Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You

children, they’re not likely to readily learn compassion on their own. You must nurture your children’s ability to care about others in their early years and weave compassion into the very fabric of your family’s life, so that your children receive the messages of compassion through many conduits.
    The wonderful thing about compassion is that there are so many conduits through which you can communicate messages about compassion to your children. When you immerse your children in a sea of messages about compassion, they are all but assured of getting the messages loud and clear.
Live a Compassionate Life
     
    A common theme throughout
Your Children Are Listening
is that you send the most powerful messages to your children by living and expressing those messages in your own life. This unconscious influence is even more important than consciously sending messages of compassion to them. If you lead a compassionate life, your children will get this message frequently and consistently, and will likely internalize it in their own lives.
    Expressions of compassion in your life are communicated to your children in several ways, both obvious and subtle. Your children, particularly when they’re young, will most notice the larger compassionate acts you engage in, for example, volunteering your time for a worthy cause or traveling a long distance to support a family member in need. As your children get older and begin to grasp the subtleties of compassion, they will also see the smaller expressions of compassion you make, such as comforting them when they scrape their knee, assuming dinner duties when your spouse is stressed out from work, or helping a neighbor with a house project. Even smaller acts of compassion, such as being kind to a waiter at a restaurant, offer your children subtler lessons about the depth and breadth of living a compassionate life.
    Also, as I mentioned earlier, emotions are a powerful means of conveying important messages about compassion. When you express emotions related to living a compassionate life, you show your children how they will feel when they act compassionately. You can begin to make this emotional connection for your children by letting them see the emotions that motivate you to act compassionately (e.g., empathy, kindness) and the emotions you feel when you have acted compassionately (e.g., satisfaction, pride). At first, you may need to tell your children about the emotions you feel, but as they learn and absorb the emotional connection, they will be able to sense them directly from your actions.
Surround Yourself with Compassionate People
     
    Early in your children’s lives, you have the most influence over the messages that your children receive. However, as they expand their social world, your messages become less influential and those of others gain sway over them. Unfortunately, many of those messages (e.g. from peers and popular culture) will not be ones that you necessarily want your children to get. But you can create a critical mass of people and institutions who will support and reinforce your messages of compassion. The neighborhoods in which you live, the other families with whom you socialize, the schools your children attend, and the activities in which your children participate are all a part of your children’s “message environment” over which you can exert an influence. When you surround your children with like-minded people, those people not only ensure that your children get supportive messages from many different sources, but also act as a shield against unwanted messages directed toward your children.
Talk to Your Children About Compassion
     
    As your children mature, you can begin to talk to them directly about compassion. This conduit enables them to develop an intellectualunderstanding of what compassion is and the role it can play in their lives. Explain what compassion is and why it is important to them, your family, and the world as a whole. Because compassion is, at its core, an emotion, you should describe what it is like to feel compassion (an urge to do good for someone else) and how it feels to act compassionately (satisfying, joyful, inspiring). To help show your children why it is so important, you can talk to them about the consequences of compassion (connectedness and meaning) and those of indifference (alienation and insignificance). The way to really reinforce this message is to offer your children examples of compassion. Point out