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

When you tell your children stories, you are sharing your knowledge and your imagination.
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    ROUTINES AND RITUALS FOR COMPASSION
     
Recount daily acts of kindness.
Donate money to charity.
Give away old clothes, books, and toys to those in need.
Participate in food drives.
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    Catie has a job chart on which she places little magnets signifying that she has fulfilled her responsibilities each day (more on the job chart in chapter 11). One of her responsibilities is to “be kind.” Every evening while completing her job chart, she has to recount how she was kind that day and to whom.
    Catie also has a piggy bank in which she deposits her weekly allowance (more on allowances in chapter 11). We ask her to donate 25 percent of her allowance to charity. Every two months, she donates her charitable savings to a cause of her choice. In the past, she has given her money to earthquake victims in Haiti, a local nonprofit organization that takes care of injured animals, and a nearby homeless shelter. In all cases, Catie takes the money out of her piggy bank, puts it in a little purse of hers, and delivers it personally to the charity.
    Some friends of ours, Dirk and Emily, have a ritual with their son that involves giving away, rather than selling, his old clothes, books, and toys. They’ve told him that they choose to give away things that they could sell because there are many less fortunate families who can’t afford to buy everything they need. Every time their son gets something new, he has to give away an old item. (This also reduces clutter in their home.)
    Ron and Georgia participate in a local program called Homeward Bound in which they and other families take turns buying, packing, and delivering groceries to a family living at a homeless shelter.Every other month, they and their three children complete a ritual to support Homeward Bound. The family sits down at the kitchen table and compiles a list of groceries they want to buy, paying special attention to the time of year and the upcoming holidays. The kids paint the shopping bags that will hold the food in bright colors and make cards for the family. Each of their children also selects a small toy from their room for the children in the recipient family. The entire family then goes to the supermarket, and the children are responsible for finding and checking off the items on the grocery list. When they get home, they all pack the groceries and then deliver them to the family at the shelter. Ron and Georgia’s children introduce themselves to the family and hand the shopping bags full of food to them. After the delivery, over dinner, everyone shares what the experience meant to them, what they learned from meeting the family, and one other thing that they might do to express their compassion.
ACTIVITIES FOR COMPASSION
     
    Sharing is a huge challenge for young children. Because they are still in an egocentric stage of development, they lack the compassion and empathy necessary to see how not sharing affects those around them. Yet, sharing, as an expression of compassion, is a message that your children must get. We try to strike a balance in which we establish the expectation of sharing (i.e., we encourage and sometimes require sharing), yet we also give Catie and Gracie permission not to share some things. We allow them to designate some of their possessions as “special” things that they don’t have to share with others. Of course, we encourage them to share everything, but the “special” category lets them feel that they have some things that are truly theirs. Also, at times when they don’t want to share, we make a point of telling them that the best kind of generosity occurs when they don’t want to share.
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    ACTIVITIES FOR COMPASSION
     
Create expectation of sharing.
Allow your children to designate “special” items that they don’t have to share.
Expose your children to diverse people and cultures.
Expand compassion outward from family to friends and neighbors and beyond.
Live a life that is about compassion.
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    Eve and Darren believe that compassion arises from the realization that there are people in the world different from you. So from their two children’s earliest years, they exposed their kids to as much diversity—racial, religious, age, and socioeconomic—as possible. They live in a neighborhood of mixed ethnicity in a large and diverse city and explore every nook and cranny of the urban landscape, even poor areas in