How to Keep Your Kids Honest: 30 Ways in 30 Days

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If you’re like me (or most parents for that matter!), you struggle with how to keep your kids honest. Since April 30 is National Honesty Day, I wanted to help you teach your kids honesty in a more clever, bite size way.

I’ve come up with 30 Ways in the 30 Days of April to help keep your kids honest. I’ve shared the entire list of honesty tips of on my April Tommy Nelson blog post, but I wanted to share the top 10 to get you started encouraging your kids to walk in the ways of honesty and truth.

Top Ways to Keep Your Kids Honest:

1. Keep them accountable for their actions
2. Listen as they speak to friends & siblings
3. Have them put a penny in a jar every time they don’t tell the ‘whole’ truth
4. Share the difference between manipulation & persuasion
5. Set a good example before them
6. Encourage them when they tell the truth in a difficult situation
7. Ask little ones if they know the difference between right and wrong
8. Explain the difference between ‘telling the truth’ and ‘being honest’
9. Talk about what it means to live an ‘honest life’
10. Discourage telling ‘fibs’
11. Role play
12. Tell them why the ‘Finders Keepers’ rule can be hurtful and dishonest
13. Praise them if they turn in a lost object
14. Pray honestly – even if that means confessing hurt or dishonesty
15. Remind them lying comes with consequences, but confession is met with forgiveness
16. Remind them there is less to ‘remember’ when they tell the truth than when they lie
17. Ask them to come up with words that contradict ‘truth’
18. As a family, search the Bible for how many times you can find the word ‘truth’
19. Draw a picture of a time when you told the truth
20. Make an acrostic using the word “TRUTH”
21. Tell a story of when you ‘did the right thing’
22. Talk about how truth is encouraged at school
23. Think of a time when a friend told you the truth, even though it may have hurt to hear
24. Explain the difference between ‘fantasy’ & ‘lying’
25. Teach the character of grace, love & mercy
26. Work on self-discipline
27. Keep encouraging Bible verses on the fridge
28. Write truth scripture on kids’ bathroom mirror
29. Memorize a verse about ‘honesty’ as a family
30. Above all, teach kids to be courageous and triumphant in their pursuit of the Truth of God!

If you really want a helpful tool to help your kids live our the principles of being honest and doing the right thing, then check out this DVD resource from Tommy Nelson:

Featuring the voice talents of my Nashville ‘neighbors’, Amy Grant & Vince Gill’, this DVD will not only engage pre-school and elementary aged children alike, but also teaches a great message, including behaving well even when nobody is watching, and the biblical lessons from the Parables of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

Remember, the best way to accomplish the goal of teaching our kids honesty is to show them practical ways to live it out instead of just listening to it! If you want more practical help on how to relate God’s Word to your life, take a look at my devotionals.

How have you taught your kids about the importance of telling the truth?