26 Character Traits Children Can Learn, A to Z
Children meet most of these before they can spell them. Here is the alphabet of faults and virtues as a five-year-old actually encounters them — and a way to talk about each without turning it into a lecture.
The list
- A — Aggression. Anger that moves faster than thinking.
- B — Boastfulness. Wanting to be admired more than wanting company.
- C — Cowardice. Not the fear itself, but leaving someone else alone in it.
- D — Deceit. Getting what you want by making someone believe something false.
- E — Envy. Wanting to be someone else instead of looking at what you have.
- F — Frivolity. Play before work, and the winter that follows.
- G — Greed. Keeping so much that nothing can be shared.
- H — Haughtiness. Believing other people are beneath you.
- I — Impatience. Pulling up the carrot to see whether it has grown.
- J — Jealousy. Guarding a friendship so tightly it breaks.
- K — Know-it-all. Being unable to say "I don't know".
- L — Lying. Spending trust you will need later.
- M — Meanness. Enjoying somebody's smallness.
- N — Nagging. Saying it a tenth time instead of once.
- O — Obsession. One thing crowding out everything else.
- P — Pessimism. Deciding the ending before it happens.
- Q — Quarrelsomeness. Needing to win more than needing to be right.
- R — Rudeness. Forgetting that other people are watching and feeling.
- S — Selfishness. Guarding what you will never use.
- T — Thievery. Taking what was not offered.
- U — Ungratefulness. Not noticing what was given.
- V — Vanity. Loving your reflection more than your friends.
- W — Wastefulness. Spoiling what someone else needed.
- X — eXcess. Too much of a good thing.
- Y — Yelling. Volume standing in for reason.
- Z — Zealotry. Being so sure that you stop listening.
How to talk about them without lecturing
The fastest way to lose a child's attention is to make the story about them. Keep it about the animal. "Why did nobody come when the boy shouted?" is a question a six-year-old will answer honestly, because it costs them nothing to admit. The transfer to their own week happens quietly, later, and usually without being mentioned.
Two more things that help. First, let the fault be interesting rather than shameful — greedy animals are funny, and a child who laughs is a child still listening. Second, never supply the moral before the story. If the ending is announced in advance, there is nothing left to work out, and working it out is the part that sticks.
Sing Me a Fable gives each of these 26 traits its own animal, its own rhyming fable and its own song, so a child meets one letter and one lesson at a time.
See the book