Ian James Corlett, author of E Is for Ethics: How to Talk to Kids About Morals, Values, and What Matters Most
There’s no denying that E Is for Ethics: How to Talk to Kids About Morals, Values, and What Matters Most sounds a bit like a Victorian primer, as filtered by, say, Mike Huckabee. And that’s too bad, because Ian James Corlett has actually written something much more entertaining: a set of parables about values such as honesty, generosity, gratitude, tact, acceptance, and effort. These are offered, not as heavy-handed lessons, but rather as prompts for familial discussion.
The stories focus on a brother and sister, Elliott and Lucy, modeled loosely on Corlett’s own children, and capture a wide range of interactions: at home, at school, and in sports. Charmingly illustrated by R. A. Holt, the stories are likely to seem familiar to many children. That shouldn’t be too surprising: Although he’s a first-time author, Ian James Corlett has extensive experience in children’s television and animation, and has a developed sense of how to engage children’s attention. Here’s a typical opener:
Lucy was in a sad mood. She had just spent the morning searching for her favorite book, Lily Lightheart. She looked all over the house: in the darkest corners of the basement, behind every piece of furniture, even in her brother’s room! As she sat on her bed looking sad, her mom entered to see if she had found it. Lucy just looked at her feet and said dramatically, “This is the worst day of my life. I have nothing to read!”
It’s awesome that Lily Lightheart really is a title in a Victorian series about morals for kids. Corlett has updated this tradition for today’s families.
The book’s website is EIsforEthics.com. Corlett discusses his “uniquely Canadian” motto in this video:
Ian James Corlett spoke with me by phone on Wednesday.
GD: Can you talk a little bit about the background of the book?
IJC: This book is designed as a family discussion book. It is based on a strategy I used with my kids, when they were young-they’re now 10 and 12, and I’ve found that 10 is about the cutoff for kids being willing to sit down and listen to “dad telling stories.”
It started years ago, when I would sit down with the kids and with my wife, after dinner on a Monday night, and we would have this forum called “family fun time.” (A name I made up because I didn’t want it to be “family lecture time” or “family ethics time.”) They actually got very used to the routine, and if for any reason I would have to miss it, whether from working late or through some other commitment, I always remember my daughter protesting, “Hey, dad, it’s family fun time! It’s Monday, after dinner-that’s what we do!”
I would take that opportunity to have-not quality family time, because all family time is quality-but family time with a purpose. We would sit around and talk about stories that would have some sort of moral implication, or a value. What is honesty, for example, or what does it mean to be an honest person. My kids so far are not in jail, are doing very well, and so it seemed to go well.
Here’s a funny story: I have friends of all sorts, and one of my friends who I work with is a very partisan conservative. He was on a bit of a tear one day about “godless liberals” and how they’re ruining the world. I’m a middle-of-the-road sort of guy, and I remembering thinking, on the one hand, I hear what you’re saying, because you’re talking about the basic right and wrong of life, but the problem is that if you don’t subscribe to some sort of religion or some socio-ethical framework, then you need a strong set of ethics to replace it.
Everyone wants to do the right thing, but if you don’t want to go the God route, 100%, then how do you start that conversation? My line to him was, “if you’re not religious, then you should certainly have a strong system of ethics.” And a couple of weeks later, we were chatting about something else, and he pipes up to say “You know, if people aren’t religious, then they really should have a strong sense of ethics.” I thought, wait a minute-I said that. And it sounded really good coming back.
So that was the spark that got me to sit down and decide to retool the stories I’ve told my kids, and make them more structured, and help other parents by giving them a forum and a textbook to sit down and open the door to these discussions. At the end of the story, it’s not judgmental: “hey, family, what would you do? What do you think Elliott will do, or Lucy?” And then the families will take it and run with it. Because that’s the last thing that I want, is to have some agenda. It’s just a tool to help people.
GD: Keeping with that theme of dialogue, and not being judgmental, I wonder whether you ever changed your mind after family fun time-for example, if your kids reframed an idea, or got you to think about it in a different way?
