Angry children can be a handful. Mean children evoke anger even in adults. We all want to be treated kindly, and it troubles us to see our children not acting kindly, but if we want to see more kindness in our children, it has to begin at home. Here are 5 ways to help your children be kinder.
Talk about kindness. The more you talk about kindness, the more familiar your children are with what kindness actually is. Don’t wait for tough situations to arise before you share lessons about kindness; instead, talk about examples out of the blue. Tell your children stories that center on kindness. The stories don’t have to be grand or even very long; just talk about kind acts that you have observed or that touched you in some way. The more your children hear about kindness, the more likely they are to absorb it.
- Show kindness to your children every day. You can talk all you want about kindness, but as you well know, your children learn much more from what they see you doing than by what you tell them. Showing kindness to your children means both being directly kind to them, and also being kind to others so that they see kindness being role modeled. I’ve seen too many parents through the years tell me that they “are kind” to their children, and then report that they “can’t help it” how they talk to other adults. The simple fact is, your children are constantly learning about the world from you, and when you gossip or are otherwise unkind within earshot of your children, your children are taking it in and then living it out.
- Meditate everyday with your children. Meditation has been demonstrated to increase self-control. The more self-control your children can exude, the more likely they will be to hold back the impulse to be mean. By taking the time to meditate with your children (even two minutes a day), the more you are setting your children up to be kind. You cannot have your children meditate without doing it yourself, because again, they learn more by watching. You cannot meditate once every blue moon and expect that your children will just magically learn increased self-control. If you really want peaceful, kind children, meditate with them every day.
- Make kindness a priority. Think about your day. What do you routinely emphasize in your house? If you yell a lot, you are teaching your children how to yell. If you emphasize hurrying up because you’re always running behind, you are, whether you want to be or not, setting your children up to learn how to be frazzled. If you emphasize to “do what I say, not what I do,” then you are, whether you mean to be or not, setting your children up for resentment; resentment leads to anger, and anger in children is often expressed through acting out (or mean) behaviors. If you emphasize kindness routinely with your words and actions, then you are significantly more likely to have kind children. You, however, have to be the one who emphasizes kindness as a top priority in your house.
- Have your children practice kindness. One of the best things about being an involved parent is getting to role-play with your children. Set up fun scenarios and role-play ways for them to practice kindness. Remember to be kind to them if they mess up or are not immediately kind in the role-play. Have fun with the role-plays. Think of silly topics that are not sensitive and work your way up to more sensitive subjects (like bullying). To get young children interested in role-playing, consider taking on the role of different talking animals, but regardless of your children’s ages, continually role-play ways to handle situations in a kind way, because the more they practice kindness, the better they will get at it.
For more on raising peaceful children, get Zen Parent, Zen Child, by Dr. Christian Conte.