As much as we enjoy Halloween, we were always glad when it was behind us. Sure, we enjoyed many aspects of trick or treating – like the time a 4 year old Elvis impersonator came to the door and said, “Thank you.  Thank you very much” in his deepest little voice.  But with all the fun and excitement, there is also a certain kind of craziness that is driven by the childhood narcotic – Candy.  It’s as if EVERYTHING goes out the window on binge night!  However, for us as parents, there was one Halloween when we hit a significant milestone with our boys that always makes us reflect fondly on Halloween every year.

Halloween 2007 started off like every other Halloween.  Trevor was 10 and Alex 7.  Shelly made sure the ill-fitting costumes looked as nice as possible. Rich rounded up all the flashlights and coordinated the evening with some other dads in the neighborhood.  Before heading out (like we did every year), we made sure that Trevor and Alex knew the rules:  Always say please and thank you, wait to be offered a treat, take only one treat, wish the people a Happy Halloween, etc…  Once everything was covered and all the kids and dads were gathered, we set out on our TRICK OR TREAT odyssey.

What happened next this particular year caught Rich completely off-guard.  As our group of 8 boys got to the first house, the dads dutifully waited in the street while all the boys ran across the neighbors’ yards with no regard for stepping on shrubs, plants, and carefully placed lawn decorations, except for our boys.  Trevor and Alex – without any prompting from us – took the extra time to walk along the sidewalk, then up the driveway, and stayed on the path to the front door.  Wow! That was completely unexpected!  Secretly, Rich wondered if this was just a one-time “trick.”  But, the same thing happened again at every house afterward. Even more remarkable was the fact that, eventually, all the other boys started mimicking what Trevor and Alex were doing!  No more running across yards inadvertently destroying decorations and landscaping.  A couple of the other dads eventually took notice of this and said, “Our kids would never do that on their own; they don’t even listen.”

Once we got home and dumped all the evening’s loot on the kitchen table, Rich mentioned to Shelly how the boys, on their own initiative, walked around on all the sidewalks to every front door they visited.  When we asked them why they did that, they told us that they didn’t want to accidentally damage somebody’s plants or decorations, so they walked around.  When we dug a little deeper into their motivations, they told us that our neighbors probably spent money and effort to make their yards look nice.  We were so encouraged as parents that everything we had been pursuing in our parenting was actually reaching their hearts and they were showing respect and honoring others on their own initiative.

The idea of recognizing the Preciousness of Others was a principle we learned from the Parenting from the Tree of Life class. This idea is a mindset and value that we should cherish.  It acknowledges that everyone is precious to God and, therefore, we should respect and love others.  For our family, this idea is expressed in a scripture we adopted as our family verse – Matthew 22:37-39, as it went hand-in-hand with the Golden Rule we taught our boys when they were very young – Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Teaching this idea to children is challenging without showing them what it actually looks like.  Prior to our memorable Halloween experience, here were a few examples of the kinds of things we did to show our boys the principle of recognizing the Preciousness of Others:

  • We looked for parking spots away from the front of stores and restaurants to allow others – moms with babies, elderly, people with ailments, etc. – to have closer access to the entrance.
  • We allowed others to “cut” in front of us whether we were waiting in a line or letting someone merge ahead of us in traffic.
  • We always made sure that we cleaned up after ourselves and pushed our chairs in at friends’ homes and in public places like restaurants or parks.

Doing these simple kinds of things, explaining why we did them, and teaching our kids ways they could honor others allowed us to demonstrate the Preciousness of Others principle to them.  And eventually they demonstrated this principle to us, on their own, that Halloween.  Please know that we had plenty of challenges with our boys.  But getting them to internalize and express the Preciousness of Others idea was a huge milestone for us.  It got them thinking about how their actions affected other people and they began taking responsibility for their behavior more consistently.  And that was something, as parents, we could build upon.

Blessings to your family,

Shelly and Rich

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