Reported for the Flatiron Hot! News by Eric Shapiro & Edited by the Flatiron Hot! News Editorial Staff
As our Flatiron/Chelsea neighborhood, home of the Flatiron Hot! News and its sponsor the NYC Seminar and Conference Center, continues to evolve into a truly heterogeneous mixed residential and commercial neighborhood, with its new residential buildings and copious collection of schools, playgrounds, parks, and wonderful cultural institutions, we at Flatiron Hot! News have taken great pleasure in seeing the large numbers of new parents and young children in the neighborhood. Therefore, it was with great interest that our team heard about a fascinating new book, “The Kindness Advantage: Cultivating Compassionate and Connected Children,” by noted authors Dale Atkins and Amanda Salzhauer, that gives new insight into how we can raise kinder, more compassionate children. (Click here to watch the authors discuss their approach at a recent appearance at the Jumpstart Author’s Lunch.) Flatiron Hot! News Writer-at-Large Eric Shapiro gives us an overview of this important new book, and recounts for us his discussion with the authors.
According to numerous studies, every human being is hardwired for kindness. If this is the case, why is it that the world and its inhabitants are so often lacking in empathy and compassion? For mental health professionals Dale Atkins and Amanda Salzhauer, who recently sat down with Flatiron Hot! News for an illuminating interview, kindness is not something that just happens. Rather, it is a quality that must be meticulously cultivated in individuals, families and communities. To this end, the authors collaborated on The Kindness Advantage: Cultivating Compassionate and Connected Children, a self-help book that provides parents with a practical and concrete guide to equip their children with the skills they need to have a positive influence on the world.
Released this past year, The Kindness Advantage has received acclaim from numerous sources, including Greater Good Magazine, a publication of the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley, which named it one of the five best parenting books of 2018. IndySchool Magazine will be featuring the book in their winter 2019 issue, as well. Click here for the book’s website.
Advice for Rearing Young Children …
Atkins and Salzhauer, an aunt-and-niece team, did not decide to write The Kindness Advantage in a vacuum. The former explained: “For many years, I was talking about issues having to do with raising charitable and compassionate children. In the process of speaking to different groups around the country, I kept hearing concerns about ‘how come kids aren’t more charitable, why aren’t kids more compassionate?’ Through a psychological lens and a sociological lens, it was concerning me that something was going on and kids weren’t as empathetic and kids were not more compassionate.”
As the authors relate, The Kindness Advantage goes a long way towards explaining how to solve this kindness deficit. At the root of kindness is empathy, or trying to put oneself in someone else’s shoes by imagining their emotional and intellectual experience. The book explains how parents can help their children develop empathy from a young age through both words and actions.
As they go on to explain, “There’s a lot of research looking at how these values are transmitted from families to children. One of the things we know is that modeling is incredibly important. Showing your child what you do and talking to your child about what you are doing and why.”
Atkins elaborates further, “Developmentally, with kids, that could be very difficult, you work towards it. How you respond to someone living on the street living in a box, you may show compassion, you may be able to have concern, have sympathy for them, imagine what it might be like to lie on the sidewalk and be cold in the winter. That might be the first step towards developing the kind of empathy that we talk about.”
The therapists explain that children can also learn empathy and compassion from role models, both real (such as celebrities and sports stars) and fictional. The latter is particularly important and is one of many reasons parents should read to their children and provide them with positive media content.
Atkins further elaborates, “It is important for 4-to-6-year-olds to have conversations about central characters and those, too, are role models. We look to literary fiction, whatever movie, whatever news story- and it’s fine to say ‘we don’t treat people that way,’ or ‘we don’t talk to people that way.’ You don’t just ignore the negative role models; you also pair it, or ‘bond’ with the positive role models.”
In addition to offering their own expert advice on how parents can model kindness for children, the authors showcase a series of astonishing “real-life stories” of children empathizing with strangers and coming up with projects to spread kindness within their communities and beyond. The authors stress that a child need not be wealthy or well-connected to carry out acts of kindness. “There is generosity of spirit in all socioeconomic communities,” Atkins observed.
