How to raise a kind child

Most parents want a kind child more than a clever or a winning one. The good news is that kindness grows in ordinary soil rather than in grand lessons. Children become kind the way they become anything. They watch how you treat people, and they feel what it’s like to be treated kindly themselves. Small chances to help, the kind someone notices, do the rest.

How kindness grows

• Let them catch it from you: how you speak to the tired shop worker teaches more than any talk about manners. Children copy the kindness they see far more than the kindness they’re told about.
• Notice their care out loud: “You helped your sister up. That was kind of you.” Warmly named, kindness grows. A child does more of what we delight in.
• Give them small jobs of care: carrying something for a grandparent, feeding the pet, checking on a friend. Practised, kindness becomes a habit rather than a rule.

The idea underneath

Marcus Aurelius kept a picture in mind: a person belongs to the people around them the way a bee belongs to its hive.

We aren’t made to thrive alone. What’s good for the people around a child, and what’s good for the child, turn out to be the same thing more often than not. When a child is kind, nothing is lost. They’re tending the little world they live in, and it tends them back. Helping a child feel that, in warm daily doses, does more than any lesson on being nice.

Mark Fitzgerald · Founder of Stoic Sprout

Mark made Stoic Sprout as a dad in Melbourne, for his own young children, with calm stories drawn from the real Stoic philosophers. More about Mark →

Stoic Sprout builds calm and character. It isn't therapy or medical advice. If your child is struggling in a way that worries you, please talk to your GP or another professional.