C is for Conscience

By Trina Titus Lozano

Developing your child’s moral conscience is possibly your most important job as a mom. God already created your child to have a primary blocks

conscience from birth and that provides the inborn sense of right and wrong. However, your child’s moral conscience provides the learned standards of right and wrong.

Every daily activity and interaction that we and our children participate in brings us new ethical situations and circumstances that call for a moral response.

Gary Ezzo, author of Growing Kids Gods Way, explains “The human conscience develops by positive and negative means. Negative training includes restrictions, consequences, and warnings, and parents should use it predominantly in the early years. Positive training includes instruction, encouragement and reinforcement and predominates in the middle and upper years. While the healthy conscience development requires both positive and negative training, an overemphasis on one to the exclusion of the other at any phase of growth is unhealthy.”

Two terms that describe conditions of the heart as a result of right or wrong training are assertive and prohibitive.

Assertive: The assertive conscience says, “I should choose to do this because it is right,” or “I shouldn’t do this because it is wrong.”

Prohibitive: The prohibitive conscience says “I better do this or else I will be punished.”

The difference is the motivation to make right choices is not made out of respect for God and the love of virtue, but rather the fear of punishment.

Dear women of God I think that we need to add to our “Momisms.”

Our cliché responses that include, “if you do that, then you are going to get a spanking’!” Or, “you better not, or you’ll be in time out.” or “If I find out, then you’ll be grounded for a week.” These responses only develop our child’s prohibitive conscience. As we focus on building our child’s assertive conscience, we will change our words.

For example: “You will want to pick up your toys because it’s the right thing to do. God has blessed us and we want to take care of our things.”

“You need to do your homework because it’s the right thing to do. It’s important to always do your best. You are so blessed to have an education.”

“You don’t want to wear that, because it isn’t right. It is immodest and it wouldn’t be right to expose your body like that.”

The conscience is the moral warehouse of the soul. We want to fill up that warehouse and train our children to recognize right and wrong. Soon they will make smart choices for the right reasons. God will be honored, the kids will feel better and you will be a proud mom.