IJC: I can’t say that I had that specific experience, but I have been surprised many times by the kids’ response to things-and sometimes they’re slightly shocking! I’m trying to think of an example, but they are scenarios in which what seems simple to you and me isn’t to them. This isn’t a real example, but: Imagine a kid finding a $5 bill, and it’s clear who dropped it-this is that lady’s $5. The kids will say, “nope, she dropped it!,” where you or I would automatically return it. It’s an interesting insight into their little minds, to see how they’re formulating their thoughts. And that’s the point-to start the discussion, not to say, NO, that’s WRONG. The stories all end with supplemental questions, and select relevant quotations, in order to help parents look at from a different angle.
GD: You mentioned above that the stories worked from a pretty young age until about 10, and some of the early reviews have slotted E Is for Ethics for preschoolers to tweens. That’s a pretty big developmental range. How did you choose stories that might be accessible to such different children?
IJC: My kids are 2 years apart, and what I find is that up until about 12, my son’s age, they’re still willing to be a child, even though with their friends, or in certain circumstances, they like to think of themselves as grown-up, as cool, they’re like teenagers, playing video games. My experience writing for television has taught me that there are specific demographics: there’s preschool, there’s 6 to 9-ish, and then there’s 9-12. What I tried to do was not be overly simplistic. So for a young kid, say 3 or 4, it’ll be a bit of a challenge, but I’ve found that children like to challenge themselves. They’re willing, if Mom and Dad are involved and reading these stories, to try hard to rise to the occasion intellectually. Now, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to grasp everything, because there are some things that kids just don’t get conceptually. I’ve straddled, is what I’m trying to say! There’re no overly young things, but there’re certainly no “first kiss”-type stories, either. The sweet spot is probably 6 to 9, and preschoolers will get it-I started this when my kids where 3.
GD: As you just said, you’ve done a lot of work with children’s television-why’d you want to do this as a book?
IJC: To be completely honest, I was looking for a break from producing animation. Making cartoons and cartoon series is such a huge undertaking. There are so many people involved! You have producers, and co-producers, and broadcasters-everyone has a voice in shaping the production. I really wanted an opportunity to just do something by myself, and thought this would be a great adventure. So far it’s been incredibly pleasant-and early signs are that’s successful.
GD: Was the format challenging? You restrict yourself to 1-page stories, with brief discussion prompts afterwards and a couple of quotations.
IJC: It was challenging, but I think I’m built for this, since part of my background is writing for advertising. And that is all about distilling a big idea into 30 seconds. I guess I have some ability in that, and even animation now some episodes are 11 minutes. So you have to have a beginning, middle, and end in a pretty short period of time. This was very different from writing for tv, but getting that big notion into a digestible piece of work was challenging but enjoyable. Overall, my experience of “authorin’” [self-deprecating voice-GD] has been very pleasant in dealing with my editors and publisher. The change was exactly what I was looking for.
GD: The chapters are quite short, because they’re each designed to focus on one value in particular. But I wonder in practice if you ever pit them against each other or hold them in tension? The example that came to mind was that, well, we value honesty and responsibility, but we also instinctively hate snitches or tattletales. I wonder how you handle conflicts in values.
IJC: I avoided the tattletale one, in part because it is a conflict of values. What I noticed in weaving the stories together is how many of the values interlock. You can use the same expression or action to suggest kindness and generosity, for example. Many of these values are quite closely related. To find the nugget of what a particular ethic was, without getting too broad and putting things together was a challenge.
GD: It’s a funny coincidence that this book arrived just as Tiger “I’m a boring family man” Woods’s troubles became frontpage news, and so have been wondering about the extent to which ethics is something that you learn by watching, rather than talking about. If I’m fundamentally a cad or an absent father, we can chat about loyalty, but . . .
