Kids will do as we parents do

I watched "The Blind Side" last night. It's about Michael Oher, a homeless African-American youngster from a broken home, who is taken in by the Touhys, a well-to-do white family who help him fulfill his potential. It stars Sandra Bullock in a potentially award-winning role.

The point here is that for good or ill, we, the parents, are establishing the framework for our child's worldview, character development and choices.

This is not to say that a child's future is inevitably determined by his/her homelife. There are kids who grow up in very rocky home situations with very poor role models who nevertheless turn out to be really neat people. On the flip side of the coin, there are kids who had great parents but nevertheless choose to embrace a very sinful lifestyle.

But both common sense and evidence tell us that - generally speaking - loving and moral homes are far more likely to produce loving and moral kids. I notice that kids tend to imitate the attitudes and actions modelled by their parents.