OPINION: Parents: So Your Kid is Smart? So WHAT! Being GOOD is what matters.

Hopefully, many parents have been awakened by a detail surrounding Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer that is puzzling to many.

“How could this young man be the primary suspect?” they wonder. “He got all A’s in school. He had a near-perfect ACT test score, and earned a college scholarship.”

Unfortunately, in the area of moral values and respect for human life, the alleged killer was morally illiterate.

Schools frequently avoid telling the truth to parents of children whose behavior is seriously in need of correction. Teachers seek to reduce parental push-back by emphasizing that the child in question is “really smart.” In fact, the newest public school practice is to assign grades regardless of a child’s behavior.

This has resulted in a trend for parents of students who receive high grades to unquestionably feel like they’re doing a great job of raising their children. While it definitely can be an indicator that they are, wise parents need to maintain a much higher level of awareness.

While earning high academic grades is a worthy achievement, it doesn’t – or at least shouldn’t – have a higher priority than ensuring that your children are being raised to excel equally in:

• Honesty and telling the truth

• Moral courage

• Respectful behavior toward all adults, starting with their parents

• Obedience to the laws

• Unselfishness

• Compassion towards the elderly, sick, and disabled

• Kindness towards animals

• Forgiveness

• Humility and Integrity, and most importantly:

• Reverence and obedience to God

Parents are often fooled into thinking that the aforementioned traits don’t need to be specifically taught. Many parents believe moral character will just develop as an inevitable side effect of practicing favorite “parenting things” like: obsessing over current nutritional theories, excessively engaging their children in sports, limiting their “screen time”, or providing high-end vacations and enrichment visits to art museums, and so on.

That’s a mistaken assumption that can go very wrong.

The previously listed – and essential – character qualities are no more learned from osmosis than are math, science, English, or social studies.

If parents want children to have a demonstrable “A+” level of these moral traits, they need to provide opportunities to specifically learn and practice them – just as much as parents would conscientiously check to see that their child’s school assignments were being fully completed.

Two important lessons to be learned from the Charlie Kirk tragedy

• Raising children to be “smart” is certainly desirable.

• Raising them to be “good” is essential, if we hope to raise a future generation that will become moral contributors, rather than immoral predators.

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