Here's an important statement, and I want you to listen closely. Habits form character. A person who is

known for being truthful is truthful habitually, not just once in a while. A person's habits form

his character. I think we all want our children to be truthful, not just once in a while, not just sometimes,

but having a habit of telling the truth.

It's distressing to feel that you cannot trust what your child says.

But how do you help a child cultivate such an important habit? Let's talk about it.

Welcome to the Simply Charlotte Mason podcast. I'm Sonia Schaefer. We've talked about cultivating a couple of

important habits already,

the habit of attention and the habit of obedience. Today we want to zoom in on the habit of

truthfulness. Would your home be any different if your children had just those three habits,

attention, obedience, and truthfulness?

For Charlotte Mason, they were the top three habits to work on.

She wrote and talked about those three habits the most.

Her ideas on truthfulness are based on this concept, that words are powerful things,

and we need to be careful how we wield them.

So the place to start with cultivating a habit of truthfulness is to ask ourselves,

do we love truth and hold it in high esteem? Or do we view it as something that can be

bent and manipulated to serve our own purposes? Are we careful to verify what we read in social media?

Or do we weigh its value by how exciting it is and then pass it on to others as fact?

How careful are we with our own words?

Then as we create that environment of valuing truth in our homes, we can cultivate it

in our children by requiring them from the beginning to give exact facts without exaggerating

...