Character education with our children begins right from the beginning of them opening 
their eyes to the world, the people in it, and how they respond to it. Routines help children know the boundaries of natural or acquired virtues, much like the boundary of the lake helps the lake to be a lake, not a swamp.
Consistency is the key.
The sooner we institute good habits, otherwise called virtues, the easier children know what is expected of them. If we are beginning late in the process of teaching good habits, know that it is possible to retrain our habits. It takes 21 days to change a bad habit. Just stay with it.
That also goes for teaching our children good habits. It helps to take a healthy daily dose of empathy and patience with our morning vitamins. We know how hard it is for us to change lazy habits or our own bad language into life-affirming good habits. Our children need the same time frame of 21 days of positive reinforcement to begin to see positive results.
How do we begin with children up to seven years of age?
The key good habits to build upon, according to David Isaacs, author of Character Building, are:
- Obedience
- Sincerity
- Order
Since young children have no sense of time, you can encourage children to put away their things:
- before the music stops
- beat the clock – before the big hand reaches the 12 (or next clock number that is five minutes away)
- beat yesterday’s time
- use a five-minute hourglass
You can also give them choices with sticker rewards:
- Do you want to pick up the little blocks or the big puzzle?
- Play “I Spy” and see who can pick up the most arts and crafts debris.
- Who can put away five items the fastest?
“Until they are seven, children scarcely have the use of reason and therefore the best they can do is obey their educators and try to fulfil this duty with affection,” says Isaacs.
Low-grade motives for obeying parents prior to seven-years old can include obeying because they are afraid or because there is no way out. If children learn better motivation, being encouraged to obey out of love, to help their parents, then the children are on their way to developing the virtue of generosity.
Sincerity also is related to honesty. Children need to learn the benefits of the fruits of being sincere, as opposed to negative reinforcement such as being punished for telling the truth.
It will help children to be asked to be orderly and tidy up after themselves. An early start in this lesson creates a life for children where they learn how to be responsible for putting away their toys, clothes and treasures, with the help of caring parents and caretakers. This is not to be confused with the parents doing all the putting away of toys, clothes and treasures, thus training the children that in coming years, “That is not my job,” in the self-sabotage mantra.
“A sense of duty is another reason for being orderly – for example, when being tidy is linked in with carrying one’s weight by doing one’s chores.
“These three virtues will form a solid basis for moving on to other virtues at the next stage,” Isaacs says.
For children in grades five through eight, now is the time to begin teaching The Virtue of 
Virtues, by Linda Hourihan. It has been taught as a CCD curriculum. However, it is a seven-lesson Christian tool parents can use one hour a night for seven days, one hour a week for seven weeks, or one hour a month for seven months.
Each chapter is uses thought-provoking reporter questions for children to search for and discover truth and morality in each lesson, while they learn how to apply the virtues to their daily lives. Virtues are based on ethics and values that move past the popular opinion of the day to a solid foundation of unchangeable virtues given to us by God, exemplified by Jesus, and bolstered by the Holy Spirit.
This book is available at: https://www.iuniverse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/809142-the-virtue-of-virtues
God Bless