As parents, one of our greatest hopes is that our kids will turn out to be good people. But, how exactly do you get started in teaching your little ones about the importance of being kind? Check out this 24 Days of Kindness for Preschoolers challenge.
If you follow me on Instagram and watch my IG stories, you would have heard when I announced that we were joining Kate and Emmett from Emmett’s ABCs in their 24 Days of Kindness for Preschoolers challenge.
Copying those around them is what toddlers do best. And since being kind is a learned behaviour, we as parents can do our best by practicing kindness ourselves. When it comes to teaching kindness, we have the powerful opportunity (and responsibility) to lead by example.
Kate and Emmett developed their own list of daily challenges to complete between December 1 to 24, which can be found here. However, as Morley is not currently in school, we slightly adapted our daily challenges to fit our current lifestyle.
Here are our 24 Days of Kindness:
- Smile at someone new.
- Share a toy.
- Share with mom and dad.
- Give someone a compliment.
- Write a kind note to someone.
- Give a friend or family member a hug.
- Let someone have the first turn.
- Help give a younger sibling a bath.
- Tell a store cashier that you appreciate them.
- Buy a toy that you would love and them donate it.
- Take food to the dogs at the local shelter.
- Wish someone Happy Holidays.
- Make a handmade gift for someone you love.
- Call someone you haven’t spoken to in a while.
- Pick up a piece of trash.
- Hold the door for the person behind you.
- Talk to someone new (with mom and dad’s ok).
- Give extra snuggles to your family pet or sibling.
- Let your sibling play with one of your favourite toys.
- Tell your mom or dad something you love about them.
- Help make dinner.
- Make a bird feeder and put it up.
- Choose three toys that you’d like to pass along to another little boy or girl.
- Recycle.
Not only will these daily challenges help to teach our toddler kindness and its importance, but it will also to help develop her social skills. She’s an extremely social little girl (when she wants to be and around “her people”) but this challenge will break her out of her shell and force her to interact with strangers (with mommy and daddy's ok), of all ages. There are also lots of days that involve sharing, because as a toddler, that's not always easy thing to do.
We may already be a few days into December, but it’s never too late to start or to practice kindness.
Start them young. Together, we can make the world a better place with acts of kindness both big and small.
How do you teacher your children kindness? I’d love to hear!
