocabulary your children pick up from you. Once your children develop language skills, you can shape their defaults by discussing appropriate behavior after teachable moments that arise in situations and in conversations. Ultimately, defaults are instilled through sheer repetition; the more your children see and hear the same messages, and act and react in the same way themselves, the more deeply ingrained those defaults become and the more likely those defaults will direct their behavior in the future.
Types of Defaults
     
    The values that your children internalize can act as defaults because values will be the first “gatekeeper” in choosing a particular course of action. If your children’s default values include honesty, responsibility, and generosity, then when they are faced with situations that trigger these value defaults, they will be more likely to, for example, tell the truth, accept blame, and help others. And, given all of the bad values in the messages that they are getting from popular culture these days, it is an immense challenge to instill healthy values in your children. Unfortunately, once your children leave the nest, most of the values to which they are exposed, for instance, those conveyed by popular culture, will not be healthyones. If you can inculcate positive values through good messages early in your children’s lives, you’ll be setting value defaults that will make them more impervious to the unhealthy values they will confront once they enter the larger social (and digital) world.
    The attitudes that your children develop about themselves—self-esteem, self-respect, confidence, willingness to take risks, patience, and hard work—will become defaults when they face challenges in different aspects of their lives, such as in school and relationships. These attitudes are initially created through the quality of your relationship with your children and the messages you send them about your attitude toward them.
    Defaults related to children’s physical health become habits that guide their physical life. Eating, exercise, and sleep defaults can set the stage for their long-term physical health (or ill health). When you look at the unhealthy diets and lack of physical activity among so many children these days, and the unhealthy defaults that get established at such a young age, you can understand why obesity among children has reached epidemic proportions.
    How children occupy their free time (For example, do they read or watch television?) and how they play early in their lives (Do they play tag in the backyard or video games indoors?) can set their default for how they spend their playtime and respond to boredom in their later childhood years. Early use (or overuse) of entertainment and social media—for example, television, computers, smart-phones, and video games, all of which have become so prevalent in recent years—is creating an entirely new set of defaults that were simply unavailable in generations past.
    Early social patterns also become defaults that will affect their relationships in later childhood and into adulthood. The messages young children get about how they interact with others determine whether their social defaults trigger, for example, kindness, compassion, respect, and cooperation, or selfishness, antipathy, rudeness, and contention.
No Guarantees, But …
     
    Even if your children develop healthy defaults, does this ensure that they won’t do anything stupid, mean, or unhealthy? Of course not. Just as computers have bugs, glitches, lockups, and crashes no matter how well they are programmed and maintained, your children will need to be refreshed and updated periodically. But if your children are well programmed from the start, then you can be hopeful that those darling little “computers” will function productively and happily for many years to come.
Defaults for Parents, Too
     
    The notion of defaults doesn’t just apply to children. They can also play a big role in your parenting as your children get older. Think of it this way. In the first years of parenting, you send a variety of messages