Helping Your Child Learn Responsible Behavior - continued

Our Heroes

Many children love to look at portraits or photographs, especially if you can tell them stories about the people in the pictures.

What you'll need Family photo album (or a box or bag of pictures you've been meaning to put in an album)

Portraits of impressive individuals from books or from history

What to do

1. Select a photo of a person in your family with an impressive quality or accomplishment. Tell your child about the person and about what the person did. Perhaps your grandparents had the courage to immigrate from another country or your parents sacrificed in order to support you in school. Talk about the results of these actions.
2. Collect photographs from newspapers or magazines about impressive people in your community. With your child, talk about their actions that merit admiration or praise.
3. In addition to relatives or others, you may want to display portraits of other people who deserve our admiration and respect. A picture of Anne Frank, a young girl who wrote a diary while she and her family lived in hiding from Nazi Germans and who died in a concentration camp, can inspire conversation about courage and compassion for others. A portrait of Martin Luther King, a great civil rights leader who believed in nonviolent change, can lead to discussions of great accomplishment despite prejudice. Choose people whom you admire and feel comfortable talking to your child about.

By stories we tell about the people we admire, we can inspire children and remind them of those qualities we think are important.