Integrity Is The Compass Within
Excerpts from the Preface

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. ãHenry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Very high on any wise list of dreams for our children is the hope that they do indeed become persons of integrity. Of course, we may also hope that they enjoy success and health and status and happiness, but we know that if they are lacking in integrity all that will prove hollow. We also realize that if they have integrity they will be, despite any setbacks and discouragements, people whom we will admire as well as people who are proud of themselves. After all, their integrity is one thing-perhaps the only thing-that can never be taken away by anybody else. It is the unfailing compass within that always gives them a true reading north, that tells them how far away they may be from home and how to return home. It is the source of their identity.

Integrity is as difficult to define as, say, identity or love, and for the same reasons. As we intend the term, integrity is nothing less than authenticity, an internal sense of rightness and wholeness. As such, honesty, for instance, is an indispensable starting point, as is the effort to represent oneself accurately, fairly, and reasonably, at home, at school, in relationships with family and others. At the same time, integrity implies respecting others and oneself.

In other words, integrity is a notion that cuts across psychological, moral, developmental, and social categories. And as much as we parents wish to guarantee results, we know integrity is not the product of reading to our children from a prepared script. It is subtler than that. And although integrity is essential for living well, there is no equivalent of a defibrillator we can implant in our children's chests to jump-start their moral lives.

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Perhaps, then, integrity is not something to be achieved. In this sense, it is more like bravery, loyalty, kindness, and all the other virtues. We can never quite have it, and the instant we think we possess it, it slips away. It may not be not a thing at all, or if it is, we can only know its outlines, and even then only partially and incompletely. Tim O'Brien, our greatest writer about Vietnam, defines courage in terms that would be useful to apply to integrity: "Sometimes the bravest thing on earth was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones. Courage was not always a matter of yes or no. Sometimes it came in degrees, like the cold; sometimes you were very brave up to a point and then beyond that point you were not so brave. In certain situations you could do incredible things, you could advance toward enemy fire, but in other situations, which were not nearly so bad, you had trouble keeping your eyes open."

Sometimes we hear people speak of someone having integrity. And we all think we know what that means. But for us, to be in integrity implies a struggle, an ongoing and continual commitment to be true to oneself and to be fair to one another, and also a search.

Integrity is the compass within each of us. It points us in the direction we need to travel. Without a compass like that, our lives become nothing more than a succession of events and experiences. If we do not know where we are going, we are lost. With a compass, our lives become journeys. And only with integrity do our journeys achieve meaning. As such, there is nothing more important to the project of parenting children than promoting integrity, and it is something that we must work on from the earliest years.

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Integrity is only fully appreciated under complicated circumstances, often under duress, often in disappointment and loss. The sad truth is that often one learns to value integrity most just after compromising it. That is, even though integrity is an absolute value, one comes to appreciate integrity through the messy, relativistic, day to day struggles of growing up.

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As a practical matter, therefore, we write Right From Wrong with one eye looking toward what the parents of children can do now to raise healthy school-age children and another upon the groundwork for healthy adolescence. We do this because it is adolescence, more than any other phase of life, that sends shivers down a parent's spine. Ask parents of teenagers about the younger years, and they all say it feels as if it happened a minute ago and they long nostalgically for the days gone by. (It is one of the curiosities about most books on adolescence that that same wistful tone appears again and again-everybody wishes for a past that cannot be recaptured, when we were the centers of their universe.) Kids grow up fast, and parents need to stay in the moment with their school-age children even while at the same instant they prepare them for high school and adulthood, too.

In Right From Wrong we show how, from very early on, children are tuned into integrity. They yearn for wholeness within themselves and within their families. It is never easy or simple to promote integrity, and being honest often exacts a high price. The only consolation for parents and for children both is that there is no reasonable alternative. If we do not have integrity, and do not value integrity in ourselves and in our children, we have very little on which to base a healthy relationship.

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Integrity begets integrityãand in very down to earth ways. Sane, creative, and compassionate parenting is consistently rooted in the practice of integrity. As parents we know we are in integrity when:

We stand our ground, but are ready when the ground shifts underneath the feet of our children (starting school, puberty, graduation, experimentation). That means we ask questions and listen carefully to the answers as well as to the silence; that also means we freely admit our mistakes and make generous allowance for kids' being kids.
We commit ourselves wholeheartedly to the process (discipline, education, relationship) while at the same time emphasizing absolutely the health and safety of our children. Kids need limits. They thrive within boundaries and they need protection from making poor choices. They are children.
We stay strong before the spectacle of imperfection, but never let ourselves or our children to give in to discouragement.
We remember not to take personally any instances of failure or letdown, but we also make sure to give credit to our children when they do the right thing for the right reason.
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At the beginning of Maurice Sendak's classic Where The Wild Things Are, Max is wearing his wolf suit and making mischief and, as a result, he is disciplined: sent to bed without eating. Feeling powerful, he ventures off to the magical world where the wild things are and where he is summarily anointed their king. "Let the wild rumpus start!" he encourages the creatures of his imagination, and sure enough, it does. Eventually, he comes back home, however, the home that exists in his mind and heart, the place he can never finally leave even when he tries. And that's where his dinner and his family are still waiting for him.

Our children are imperfect, just like us. The world is full of very wild things. No wonder we parents worry and fret and question ourselves. All this to say that our soundest hope is to keep the dinner hot and to stay involved during those inevitable moments when our children seem to be beyond our control, at the mercy of forces we can sometimes only barely remember or understand. When our children are whole, when they feel authentic to themselves, when they grasp beyond words how important is their own integrity, however, we can nurse a beautiful hope based upon the most pragmatic insight into their dreams and struggles. Like Max, our children ultimately, and with lots of help from us, find their own way. Like Max, sometimes our children will disappoint us and themselves. Also like Max, though, they are always and already heading home, back to us and back to themselves.

Let the wild rumpus start.

Copyright Joseph Di Prisco and Michael Riera