Showing kindness means focusing your attention on another person, recognizing what they are feeling and what they need, and then offering them something. It’s giving your sister the last cookie in the jar. It’s playing a game because it’s your friend’s favorite. It’s taking the time to listen when your neighbor is sad.
Being kind isn’t always an easy skill to learn as a child (or as an adult!). It can be hard to shift your focus away from yourself and onto another person.
But teaching kindness to your kids early helps them develop a solid foundation for social-emotional health, strong relationships, and positive self-esteem.
Key Takeaways
- Kindness is a foundational skill for helping your child thrive in school and in life.
- Compassion and empathy don’t necessarily develop on their own. You need to nurture these traits in kids.
- The earlier you can promote kindness in your child, the better.
- Modeling kindness every day is one of the best ways to teach it.
- A social-emotional learning program like Learn with Sesame Street can help kids build kindness and other essential character skills.
Table of Contents
- Why Is It Important to Teach Kindness?
- General Tips for Teaching Kids Kindness
- 6 Ways to Nurture Kindness and Empathy in Kids
Why Is It Important to Teach Kindness?
Imagine your child feeling sad but not wanting to share it with anyone else. Or feeling hurt but scared to say anything about it. Keeping emotions locked inside feels lonely. It creates a sense of “I’m the only one.”
Kindness helps build connections between people so we all feel less alone. When someone offers kindness, they’re saying, “No, you’re not the only one.” They’re creating an inclusive environment, which fosters social engagement, empathy, and a sense of community.
Receiving kindness makes that sad or hurt child feel safe and seen. And the child offering kindness benefits too!
Being kind reduces anxiety and stress and increases “feel-good” hormones like oxytocin, endorphins, and serotonin. Even witnessing someone being kind produces the same results!
But, kindness and compassion don’t necessarily develop on their own. You have to nurture these social-emotional skills.
Make time to talk about ways you and your child can show kindness to others and create routines that put compassion into practice. When you do that, it will be much easier to teach these skills and help them become an organic part of your child’s life.
General Tips for Teaching Kids Kindness
Teaching kindness to your child is super important, so you don’t want it to be an afterthought. Here are some of the best tips to keep in mind as you teach your child to be kind.
Get Your Child Involved
When you decide to do something kind, make sure your child is involved right from the start. For example, if your family is planning to donate toys or help out at a local shelter, talk about it with your child and include them in the planning.
When they see you making an effort to help others, it will inspire them to do the same. It also helps them feel like kindness is something that everyone does together, and not just something you told them they have to do.
When they’re part of the process, they’re much more willing to help.
Model Kind Behavior
One of the most effective ways for your child to learn kindness is to see it from the people around them. In other words, you need to be the model!
When your child watches you show compassion (caring about how someone else is feeling) or empathy (understanding what someone else is going through) during your daily life, they start to understand how to perform kind acts themselves.
They learn best by watching you treat others with respect and care.
Use Positive Reinforcement
It’s essential to praise kids when you see them being kind. This is called positive reinforcement.
When you witness your child sharing a toy with a sibling, giving an old coat to someone in need, or even helping a friend, make sure you tell them what a great job they did.
You can say something like, “That was so thoughtful of you to share your toy. Look how happy your sister is!” These acts might seem small, but they are the building blocks that help your child grow into a more compassionate and caring person.
With these tips, you’re ready to start some fun kindness activities!
6 Ways to Nurture Kindness and Empathy in Kids
1) Make an Acts of Kindness Scavenger Hunt
A kindness scavenger hunt gives kids a fun way to practice thinking about other people and making them feel good.
Create a list of actions for kids to complete, then pair the kids up or create a few teams and send them off to spread kindness! This is a great activity for a classroom full of students or a birthday party. It also makes a fun weekend-long adventure for your family!
Good scavenger hunt items include:
- Sharing with someone
- Giving someone a hug (if they want one)
- Drawing a picture for someone
- Making someone smile
- Making someone laugh
- Holding open a door
- Carrying something for someone
- Leaving a friendly or loving note on someone’s desk
- Reading to a younger sibling
After the scavenger hunt is over, talk about what actions were your kids’ favorites and ask them to share some of the ways people reacted to their acts of kindness. This conversation can help you reinforce feelings connected to kindness and generosity.