IJC: I’ve been thinking about this myself, because I’ve been living a bit in fear with respect to the book. I talk a lot, I blab a lot, since a lot of what I do is voiceover work and acting for cartoons as well as writing for them. And so there’s a strong sense of humor in our household, and I keep thinking: If the book goes well, what happens when I have a Joe Biden moment? I almost feel as though there should be a caveat: I’m like a sports reporter: I report the ethics, but am not necessarily good at it! It’s a fleeting thought, but it’s so dangerous. The guys who set themselves up as role models-not necessarily sports figures, but politicians and religious leaders, where inevitably there’s the scandal and the tears. My feeling is that it’s so much better if we’re straightforward about how we’re all struggling and imperfect. I’m certainly not setting myself up as the arbiter of all things ethical, though I do know how important it is to give our kids a foundation in these issues. It doesn’t mean that Dad can be out gallivanting around, stumble home and say “ok, kids, we’re going to look at this ethics book.”
GD: And your format keeps you from coming off as the ethics scold, because you stop before the moral becomes too heavy-handed.
IJC: Exactly. And apart from my own personal conviction that this is how ethics should be taught, parents need to be honest and a little imperfect with their kids. Certainly kids look to you for everything, but it’s good for them to understand that sometimes people have qualms, or difficulty choosing between different goods. They will respect you more for that. And if you’ve set yourself up as infallible, when something comes up to test you, then they’ll denounce you as a fraud.
GD: You write in the introduction that there’s not as much discussion of right and wrong in schools or in public discourse. And on the one hand I take your point about the language of right and wrong, but on the other hand it seems like there’s a lot of heavy-handed stuff for kids, like your average PBS show for children, or the “updated,” politically correct versions of the fairy tales. What’s different about your approach?
IJC: I may have overstated that a bit, because I was looking back over the last couple of decades of social curricula. What I found was that, because everyone is so concerned about so many things, like a lawsuit-we came a long way in getting away from corporal punishment in the schools and the really old-school, “you just sit there and listen or we’ll pound you”-we’ve come such a long way from that. But, as in so many things, the pendulum swung too far, in my opinion, and everything was ok. Teaching ethics became a bit soft. I noticed it even with my kids’ school sports teams, and their peers. There are some schools, depending on their politics and the politics of the individual teachers, where they don’t even have Sports Days where kids win things. They recognize everyone for participating, and say “Everyone’s a winner.” Well-sort of! But there are still winners! That approach goes way too far, and that’s what I was speaking to in my introduction.
Interestingly enough, while working on the book, and on another project that’s emerged out of it, which is an animated series based on the characters Elliott and Lucy, we’ve enlisted an educational consultant, a Ph.D. in early childhood development, and what we found from talking to him, and with others during the interview process, is that the topic of ethics and ethical behavior has again come into the consciousness of the educational system. That was based on a consultant from Ontario, who noted that the province is taking initiative and arguing that, from a very early age, kids need to be taught this, because we’re seeing grown-ups and teenagers who have no concept of anything ethical. Anything goes. So they’re recognizing that there’s something important to it, and it needs to be targeted.
Maybe it’s turning around, then, and I’d be pleased as punch to rewrite the forward in a couple of years if things keep progressing. I do think there’s a real movement to recognize that these kids are projects. Everyone has said for years that children are our future, but it’s often hollow, and I think there is a new consciousness of this responsibility, whether it’s because of the economic meltdown, or social changes, or who knows what-but something is changing.
GD: One last question: Since this emerged from an actual ritual in your family, it seems fair to ask what your kids make of the book, the physical object itself?
IJC: This is interesting, because Elliott and Lucy are kind of based on my kids. And so my daughter reads the book, and she says, “Oh, is that the time I . . . ? Is ‘Kindness’ the one where I . . .” I have to say, “Claire, it’s not you. It’s Lucy.” And she goes, “Yeahyeahyeah, whatever.” They think it’s pretty cool. It’s funny, because we’re a bit of a showbiz family: I’ve been in a lot of cartoons, and their friends know the cartoons I’ve been in, and will say “Do this or that voice.” And my kids have been in some cartoons-some big ones. But this book is a totally different animal. They feel pretty good about it, because teachers in their school are buying it, and talking about the book, so they’re pleased as punch by it.
GD: Thanks very much for your time!
