kindness

My daughter shares her millennial generation’s intolerance for all non-instantaneous forms of communication. That includes voice mail. If she calls and I don’t answer, she simply hangs up, leaving me to speculate whether she’d merely wanted to chat, or been kidnapped. So when I saw that she’d left a message on my phone a couple of weeks ago, I wondered what she had considered important enough to merit the effort. It turned out that she hadn’t felt either chatty or imperiled, only unhappy about having snapped at me before she’d left the house that morning. “I’m sorry I was so cranky, Mom,” she said, sounding contrite. “I was just in a bad mood; I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. Please forgive me.”

It wasn’t hard to do, especially since it had been she and her brother who’d taught me how to do it by always forgiving me for my own intermittent crankiness when they were growing up. In fact, if I’d been the one to teach them how important it was to apologize—to say they were sorry for calling another kid “stupid head,” or for accidently riding a scooter up some unsuspecting pedestrian’s leg—they’d been the ones to teach me how important it was to forgive.

I remember one particularly fraught morning when my daughter, then age seven, and I exchanged this bilateral lesson. I had an early appointment to get to, but despite my urging her to hurry, she was still dawdling dreamily over her bagel only minutes before the school bus was due to arrive.

Exasperated—and suddenly noticing that the feet she was swinging languidly under the kitchen table were bare of shoes and socks—I went into overdrive. In a loud, angry voice, I let loose a string of accusations about her total lack of cooperation, her nonexistent sense of responsibility, and her general inability to focus on anything important. The feet abruptly stopped swinging, and a hurt and startled face turned in my direction.

“Now go and put on your shoes,” I finished sternly, and she quietly left the table. But the image of that wounded little face remained, and I realized almost immediately that I’d reacted too fiercely to her lackadaisical, but hardly criminal, behavior. A moment later, I followed her into her bedroom and sat down next to her as she pulled on her socks.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” I said. And then, realizing that “sorry” wasn’t enough, I explained my behavior and took back the global accusations that I had made about her character. “I think I got so angry because I’m worried about getting to an appointment. I know you can be very cooperative, and I apologize for saying you’re not.” I put my arms around her, and was relieved to feel her squeeze me back.

A year or two earlier, my still-gangly adolescent son unaccountably decided to join his high school’s wrestling team. When he asked me to buy him a $40 team sweatshirt, I flatly refused, reminding him that he was already in possession of a school sweatshirt, and that money didn’t grow on trees, at least not on our trees. I ended this non-discussion by admonishing him not to ask me again.

Two weeks later, his dad and I went to see his team compete against another school. I watched as, one-by-one, his teammates trotted into the gym wearing dark blue, zip-up sweatshirts, with the name of their high school and “Wrestling” spelled out in gold lettering on the back. In contrast, my son’s old pullover—faded from many washings, a bit short in the sleeves—looked pretty pathetic. I realized how embarrassed he must have felt in it, and on our way home after the match, I whispered an apology (of sorts) in his ear: “Order the dumb sweatshirt!”

Whenever I apologized to my children—for flying off the handle and saying hurtful things I didn’t really mean, for overreacting to some annoying piece of behavior, for answering no to a request without considering the reasons behind it, for any piece of unjust behavior that I regretted—I was trying to convey to them several important messages. Above all, I was trying to make it clear to them that I cared about their feelings, that I cared enough to take the time to judge my actions, to ask myself whether I was being too harsh or unfair, to check whether my behavior stemmed more from my own stress than from their misdeeds. My apology told them how important they were to me, how high a priority they had in my heart.

It also modeled the sort of behavior I wanted them to make their own, showing them what it meant to listen to the stirrings of regret they would inevitably hear from time to time for having treated another person badly. I wanted them to see that being in the wrong wouldn’t kill them or irreparably harm their relationships with those they cared for, not if they took the time to make things right.

I know I can’t protect my children from all the injustice in the world—but I can protect them from my own. By apologizing to them, which I still do now that they are grown, I’m letting them know they can count on me to be fair, to recant an undeserved rebuke, or rethink an ill-considered decision. I’m illustrating how acknowledging hurtful behavior toward others is an important way of maintaining their trust. People you apologize to learn they can count on you to be on the up-and-up with them, always. And isn’t that the way we want our kids to feel about us?

