Things I Want to Teach My Kids about Modesty

       I want to teach my kids that modesty is not about what you wear. 

       Modesty is about having a humble heart, about being kind and fair, unselfish and loving.   It’s about living within your means. It’s a spirit of obedience to God’s commandments. Modesty is absolutely confident, because its confidence comes from a higher source than ones’ self (you could also call this kind of confidence “faith”.) Modesty involves an admission that you don’t have all the answers all the time, and that living by faith requires you to live with questions or doubts some (or much) of the time. Modesty listens with compassion and respect to the opinions of others and doesn’t boast in one’s own understanding. A modest person gives others the benefit of the doubt and doesn’t judge harshly or unrighteously. 

  In other words, a person who is modest is trying to be like Jesus.

  How much does that have to do with clothing? Very little. So why do most of our modesty discussions focus on clothing? I have no idea.

To be clear, I don’t think that dress and grooming are irrelevant to a discussion of modesty, nor do I think that they are unimportant. But I think they’re much less important than we sometimes make them out to be, and I think a focus on the appearance of others as a valid indicator of righteousness is troubling and un-Christlike and leads to a number of problems.

I want to teach my kids that appearance is a terribly unreliable way to tell anything about a person. And while there are situations that may require appearance-based judgments (like when I decide not to get on an elevator with a big guy who seems a little drunk), most of the time there’s no good reason for us to infer much of anything about the people we come into contact with based on our initial impressions.

So I want my kids to understand that modesty means not passing unrighteous judgment. It also means that they shouldn’t worry when others judge them because of appearance. I want my kids to know that their value and their virtue are not determined by anyone but God.

I want my kids to behave themselves modestly, and I want them to dress in a way that communicates respect for themselves and for God. I anticipate that we’ll have discussions about what that means. I want to encourage them to come to an understanding for themselves and to set personal standards to follow. 

I want to teach my kids that they are not responsible for anyone else’s thoughts and that no one is responsible for theirs, that we can dress and behave in a way that can uplift others, but that we are modest because of our relationship with God, not because we’re duty-bound to keep others from getting turned on.

I want to teach my kids that both men AND women are visual creatures, that both men AND women get turned on, by all kinds of people in all kinds of outfits, and that we are all personally responsible for controlling our own thoughts, not objectifying others, and being respectful of everyone.

I want my kids to understand that the goal of modesty has nothing to do with being attractive. Someone may be attracted to your modesty, but you’re not modest in order to attract him or her. That’s contradictory to what modesty represents. Modesty and attractiveness are by no means mutually exclusive, but to connect the two and teach modesty based on that connection seems to rob the principle of both its purpose and its power.

And I do want my kids to know that modesty is a principle of power—not because dressing in a certain way allows us to influence the way others think about us, but because being modest means we are living in a way that allows the Spirit into our lives to direct us, to comfort us, and to bring us the happiness that comes through trusting in the Lord and His divine love for us, no matter what we're wearing.