Wonder MORE and Choose Kind

Have you ever stopped and wondered what life would be like if we all simply chose to be kind?

I mean, stop and think about it. How simple would it be if everyone grew into a mindset of choosing to be kind? Think about the benefits it would create. 

Working with kids day in and day out, I am here to tell you the struggles kids are coming to school with today are more challenging and alarming than ever. 

Depression, bullying, anxiety, causing self-harm...these things were rare when I was a kid! Now they are becoming common language and that scares me.

How can we get this in check?

Choose kind. 

Sounds so simple, doesn't it. 

It is that simple.

If we chose to be kind more often, our world and the world our kids will live in would be a better place. Period, the end, game over.

It's our job as parents to show our kids that the world is an amazing place and their dreams can come true. It's also our job to prepare them to face the ugly in the world. Choosing to be kind is a good place to start. 

Where do we start on the path of choosing to be kind?

How about manners 101?

Yes, your kids know how to say, "thank you", "please", "no thank you", etc...

Here's my question though. Are they saying those things? 

I have a perfect example to illustrate this for you. 

My 5th-grade team took almost 90 kids to see the movie Wonder recently. We took a morning to take the kids to see the movie version of the book we read together as a class. The movie was great and the book is awesome. Great learning to be had for anyone. We chose not to charge our kids for the movie, opting to use part of our field trip budget.

90 x $6 = $540

That's a big part of our budget...sadly. (but worth it!)

After the movie was done and the kids were heading back to the bus, I heard lots of comments about how much the kids enjoyed the movie and how they noticed differences between the movie and the book. It was really cool.

The not so cool part was what we didn't hear.

There was not one, "thank you".

Now, I don't want you to think that I'm the kind of person who needs that sort of thing, I just happened to notice it. 

Every single kid on my team this year knows those 2 words, but at an appropriate time to use them, they didn't.

Once we got back to school, I shared this with all the kids. I wanted them to be aware of the fact that manners are always cool. They always will be. 

If we want to choose kind, we have to get back to basics. 

Manners, common sense, being helpful, respecting the differences in others...

This is nothing new, we just seem to have lost it a bit.

It's time to get it back into the world.

With your kids, please (yes, I'm begging you) choose kind.