Teaching your kids about Tiger Woods

I told my seven-year-old about Tiger Woods. I figure, better she hears about it from me than from some other second-grader.

The story is pretty simple: a daddy had girlfriends. This provides a number of jumping off points to discuss family values. What's wrong about that? What is marriage? What is the social contract? Why is it wrong to break the social contract? Is it ever ok to break the social contract?

I have figured out that really all I can do as a parent is to instruct my kid about family values. Values are necessarily different from one family to the next, and they are shaped by our education and our experiences. We try to spend the most time with families who share the most similar values. Is it ok to spend time with families that have different values? I guess it's ok for limited time, as long as I get the last word. So we can use experiences with other families as a way of discussing what's wrong or what's right about their approach.

I take a pretty literal view of values: there is a hierarchy of what's good and what's bad. Some concepts are more valuable than others. Probably compassion is the top value, to me, then education.