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

ways in which your children can express compassion in your family, for example, by being kind to their siblings. You can also highlight ways they can show compassion toward their community, such as donating old clothes to charity. Finally, you can establish clear expectations about compassion in your family and attach appropriate consequences for violations of those expectations.
Explore Compassion
     
    Raising your children’s awareness and understanding of compassion is not going to be accomplished in one or even a few conversations. Instead, this process is an ongoing dialogue in which you regularly engage your children in discussions and experiences related to compassion. You can search for examples of compassion—or its opposites, indifference and hatred—in various forms of media: newspapers, magazines, and the Web will offer daily examples occurring in your own backyard and around the world.
    As your children gain a deeper appreciation for and understanding of compassion, you can further engage them with other resources, for example, books, television shows, films, and lectures that describe acts of compassion, indifference, and hatred in greater depth and give your children the opportunity to more fully delve into all aspects of compassion. The goal of these many and diverseforms of messaging is to evoke in your children the thoughts, emotions, and calls to action that will make compassion a part of who they are and the way they live.
Engage Your Children in Compassionate Activities
     
    There is no more powerful way to send messages of compassion to your children than through their actions, by having them directly experience compassionate activities. You can start these undertakings within your family by encouraging acts of compassion toward siblings and toward you, such as consoling a sibling who is upset or being extra loving when you have the flu.
    You can then expand the circle of compassion by having your children participate in activities that help others outside the home. The easiest way to express compassion outside of your family is to give money or goods to a worthy cause; we saw this outpouring of compassion and generosity following the hurricanes on the Gulf Coast and the earthquake in Haiti. These messages, though worthy, are less effective with children because the act of giving is at a great distance from the recipients of the generosity, so it is more difficult for children to see, experience, and connect with their acts of compassion.
    The most effective way to communicate messages of compassion to your children is through hands-on acts of compassion that give your children direct contact with those they are helping. Making these activities family affairs further strengthens the message of compassion. You can then talk about the experience over dinner to share stories, discuss who and how everyone helped, and share the feelings that the experience evoked.
    There are many benefits to this direct experience. Your children see the connection between their efforts and their results, in other words, they put a human face to the beneficiaries of their generosity and see the impact of their compassion firsthand. Your children also experience the emotions associated with compassion, includingempathy, caring, and satisfaction, with immediacy and intensity. And they meet and interact with others who value compassion, thus providing an additional conduit for your messages of compassion.
Teach Interdependence
     
    The conventional wisdom is that the transition from childhood to adulthood is marked by a shift from dependence on parents to self-reliance, and that when independence is achieved, children have reached adulthood. But they are, in fact, still one step away from being truly mature adults. Children gain independence by disconnecting from their parents and learning to satisfy their own needs. The problem with stopping at this stage of development is that children maintain the egocentrism that characterized their childhoods. The only difference is that they are now able to satisfy their self-centeredness on their own.
    There is actually one more shift that is required for children to become value-driven and contributing adults. This final, essential step for raising children to be compassionate people is teaching them to be interdependent. Children who achieve this final stage of maturity get the message that they must find a middle ground between being self-reliant, being dependent on other