Parents generally tend to focus on providing the child with the right kind of education, the perfect school, and ensuring he learns the skills required to be a productive individual. However, there are rare times when a child’s social growth and compassionate behavior are put in focus as well. In today’s world, kindness is taking a backseat with most people preferring to be selfish and uncaring towards others. Here’s your chance to make the next generation better than us.
Many believe that being kind actually makes you naive and gullible, leading you to lose out to competition in life. But studies show otherwise. Kids who are kind to other children around them are more readily accepted by his classmates. Everyone wants to be treated kindly and seeing someone as a kind person helps you form a bond with them. The instances of bullying, bunking school, and unfounded violence begin to fade away when the benefits of kindness start getting visible. The random acts of kindness help your child in understanding that a kind act should not be looked at as a deal or a trade. It should come from within, from the heart.
To understand the best way of teaching kindness to children activities can always be useful, but so can everyday behavior that helps inculcate kindness as a way of life.
The easiest way for your child to be a kind person is to see you be one. Children readily emulate various traits and habits of their parents. If you tend to behave rudely, your child will end up looking at the world from the same eyes. By behaving kindly with others, you set an example for your child to look up to and do the same in his life.
A child’s world is pretty small inside his head. His school, friends, toys, and family. That’s pretty much everything for him. This is why the concept of understanding random acts of kindness dawns a little late on them. Talk to them about the world and the people living in it. Open their eyes to other individuals in the school, the many people in the streets you cross daily, and let them know why kindness is so important today.
Kids hate duties or chores and will do them simply to appease you. You wouldn’t want your kid to be kind just because you ask him to. This is a value that he needs to inculcate within himself. This can be achieved only by practising kindness on a daily basis. Let it be as small as waving to the fruit-seller you see every day on the way to school. Tiny habits come together to form a personality trait.
Teaching your child about kindness is one thing. But, once they see it happen in real life, there is no turning back. Ask your child to go and compliment a shopkeeper, or gift a toffee to a policeman standing on the road. Let them hear the words of thankfulness and experience the happiness that comes with helping someone.
Not all kindness needs to manifest in the form of action. Even a small gesture of acknowledgement can improve someone’s day. Smile at people you see every day and wave to the ones you know well. Those are enough to make someone happy for the entire day.
As your child grows up, his habits start solidifying and introducing new ones, especially selfless ones, start getting difficult. Teach your child to be kind while he is a kid so that it integrates with his personality by the time he becomes an adolescent.
Your little boy cannot do this all by himself. And it isn’t too late for you to start being kind again as well. Go with your child to encourage him to act kindly with others. Pick a day and a location and decide to smile at everyone you see them. Help your child take the first steps.
Make sure your child sees kindness for the altruistic act that it is. And not something to show off or expect something in return. That not only defeats the entire purpose of kindness but might make your child start doubting anybody else who is kind to him. This can even cause behavioral problems.
Later in life, your child will begin to associate success by comparing himself with others, leading him to be less kind to others in the effort to be better himself. Talk to him about what true success means and how kindness is an internal success that nobody can take from him.
Let your child get together his friends and organize a random act of kindness. Let him know that everyone is on the same side when they are kind and if someone isn’t actively kind, you shouldn’t end up judging the person for it.
Here’s a list of acts of kindness your kids would enjoy.
Random acts of kindness are not difficult to come up with. They are the most obvious ones once you start looking at the world with humane eyes. Let your child be that from his childhood, and he will grow up to be a wonderful human being loved by all.