2) Create a Compliment Board
Making kindness an everyday ritual in your home is easier if you create something tangible, like a compliment board.
Put a big piece of paper up on a central wall in your home and encourage your kids to add notes or drawings of positive attributes they see in others or acts of kindness they see others do. It often helps to model it for them so they understand the wide range of choices they have.
For example, if you see a child pick up a toy that another child dropped, you could write “JASON IS HELPFUL” on a piece of paper and add it to the board. Or if you see your child petting your dog gently, you could draw a picture of the scene.
This activity helps your kids notice simple ways to show kindness so they can grow the skill. Make a point of not only talking about the gestures of kindness, but also the child noticing them.
Learning to see positive actions ignites a curiosity and passion for creating them too. Once you get started with the board, brainstorm imaginative ways your kids can increase their kindness capacity.
Keeping visual examples of ways they exhibit kindness strengthens the kindness muscle too.
Fun Variations on a Compliment Board
- Leave out a bowl with a stack of paper and pens or markers next to it. Encourage your kids to write or draw at least one example of kindness they see each day and place it in the bowl. Then you can pull the papers from the bowl and talk about them at the end of the day or week.
- Make a kindness box by decorating a shoebox to hold the notes kids make.
- Collect rocks from your neighborhood, paint words of kindness on them, and then give them back to your community by leaving them in places for people to find.
- Build a kindness tree out of cardboard or make a tree mural on your wall. Cut out leaves and urge your kids to write or draw kindnesses on the leaves and add them to the branches of the tree.
- Create a paper chain of words of kindness to hang around a room.
- Engage in a compliment circle every day. Have everyone sit in a circle (or around a table) and offer one compliment to someone else. (Just make sure you keep track of who is complimented so no one gets left out!)
3) Identify Kindness and Empathy in Books
Reading creates a safe space for kids to vicariously experience kindness and other
social-emotional skills. As you read together, you can ask your child what they think the characters in the book are feeling. Then you can discuss how they know.
Can they point out clues in the illustrations that give them information? Can they relate to things the characters are going through? Can they identify familiar emotions? And can they imagine why the characters are feeling scared or hurt or sad?
Through a combination of reading and discussion, you can help build a vocabulary and understanding of kindness that can also be a wonderful springboard for make-believe play.
4) Pay Kindness Forward
When you pay kindness forward, you respond to a kindness offered to you by offering kindness to someone else. If that person does the same, it creates a domino effect of positivity and connection.
These gestures can be varied. If a teacher pays a student a compliment, maybe the student helps a friend clean up a game, the friend makes a snack for their younger sibling at home, and the younger sibling gives a hug to a parent!
Paying it forward can be a powerful way to cultivate healthy and supportive family values.
Thinking about paying it forward as a way to make the world a more supportive and kind place opens your child’s eyes to the ways we are all part of the same world, feeling the same emotions, and deserving of kindness.
5) Model Self-Kindness
When we, as parents, think about how to teach kindness to kids, we focus on our friends, family, and even strangers. That’s called kindness to others.
But there’s another important type of kindness that sometimes gets overlooked: self-kindness. Being kind to yourself is just as important as being kind to everyone else!
Teaching your child how to be nice to themselves will help them feel happier and stronger, making it easier to be kind to others. Here is an effective activity you can try.
Sit down with your child and explain to them that everyone has negative thoughts about themselves from time to time. Give them an example like “I’m not good at math,” or “I can’t run as fast as my friends.”
Then ask your child if they have any negative thoughts and what they might be. Once they’ve identified a negative thought or two, write a positive affirmation to fight it! The affirmation should be a positive sentence that takes the place of the negative thought.
For example, if they think, “I can’t draw well,” you can change it to, “I practice drawing, and I get better every day.”
Other positive notes can be simple, strong statements like:
- I am patient.
- I can share my toys.
- I can put my toys away when I’m done with them.
- I can do hard things.
Take your child’s positive affirmations and post them somewhere they will see them every day, like the bathroom mirror, on the fridge, or next to their bed.
