Teaching kids to be good people needs to start early and continue forever.
When my husband and I pick our kids up from daycare, we often stand outside and peer through the window to watch the kids for a few minutes before entering the classroom. We like observing them, unseen, to see how they interact with the other kids when they don’t know we're watching. As they get older, this becomes more difficult. Even if they don’t spot us, it isn’t long before one of their classmates spies us and rushes over and loudly announces our presence.
Yesterday we saw something that disturbed us. Our son walked over to a little girl and deliberately stepped on her foot. It surprised us because he is generally such a loving, gentle little boy. But here he was, purposely being mean to another child who was standing there minding her own business.
The jig was up when we told him that we had seen what he did and told him how disappointed we were in his behavior. We walked him through the steps of apologizing to the little girl (who, quite frankly, didn’t even seem to remember the incident). It would have been easy to just let this whole situation slide, but we are painfully aware that we are trying to raise two kids to be kind and considerate people in a world that sometimes seems to have forgotten what it means to have a strong character, to care about others, and to take responsibility for your mistakes.
These are hard lessons, and ones that will take many years to teach. But we have to start young, and we have to be painfully consistent. Kids need to know what we find unacceptable, and they need to understand how to make amends when they have wronged someone.
