Kindness comes from within. It is a sign of love, respect and concern. Showing compassion and kindness toward others helps children form and maintain positive relationships and maintain friendships. In turn, children feel important and recognized, and become self-confident people. As parents, you can start by helping children take care of themselves, others, a pet, or something special. Points to consider when encouraging kindness in young children:
1. Model the behaviors you want your children to practice. Example: let them know you are there and they are not alone, listen when they want to talk, forgive them if they hurt you unintentionally, do what you can to help them when they have trouble completing a task, etc.
2. Help children express their feelings. Guide them in the use of appropriate words and give them plenty of time to think of acceptable behaviors in different situations.
3. Build ongoing nurturing relationships. This is much more important for emotional and intellectual development than academic exercises and educational games.
4. Demonstrate gentle, non-aggressive methods of communication with children and adults.
Activities for parents.
1. Feeling the good deeds – Help children to identify and verbalize personal feelings when someone is nice to them or when they are nice to others. – Help children recognize different ways to show kindness to others.
- Visit a park or mall with the kids to observe the kinds of kind acts others do to one another. Talk about how each action makes each person feel. Ask the children to express how it feels to witness what happened.
- Show the children some pictures of saying hello to your neighbors and someone got hurt, and discuss how “greeting others politely” is a way of showing kindness; and what a person should do when someone is in pain.
- Encourage the children to identify 2 ways they can show kindness to the people they meet in the next 2 weeks.
2. Good actions – Help children appreciate what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
- Prepare a list of pictures with different behaviors, either good or bad, and have the children identify the type of actions they should try to do.
3. helping hands – Help children develop self-awareness in relation to showing kindness to their family members.
- Ask them to identify family members and tell how each of them uses their hands to show kindness at home.
- Include ways they could help each family member.
- Together with the children, come up with a plan to share responsibilities for household chores.
4. a gift for another – Provide an opportunity for children to experience the pleasurable results of being for someone else.
- Plan a visit to a child who is not feeling well or an elderly person in the neighborhood or in a home. Ask the children to make a gift that will benefit or encourage the person.
