Virtue....and how to teach it?

We took a trip to Bear Mountain yesterday.  It was gorgeous weekend for an autumn hike, and I loved almost every minute of it.  (I say almost because we ultimately pushed Aidan a bit too hard.  The kid was a trooper during the hike but got very antsy--who wouldn't after three hours in a baby hiker?--during the last mile of the hike and during the boring two-hour trip home).  What I loved most about the day was that the three of us were together as a family, and yet I felt I was able to get the solitude for which I often feel so needy. 

On the ride to the mountain, John asked a lot about how my course at Union is going.  I hadn't yet shared with him the virtue that I had focused on and written about this week.  Recall that for each week, I must choose a virtue, research what other theorists have said about it, and write an analytical/reaction paper about it.  There is no list of virtues from which students must choose, and while we are allowed to choose from among the classical virtues (prudence, temperance, etc.), we are encouraged to be creative in our choice. 
My first paper focused on "self-care."  My second focused on "responsibility."  This week, after exploring Lisa Tessman's rather bleak exploration of the relationship between oppression and virtue in her Burdened Virtues, I focused on "sensitivity to the suffering of others." 

I shared with John that I love writing these weekly papers--doing so has forced me to think about virtue in general and in virtues in particular.  We then had a discussion of which virtues we'd like to see Aidan develop and found that our lists (which were really just a first reflection on it) differed somewhat.  It's not so much that we disagreed on certain virtues, but we did prioritize them somewhat differently... 

One virtue to which we both assigned high priority is honesty, and we found ourselves wondering how to best cultivate this virtue in Aidan.  Certainly, we teach honesty by living honest lives, by being honest people.  But I found myself wondering, as we hiked along, about the less obvious ways to teach it.  For example, I've been reading Alice Miller's Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, in which she argues that some young children learn to be dishonest at a very young age because their parents do not provide an open, tolerant environment in which their children can express their honest feelings.  They learn to prevaricate for fear of punishment, or worse, sensing their parents' disapproval at the mere expression of their feelings, they repress them and sometimes lose touch entirely with their inner selves.  They may not be liars, but they are deeply alienated from the truth of themselves.  I find explorations such as Miller's interesting and can, at the very least, agree that so much of a person's "character" is developed in her/his earliest years. 

And so I found myself reflecting more on these things as we hiked Bear Mountain.  Which virtues are essential to Aidan's well-being (for Aristotle, the "big guy" of virtue ethics, virtue is "eudaimonistic," aimed at flourishing/well-being)? How do I, as his parent, teach them? 

I would love to hear your own thoughts, my dear reader.  What do you think are the virtues that are essential to well-being?  And what are some ways that one lives out these virtues?  And finally, what, actually, does well-being look like?  Please accept my invitation to engage with me in this exploration....