My son was a sophomore in college when he brought his first serious girlfriend home for his birthday dinner. She was pretty and petite and well-spoken, and my instinctual wariness (What does this girl want from my precious son?) ebbed as the meal progressed. At the end of the evening, as they were getting ready to leave and I was carrying dishes from the table to the kitchen, I passed the two of them standing in front of the hall closet. She had just finished buttoning her coat, when my son—a 6’1” bruiser, with shoulders that barely made it through our front door—flipped up her collar and said, “It’s cold out there.” His hands lingered under the cloth, cupping it to her cheeks, and he gazed down at her with a look of tenderness that, until then, I’d only ever seen him bestow on our dog. The object of his gentleness, whose blond head stopped just short of his overworked biceps, turned her face up to his. Her expression, which I remember clearly to this day, was one of complete trust and adoration.

Their emotional transaction lasted for no more than ten seconds, but that was long enough to convince me I had raised a son who could do more than simply consume a houseful of food in one afternoon, or emerge from a rugby match with a black eye and a grin. What I saw was that I had brought up a young man who could both inspire, and return, love.

It’s memories like these, I find, that I treasure most about my kids, not their public triumphs, but the intimate moments in their lives when, without knowing it, they showed me they were becoming the kind of open-hearted people I always hoped they’d be.

My daughter was seven years old the day the soccer team she played on after school lost a close game at the last minute, when their goalie was unable to stop a ball kicked swiftly into the net by one of the players on the opposing team. The loss was a big letdown for our side, so I prepared a consoling speech as I watched my daughter walk dejectedly off the field. All at once, I saw her lengthen her stride so that she came up beside her team’s goalie, who looked dangerously close to tears. I watched as my little girl leaned in and said something to her fallen friend, who shrugged her shoulders and seemed to brighten up. They gave each other a quick hug, after which my daughter skipped over to where I was waiting.

“What did you say to Natalie?” I asked, as she put on the jacket I held out to her. She brushed away the bangs that were forever flopping into her eyes and began to zip up. “I just told her that I thought the last ball had been a really hard one to stop, and that probably no one else on the team could have done it.”

“That was nice of you,” I said. She shrugged. “Yeah, well...” She didn’t seem to know how to finish the sentence. I guess a seven-year-old doesn’t have the dictionary definition of empathy at her fingertips. No matter. Her behavior was proof enough that she knew it by heart. 

Look, there are many things my children are not and never will be: Rhodes Scholars, Silicon Valley billionaires, Nobel Prize winners, or Olympic champions. But does this mean they are less than they should be? Of course not—not if I remember that their value isn’t based on what they achieve, but on who they are.

I think we parents often forget this. I know I did all those nights I lost sleep agonizing over my son’s listless test scores or my daughter’s lack of direction, his carelessness, her dreaminess. It took me far too long to see that the question isn’t whether a child makes valedictorian, but whether he makes other people happy. It isn’t whether he gets into the college of his choice, but whether he makes the right choices. It isn’t whether he keeps his room clean, but whether he keeps his word.

As I see it, we parents are in the manufacturing business. We’re on the assembly line every day, reminding our kids to say please and thank you, not to hurt other people’s feelings, to work for what they want, to be good sports. And after putting in countless hours of unpaid overtime to get the job done right, our rewards are found not in diplomas or trophies but in the everyday feats of kindness and courage by which our children show us that we’ve turned out a quality product.

We just have to keep our eyes and our ears wide open.  

A friend remembers her mother trying to teach her and her sibling good manners at the breakfast table when they were young. “What’s the magic word?” their mother asked before sliding pancakes on their plates. The younger sister thought and then answered triumphantly, “Bippity-boppity-boo!”

Well, that was then and this is now. As challenging as it’s always been to teach children to be courteous, many parents think it’s much more difficult today.

In the current climate world, rudeness often reigns. Cyberbullying is all too common. Television reality shows depict backstabbing behaviors and bickering. Politicians—even some of those running for the highest office in our land—hurl insults. Kids observe road rage, toxic interactions on playing fields and in sports arenas—and even in their own homes. (OK—who hasn’t slammed a door or otherwise shown a regrettable lack of restraint or decorum in front of our children at least once?)

An overwhelming majority of Americans across all generations believe that lack of civility is a major societal problem today. And most of us think the problem is only going to worsen, because kids need to see civility modeled in order to learn it and that’s increasingly a tall order. Parents have to work harder than ever, it seems, to teach kids what they need to live peacefully with one another—things like self-awareness and self-control, empathy, an understanding of the importance of thinking not just about ourselves but also about the common good.

Where to begin? Here are a few suggestions.

