Hi families,
This week we continue to look at how to teach our children to be kind and caring individuals. We need to remember that we as parents are their role models and our children learn lots by the way we behave and treat others.
Happy reading,
Ms Jodie
6 Ways to Teach Kids to Be Kind
The best thing you can do to make the world a better place is to create a culture of kindness in your own home. Consider these ways to show your children why the Golden Rule rules.
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Help Them Understand What Kindness Means
Even before your kids are old enough to act kindly, you can start talking about it. Empathy is hardwired in us from birth. It’s why your 2-year-old may burst into tears when she sees another toddler fall at the playground, and it’s a perfect opportunity to articulate that experience for her: “You feel sad because you care about your friend and she hurt herself.”
When kids are 3, 4, and 5, it’s a good time to start having discussions about kindness, suggests Dr. Korb, “We treat other people the way we would hope to be treated ourselves,” you can explain to your preschooler. “Once she seems to grasp this, you can move on to the Platinum Rule, which is that we treat people the way that’s best for them, even if that’s different from what’s best for us.
2. Inspire Their Imagination
Thinking “What would that feel like?” is one of the most powerful habits we can instill in our children. “You can’t be a compassionate person unless you have an active imagination—you have to be able to step into someone else’s shoes,” says Katherine Applegate, author of award-winning children’s books, including The One and Only Ivan and Wishtree.
You can offer all sorts of similar opportunities for reflection: “Imagine being a kitten that was stuck up in a tree and wasn’t able to climb down.” “Imagine how hard it must be to get on the bus in a wheelchair—and how grateful you would feel that a smart engineer invented the lift to make that possible!”
3. Model Kindness Everywhere You Go
When it comes to raising thoughtful kids, this is the most important thing we can do, says Dr. Harding. “We can’t control their behavior, but we can look for ways to demonstrate kind behavior ourselves.” Fortunately, kids are eager to copy us from a young age, so you can model kindness from the time they’re babies.
As they get older, your kids will also watch how you treat people, from subtle interactions, such as putting your phone down to make eye contact and say thank you to more tangible acts of kindness, like inviting a lonely person to share a holiday, bringing a meal to a sick neighbor, comforting the bereaved, and donating time and money to take care of people in need.
Kindness also means giving your children, especially when there are siblings in the mix, a feeling of abundance—that there is enough love, praise, laughter, and attention to go around.
4. Encourage Kind Habits
Help your children match the somewhat abstract concept of kindness with the many concrete verbs that enact it: sharing, volunteering, giving, including, comforting, supporting, championing, compromising, listening, and noticing when someone could use help—a classmate with a math problem, a family member with a chore, an older person who needs a seat on the bus.
Dr. Harding calls these small practices micro kindnesses and says they add up to something enormous. Your kids can always ask themselves, “What can I do at this moment that could add kindness to the situation?”
5. Understand That Kindness Isn’t Always Easy
We should remind ourselves and our kids that kindness is hard sometimes, says Dr. Naumburg. “It doesn’t always flow out of you naturally—but that doesn’t mean that you’re not kind.” It can be challenging to be generous with a sibling who’s annoying you. It can be scary to stick up for a friend or a classmate who isn’t being treated right. It can feel awkward to offer condolences to a grieving person.
All we can do is gently coach our kids to remember how other people might be feeling—and then encourage them to take responsibility for whatever ways they might screw up, since apologising is itself a form of kindness. Plus, the more that children get in the habit of behaving kindly, the more natural it will become. “Kindness really is like a muscle,” Dr. Naumburg explains. “The more you practice saying kind things, the easier it’s going to be when it’s hard.”
6. Pay Attention to the Effects of Kindness
Help your children notice how it feels to be kind—and how other people respond. Similarly, you want your kids to notice when people are being kind to them, which will, in turn, engender gratitude. Think of kindness and gratitude as two strands that twist together into the helix of your child’s happiness.
In the long run, kindness will benefit everyone—the practitioners and the recipients—in a million different ways. That’s what Santomero calls “the kindness ripple effect,” and it couldn’t matter more.
