Want to change the world with kindness? Let's not forget our kids…

It’s great that we all want to change the world. Standing in someone else’s shoes and making a difference to the food bank or to a child in need in a far-flung country is absolutely what we should be doing. But in the busyness of life coupled with our desire to change the whole big wide world, we sometimes forget that our family, our children, those that live in our home are our first kindness projects.

Project Kid

We need to see our children as our most important tool to make a better world. We can really impact the world by ensuring our children are taught kindness. Teaching kindness to our children involves them seeing how they are treated by parents and how we treat ourselves. They learn empathy, compassion, generosity, fairness and kindness from us, as parents.

There is a serious issue in today’s world where we rush around doing so much and forget about our own kids. These kids are a blessing from God and they were put in our care to train them up. The greatest way to teach anyone anything is through being an example.

Kindness Muscles

In Jamil Zaki’s book ‘The War for Kindness’ he concludes that empathy can be learnt and one needs empathy to be kind. I live with an illness called Sickle Cell, which growing up caused me lots of pain. Because I was ill, extra effort was made by those around me to be kind to me. I think that having so much kindness directed toward me from firstly my parents, helped my kindness muscles grow. One doesn’t have to be sick to grow kindness muscles but my point is kindness can be learnt.

Modelling

It therefore is important to teach children kindness through modelling kindness. Some suggestions are:

Letting them off the hook: When they have done something wrong once in a while. It is important that you explain what they have done wrong but that you are wanting to be kind to them. You want to show grace and mercy.

Giving lots of hugs and kisses: This sounds like a no-brainer, but in the busyness of life, taking the time to be affectionate can be missed. Affection, physical touch is important for children’s development but it also offers an example of how they should react to others.

Time: Giving kids your time makes them feel special. Taking time to ask them how they are doing and listening carefully to their response is important.

Doing something special for them: Maybe you can make a special breakfast for them and offer breakfast in bed?

Giving yourself a break: Not shouting at yourself when you have burnt the dinner or get something wrong. Mistakes happen and you are not a superhuman. Using your words to say you just burnt the dinner but everything will be okay, shows your kids that you are being kind to yourself. They will then learn to be kind to themselves.

Modelling kindness is one of the best ways to teach our children kindness and change the world at the same time.

 Author - Anusjka Regis Etumnu

Being kind is like a virtue, a quality which helps you think of others and act to make a difference. Well, that’s my interpretation. I have two children. One is 4 and one is 14. When my boy who is now 14 was around 4 yrs old he found it very difficult to share. As a first time mother I was horrified. I set out to understand why my son couldn’t bring himself to thinking about the other person. It seemed as though he had no inkling of how his little friends felt when he did not want to share with them.

In today’s world it seems like everyone is obsessed with themselves and kindness seems to be put to the bottom of the pile. It is believed that too many parents care more about their child doing well in school than they care, about their child being ‘kind’.

It seems to be a little bit strange that a child being kind doesn’t feature at the top of the list in what parents really want for their child. It is strange because kindness facilitates ways to make a child feel happy.  According to Jessica L. Cotney and Robin Banerjee 2017 they indicated that confidence, joy and pride are experienced by the giver of kindness. I believe this is why a child needs to learn to be kind.

Kindness is not just beneficial to the receiver of kindness, it is beneficial to the giver. If a child is to be well rounded and mentally resilient in the strange world we live in today, it is important that they are taught kindness.

Let’s look at these three important feelings mentioned earlier which are important to our mental health.

1. Confidence in oneself is very important to children as they need to be able to trust that they can ‘do it’. They can make good choices and do well in life.

2. Joy is important to release the happy chemicals in the brain. When a child is kind these chemicals are released and your child will be a happy child.

3. Pride in having shown kindness to someone else, allows that child to take responsibility for doing or saying something that makes someone else happy.

All these feelings and emotions are felt because we are all human beings. We are innately good. If as parents we do not teach children to be kind this ability to feel confident, joy or pride can be diminished and ways for your child to develop into a good human being is taken away and their mental health can be severely impacted if they grow up thinking it is ‘all about them’.

So back to my son. Why did he not just share? I thought I was a kind person. Although we are innately good we do have to work on suppressing the bad. We need to learn good behaviour. I therefore had to make a conscious effort to teach him to share. When he shares even now, I reinforce good behaviour by congratulating him. Our job as parents is to help our children learn to be kind because it will help them to be that good human being we ourselves aspire to be.

Author - Anusjka Regis Etumnu