• When your children witness or observe incivility, don’t miss the opportunity to talk with them about it. Explain why what was said was inappropriate. Encourage them to put themselves in the shoes of the recipient of the mean-spirited words or behavior. Teaching them how to look at the situation through the lens of the other person is one good way to teach empathy.
• Monitor your kids’ media consumption, and balance the incivility they may be seeing in news, TV shows, movies, and video games with good literature. The world is full of excellent books featuring characters who are worthy of emulating. Even fictional characters can model how to treat others with dignity. Don’t underestimate the power of literature to teach your children how to live life well!
• And try to avoid becoming desensitized to incivility. Speak up when you or your children experience or witness it. Sometimes a small incident can teach a big lesson. When some teenagers intentionally cut in front of younger children lined up for a ride at a local fair, an adult spoke to the kids, pointing out that their behavior was rude and asking them to move to the end of the line. The chagrined kids did so, to the murmurs of approval from onlookers. Another mom I know once asked two customers in a reception room to bear in mind that children were present, listening to their conversation, which was peppered with inappropriate language.

Let’s refuse to view mudslinging and name-calling as accepted (and expected) political rhetoric. Write letters to these politicians and public servants. Sign petitions. Use the power of your vote to communicate your disapproval. After all, our children are watching and listening.

When I was in elementary school—way back when—my parents would give me a dollar if I received an A in “Behavior” on our quarterly report cards. They didn’t pay for good academic grades—although it was clear that they expected my very best effort. If that best effort resulted in a B instead of an A in a particular subject, that was OK. But anything less than an A in Behavior was inexcusable.

When I became a parent, I thought about this practice a lot, particularly around the arrival of my kids’ report cards. Never completely understanding my parents’ rationale and feeling funny about rewarding good behavior with cash, I decided not to pay my kids for good conduct—or for good academic grades, for that matter. But results of a recent study from the Harvard Graduate School of Education made me think harder about what, exactly, my parents may have been trying to accomplish.

The startling take-away is that more than 80% of the 10,000 students surveyed ranked achievement or personal happiness over kindness. Yet, in the same study, 96% of parents indicated that it’s important for their children to have a strong moral compass.

The researchers in this study call this a rhetoric/reality gap—a gap between what adults say and what they do. And it sends, at the very least, a mixed message to kids about our core values.

How have we arrived at this place? Is the emphasis on high-stakes causing us to overly focus on scholastic achievement? Are we so intent on trying to ensure that our kids are “happy” that we forget to remind them to be kind—that we forget to talk about (and demonstrate!) that sometimes we must set aside our self-interests for the common good or the good of another?  

Kindness matters. It matters globally, as a healthy society needs people who care about the needs of others as well as their personal happiness.

And it matters to each of us personally. To raise happy children, we must cultivate kindness in them. People can’t be truly happy if cruelty and insensitivity are part of their make-up. To raise successful children, we must cultivate kindness. Kindness and empathy are components of a strong social-emotional IQ, which other research shows, is as critical to success in life as is intellectual IQ.

So how can we let kids know that, yes, doing well in school matters—but so does being a person of good character?  I think that’s what my parents were trying to help me understand. My report card probably had a dozen letter grades measuring scholastic achievement—but only one for conduct. Pulling a dollar out of his wallet every grading period may have been my father’s way of balancing the scale—making sure that the one important grade buried on the back of the report got its due. Playing well with others, respecting authority, being helpful—these things, like math and reading, must be learned.

A friend’s son was recently recognized at 8th-grade graduation with an award for showing leadership in tolerance and kindness. His mother was happy and proud—but also conflicted about how much fuss to make over it. Would a celebration or reward suggest that he went above and beyond, when really he had behaved exactly the way he’d been taught? I think a little fanfare underscores the message that we value being nice as much as we value accomplishment.

Intentionally giving kids opportunities to practice kindness surely helps as well. One parent I know helps her kids organize a charity toy drive now and then, urging them to donate the toys they no longer use. Another parent took her daughter to a free community luncheon to help serve. Another family regularly assists elderly neighbors, who repeatedly try to pay the children for their efforts. But the firm family rule is “no payment,” and the kids learn the difference between a job and service to others.

Of course, the message that speaks the loudest is we adults rolemodeling the behaviors and mindsets we want kids to adopt. When we parents illustrate our words with our own actions, the message is least likely to be misunderstood. Let’s try in every way to say to our kids, “Yes, we want you to be good students, but we also want you to be good people.”