Have you wondered what happens when a parent helps a child complete a project?
Imagine a family setting. A mother, a father, two children. Normal, everyday evening. The children sit down to do homework, while the parents, one or both sit down to watch TV, cook a meal, dwindle on their laptop either for leisure or work and help the children out with their school work. Typical, right?
Well, here’s where it starts to become murky and shady. What happens when the parent or both parents see their 8-year-old struggling with a diorama project?
“Wait”, says one parent. “I never even heard of this word, how is my child supposed to even complete this project”.
More often than not, the parents end of making the project, doing the work, reading the story out loud, writing the composition…
So, what’s the big deal?
It’s a huge deal! Academic integrity isn’t just a catch phrase you get to hear and follow when in university. It is something that sows its seeds at early age and it begins with parents – a child’s first role models. When children see parents do their homework, they learn a very valuable lesson – that it is ok to have someone do their work for them and take credit for it; that it is ok to use someone else’s work as own. These are some very serious, scary lessons that we are inadvertently teaching our children.
But it doesn’t end here.
Now imagine a winter vacation. The children are moping around the house as both parents are at work all day long. One of the days, the weather is chilly, cozy and nice. So the parents decide to “play hooky” from work. In front of the children, they pick up the phones and while pretending to cough, with a heavy voice ask for a sick day off. Or, feign a family emergency to take a day off. Both end of spending that day taking the children out, mall-ing, shopping, picnicking at the local park, trying to be good, involved parents.
But were they?
When children see their parents lying to get ‘out of work’ in order to ‘play’, the lesson they take away isn’t ‘my parents love me and are making efforts to spend time with me’, but more often what they are taking away is ‘it’s ok to lie to someone in authority’. More serious, scary lessons we don’t really want our children to learn from us.
Parents knowingly or unknowingly often pressurize their students to get higher grades, emphasizing on the importance of those grades, rather than on the actual knowledge-acquisition. Parents link the good grades to better future, sometimes at any cost, inadvertently giving what students believe to be the “green card” to resort to any means to get those desired grades.
Every time parents ‘download’ music or a favorite cartoon for their children, or look the other way when the children are downloading pirated games or copying text off the internet for school projects without acknowledging sources, they are endorsing dishonest behavior. Parents’ ethical attitudes and pressure or expectations impact children’s ethical attitudes and their likelihood to commit a dishonest action academically.
There are numerous such daily-instances that don’t stand out as earth-shattering moments to parents.
But they should.
Parents are the bedrocks of children’s development. Parents’ attitudes and influence have tremendous impact on how children develop their belief systems which ultimately become the basis for their understanding of what is important and what is right.
This is a wake-up call for all parents. If parents believe that learning is the most important outcome of going to school instead of grades; if parents encourage their children to complete their own work at reachable goals; if parents reinforce that dishonesty in any form is wrong and should not be encouraged; it is possible that students will also develop a strong sense of integrity and intrinsic interests that will ultimately help reduce their likelihood to be dishonest in an academic setting.
Adapted from my dissertation: Khan, Z. R., Developing a factor-model to understand the impact of factors on higher education students’ likelihood to e-cheat, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, School of Information Systems and Technology, University of Wollongong, 2014. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4545
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