Use heart as guide for teaching values

Dear Carolyn: We have a wonderful 26-year-old cousin who just announced she is pregnant. My wife and I are very happy and have expressed our joy and support.

Our challenge is how we handle this with our 10-year-old daughter. We have been and will continue to be fully supportive of our cousin; however, we also would like to impress upon our daughter that we hope that a man and a woman fall in love and then decide to get married, and, through their continued love for each other, they may have a baby. – Father Is Perplexed

You’re less perplexed than you think. In choosing to support your cousin despite a belief that a love-marriage-baby formula makes sense, you have already made the exact calculation that you want to convey to your daughter.

So, you just need to figure out why you’re expressing joy and supporting your cousin, instead of scolding, fretting over or shunning her.

Judging from your comments, you’re not saying, “X behavior is bad … unless someone close to us does it, in which case it’s OK.” That’s a good philosophy not to have, because not only does it lack integrity, but it also wouldn’t pass a clever 10-year-old’s eye-roll test.

I suspect your belief instead is that doing right by children is ultimately more important than following a societally sanctioned path to starting a family – and since you trust your cousin to be a good parent, you feel genuine joy at her news.

That’s why knowing your own heart is the first step in teaching values: Unless your heart, words and deeds are all working together, you won’t make sense – and when their parents don’t make sense, kids tend to draw their own conclusions.