Ethical behavior continues to decline

My 12-year-old son hangs out with a group of very nice 12-year-old boys – many of whom falsified their age online so they could open a Facebook account.

The boys all asked permission from their parents. What they didn’t tell Mom and Dad is that you’re supposed to be 13 to go on Facebook.

What they didn’t say is that they had to fill in a birth date on the online registration form. What they failed to mention is that they had to lie.

“But Mom, we always lie online,” one of the boys told his mothers when confronted. “If predators think we’re older, they’ll leave us alone.”

Consider another question of ethics, that of my 17-year-old daughter, who doesn’t understand why I won’t let her get her driver’s license until she can sign an affidavit – as required by law – saying she has earned 50 hours of drive time.

“But, Mom, none of my friends are driving 50 hours. Why do I have to?”

The first of my three children, now 21, remembers when he was 9 and he admitted to breaking a lamp. Instead of being punished, he remembers me getting down at eye level and thanking him for telling the truth.

He also remembers when he was 8 and he got caught eating in his room, which we didn’t allow. I told him at the time it wasn’t so much that he was eating, but that he lied when I confronted him.

“I will not lie to my mother,” he had to write 50 times.

So how did we get here? How do decent children from decent families, who are taught that honesty wins the prize, think it’s OK to lie, even commit what amounts to fraud before the state Bureau of Motor Vehicles?

These questions come up every two years, when the Josephson Institute Center for Youth Ethics – which distributes the Character Counts! program in hundreds of American schools – surveys students nationwide about their ethical behaviors.

In 2008, more than 30 percent of 30,000 students admitted to stealing from a store during the past year, while 64 percent said they cheated on a test and 36 percent said they plagiarized using the Internet.

Forty-two percent said they lied to save money, and eight in 10 said they lied to their parents in the past year.

The irony: Despite the amount of deception in their lives, 93 percent of the students said they were pleased with their personal code of ethics.

Every two years, the numbers get a little worse. Every two years, the pundits, parenting experts and educators speculate as to why:

•The Web. Innocent re-invention online easily escalates into falsifying notarized affidavits.

•Public indiscretion. Pick one: Bill Clinton. Enron. Martha Stewart. Tiger Woods. If they can lie, cheat and deceive, so can we.

•Illegal downloading. Justifying the theft of music and movies can easily shift to justifying the theft of makeup from the drug store, work from your classmate, paragraphs from Wikipedia.

There’s one more bullet point I’d like to add: parents.

I don’t know how it happened to us. But somewhere along the way, we forgot where our own ethical standards start and stop. We also forgot that saying no is sometimes a gift to our children.

For weeks, I agonized over the angst my isolated 12-year-old son appeared to suffer.

“It feels really bad, Mom, when I go to school and everybody’s talking about Dylan’s Facebook pictures except me.”

For weeks, I felt bad for my daughter.

“I don’t know how I’m going to get all those hours in, Mom.”

I considered all sides of the story. Then suddenly one day the cobwebs blew away.

My mission once again was clear, as I blurted to my son, “You can get Facebook in April when you turn 13,” and to my daughter, “You can get your driver’s license when you drive 50 hours.”

Period. End of discussion. That’s that.

They say we are living in a squishy time: The normless Internet keeps us bowing to its whims. The media soars above like a Macy’s balloon, ready to pop any minute with the next barrage of hot air.

Meanwhile, oddly, the same rules of parenting remain relevant: Pay attention to everything in your sights. Listen carefully. Consider with empathy and understanding. Apply the usual values.