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How do you raise kind kids?

By Lorelei Vashti
Two young children sit on a swing together, the eldest protectively holding the younger to depict raising kind kids.
No matter what you teach children, kindness has to come from them. So how can we help foster it?(

ABC Everyday: Daniel Mee/Adobe Stock


I'm almost 40, so you'd think I'd be secure enough in myself not to copy what everyone else is doing in the playground.

But recently, when my three-year-old pushed another kid over on the slide, I did what I've seen many parents do: I marched him over to the child he hurt and forced him to apologise.

"SAY SORRY!" I barked.

I wanted to publicly demonstrate what a good parent I am, but even if I could have made him say sorry (and I couldn't), I can't force him to feel sorry, or want to treat other people with kindness. That's got to come from him.

But how do we help guide children to the kind place within, so they can feel kindness deeply for themselves and decide to want to be kind, rather than just be kind because "I said so"?

Show that kindness starts with us

Emma Chow, a counsellor, psychotherapist and mum to two kids, says even though all parents experience their kids being mean at some point, it's never easy.

"It can be so gut-wrenching to witness, whatever age you might see it," she says.

"I once found out my eldest son had been led to taunt and hurt a boy that had bullied him," Ms Chow continues. Finding out her son "had chosen to hurt someone else", especially after he himself had been bullied, tore her apart.

"Of course I was quick to blame myself. I was hurt that my child would hurt another person. That hurt became fear, and that fear became anger."

My reaction in the playground was also based on my own fear (of what others would think of me as a parent) and anger (my expectation that my son should treat people better).

But to guide children to the place inside where kindness resides, we need to model it ourselves.

Learn to experience and acknowledge suffering

Petrina Barson is a parent, a GP and among a small number of Australians certified to teach Compassion Cultivation Training, or CCT.

"I am convinced that the primary influence on the development of kindness [and a lot of other qualities] in the child is whether they experience compassion from their primary caregivers," she says.

Compassion "involves not only a desire to relieve suffering, but also an ability to sit with suffering without being able to solve it".

"To model equanimity in situations of pain, to listen deeply — and discerning when to trust the child to find their own solutions and when to suggest or even impose solutions," Dr Barson says.

Life is often painful, and if we want to raise kind kids we need to acknowledge that they will, at times, experience suffering.

Many of us were brought up with the opposite approach: "Suck it up and get on with it", "She'll be right" and "Here, have an ice cream and forget about it!"

But dismissing a child's pain can lead them to experience shame and anxiety.

The child may tell themselves something like: "My suffering makes adults uncomfortable, so I'd better push it down and pretend it doesn't exist."

If we can't acknowledge their pain, how can we expect them to empathise with the pain of others?

But we, their parents, also need to be able to sit with our own painful feelings, to model how to do it. This isn't easy, but if we take the practice of compassion one step further, we can get there.

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Take a 'self-compassion break'

Dr Barson says she thinks "self-compassion is incredibly important in raising kids".

"Because parenting is such a hard job, and inevitably we make mistakes," she says.

"Self-compassion is a space in which we can safely acknowledge our failures (knowing that we will not attack or condemn ourselves for them) and at the same time mentor ourselves in our parenting."

Kristin Neff, a founding figure of the self-compassion movement, describes it as a way of embracing ourselves, flaws and all.

On her website, Ms Neff suggests taking a "self-compassion break" when things get tough. You only need a minute, and it involves three steps:

  1. 1.Stop and acknowledge to yourself that this is a moment of suffering for you. Name what is happening for you: "This hurts", "This is stress".
  2. 2.Remind yourself that suffering is a part of life. Perhaps tell yourself that many (many!) other parents have probably suffered in this way, too.
  3. 3.Finally, give yourself some words of comfort: "May I be kind to myself", "May I forgive myself".

I've now started to think about raising kind kids as something that happens "backwards".

First, we need to show kindness to ourselves in times of suffering. This gives our children permission to be kind to themselves, too. Then they instinctively know how to show it to others — or in others words, to be kind, from the inside out.

A belief that Australians need to show more respect to each other was the top uniting issue to emerge from the Australia Talks National Survey, which asked 54,000 Australians about their lives and what keeps them up at night. Use our interactive tool to see the results and how their answers compare with yours — available in English, simplified Chinese, Arabic and Vietnamese.

Then, join Annabel Crabb as she takes you through some of the most surprising and exciting insights with Waleed Aly on the Australia Talks TV special on iview.