People Are Good - The Secret of Good Parents (Part 2)

Good parents believe that people are good. What do they mean by good? What exactly do good parents look for in people?

Good people means kind and honest people. When parents want to raise good children they mean kind and honest children. Why exactly these two words? Some people list values as: appreciating, grateful, caring, compassionate, courteous, forgiving, listening, loving, patient, sacrificing, tolerant, peaceful, humble, committed, respectful, intelligent, fair, and just. Each of these words has some relation to kind and honest, in one way or another these words describe a person as the person is either kind or honest.

For example, people are caring and compassionate because they are kind and can imagine another person's feelings and pain. People listen to others because they are kind enough to be attentive to another person's needs. People are grateful for the goodness, which comes from someone in their lives, and they are kind because they know that goodness. People are fair because they evaluate situations honestly and see justice; they are tolerant because they approach other people honestly as equal; they are committed because they are honest to the words they give; intelligent - because they know the difference between honesty and dishonesty, between good and bad.

The list of qualities, which people use to describe what they mean by good can be endless. However there are only two groups, kindness (or love), which is a function of people's hearts, and honesty (or conscience), which is a function of people's intelligence, the ability to discern between good and bad.

The reason these old-fashioned qualities are not popular in conventional parenting vocabulary is that they require parents to have those qualities themselves. Here is the complete secret of good parents: they themselves are kind and honest, and they raise great children. They don't consider kindness and honesty as a human weakness. They believe in love and conscience.