When negative thoughts try to sneak into their mind, encourage them to read the positive notes, and even say them out loud! Doing this helps them remember how awesome they truly are.
6) Be Kind to Animals
Kindness isn’t just for people! Showing compassion (which means caring deeply about someone or something) for animals is a wonderful way to practice being kind.
Animals, whether they are tiny insects, big farm animals, or family pets, deserve to be treated with respect and care. Talking about how to be kind to animals as a family is a great place to start. Ask your child: “What do animals need to be healthy and happy?”
Think about the animals right outside your window. How could you show kindness to them? What about building or creating a birdbath or a bird feeder in your backyard?
Watching birds splash and eat is fun, and your child will know that they’re helping them find food and water. This is a simple, everyday act of kindness that makes a big difference to small creatures.
If you have a family pet, asking your child to help care for it is a perfect chance to practice kindness every single day. Taking responsibility for feeding your dog or cat, making sure its water bowl is full, or walking your pet shows love and dedication.
You can also think about animals that need extra help. Do you have old towels or cozy blankets you don’t need anymore? Gather them up and donate them to a local animal shelter. Shelters always need these items to keep rescued animals comfortable while they wait for new homes.
Show your child that even small actions can have a huge impact on an animal’s life!
Learning about Kindness with Begin
At Begin, we know how important kindness and other Character skills are to helping kids thrive.
Our Learn with Sesame Street social-emotional learning program gives kids access to engaging Character-building content created by Begin and Sesame Workshop.
It includes an app filled with kid-safe, ad-free, replayable games, plus classes for your kids and a Grown-Up Guide for you. Check it out today!
Frequently Asked Questions
How does teaching kindness affect my child?
Beyond just training your child to be kind, teaching kindness actually affects your child’s brain. Here’s how it works.
When your child performs a kind act, their brain releases chemicals called neurotransmitters. This class of chemicals includes things like dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, all of which improve mood in some way.
Dopamine, for example, creates a feeling of reward and pleasure. This feeling encourages your child to repeat the kind behavior because their brain remembers the positive feeling.
Over time, regularly practicing kindness strengthens the neural pathways that are connected to empathy and social connection, making it easier and more natural for them to be caring.
Should I also teach my child about digital kindness?
Absolutely! In fact, you should make it a point to talk to your child about what they say and how they behave online. This means guiding them to be polite, respectful, and supportive to others when they are texting, playing online games, or using social media.
For example, you can teach them to use kind language in comments, stick up for a friend if they see someone being mean, and never join in on bullying or hurtful gossip. If you’re unsure how to do this, start by telling them this: “If you wouldn’t say it face-to-face, don’t type it online.”
Talking about being a good digital citizen helps them extend their real-world kindness into the digital world.
What’s the difference between empathy and sympathy, and how do they relate to kindness?
When we talk about teaching kindness, we often use the words “empathy” and “sympathy” interchangeably. But those two words actually mean different things. Knowing the difference can help you guide your child better.
Sympathy is when your child feels concern or sorrow for someone else’s bad situation. For example, if their friend breaks their arm, your child feels sorry that it happened to them. They are standing outside the problem, looking in.
Empathy goes deeper. It is when your child tries to understand or share the feelings of another person. It means putting themself in their shoes.
For example, if their friend breaks their arm, your child remembers a time when they were hurt and imagines how much pain their friend must be in.
How do empathy and sympathy relate to kindness? Think of it like cause and effect. Kindness is the action that follows both these feelings, so empathy (or sympathy) is the cause and kindness is the effect.
What should I do when my child refuses to be kind or acts selfishly?
It’s completely normal for your child to act selfishly sometimes. After all, they’re still learning! So, instead of punishing them, try to use those moments as teaching opportunities.
First, help your child name the emotion that led to the selfish behavior (maybe they were feeling angry, frustrated, or jealous).
Then guide them through what they could have done differently. You could say, “I see you didn’t want to share that toy. Next time, how about you offer to share it for five minutes, and then ask for a turn again?”
This approach teaches problem-solving and focuses on fixing the behavior, not just punishing the moment.