Neuroscience helps explain why. Acts of kindness are not only beneficial to those on the receiving end. Salzhauer goes on to show that when one is kind, they experience a “helper’s high.” She elaborates: “When we do something good for someone else or – and this is really important – we even watch another person engaged in an act of kindness, endorphins – or the ‘feel-good chemicals – are released in our brain, which is why we feel good when we do something kind for another person and/or even when we watch somebody else do something good. That feeling makes us want to do more, creating a ripple effect of kindness … It has the potential to really create this sea change, which is one of the reasons we believe so much in the importance and value of kindness … It is so important to keep those lines of conversation open and it’s much easier to do that when we create the habit of talking to their kids when they’re very young. When you jump in with a 15-year-old, it’s a whole lot harder to encourage them to be open and talk and come to you with their concerns and questions. ”
“We know from the research that we really are wired for kindness. That said, it needs to be nurtured. There needs to be the modeling. We need to tell and show our kids that we value kindness when they express it. We need to notice those acts of kindness. One of the things we learned in the process of writing this book is there was a very interesting study that found that parents of preschoolers – really our target audience – often notice and acknowledge their kids’ achievements – those could be academic achievements, athletic achievements, artistic achievements – but often don’t notice their acts of kindness. That’s one of the things that we want to make parents very conscious of. Yes, we’re hardwired for kindness, but it has to be nurtured. ”
Other Highlights of Flatiron Hot! News Interview with the authors of the “Kindness Advantage”
About the Authors’ Backgrounds and Work as a Team
Authors Dale Atkins and Amanda Salhauzer of the “Kindness Advantage”
Dale: We are an aunt-and-niece team. I am a psychologist and my background is in special education and early childhood and developmental studies and I have a private practice in NYC.
Amanda: I have a masters degree in social work and for many years worked at NYU Child Study Center and had a private practice for many years after that, as well. My practice focused mainly on CBT with kids who have anxiety disorders and mood disorders and obviously that includes working with their families, as well.
Dale: I was raised in a very connected and charitable home. My parents are Amanda’s grandparents. My sister and I were raised to be engaged with our community and to be aware of how we might be able to help. Amanda and her brother were raised in a very similar environment. When I wanted to interview people with charitable children, the first person that came to mind was Amanda. Our family has long and deep roots of being involved in the community and helping and trying to make the world a better place.
Where does the charitable impulse come from and how do you model it?
Amanda: Modeling is incredibly important … For example, I am a big knitter and one of the things I have done over the years is knit things to donate, so when I’m sitting and working on something – and this is obviously more when they are younger – and they say “what are you working on? What are you making, Mommy?” I’ll say “well this is going to be a baby blanket that’s going to be donated to the hospital for a child that’s either in the hospital sick or for a family that needs a warm blanket to take home.” And it’s something that I really like to do and it makes me feel good to know that I can share something that I love with somebody else.
Using those kinds of conversations and having those conversations with kids as they get older- a Pearson Poll shows that it is important to continue to talk to your kids as they get older to create what they refer to as “giving teens.” So it’s modeling the behavior, giving them opportunity to engage in acts of kindness, whether it’s in helping in everyday life, creating volunteer experience through a church, synagogue, or whatever it might be and having these conversations over and over again.
Dale: There is generosity of spirit in all socioeconomic communities and I think that there are people who give of themselves when it appears to an outsider that they have nothing and there are lots people who have so much who don’t give. It really has so much to do with how you’ve been treated and also what you feel your role and responsibility is in the world; people give so much when they have so little. It’s important message for people to have: that you don’t have to have a lot money to be a charitable person, a compassionate person, to be an empathic person.
Can you talk about the process of how you came together and decided to write this, structure it and who your target audience was?
Amanda: I was having my “mid-career crisis,” where everything I was doing every day was taking care of kids and I needed a little bit of a shift. Dale has always been a professional mentor for me, so when she came to me with this idea I jumped on it… We would have the opportunity to work on something together and create a guide for parents… To help give parents the tools they need to manage their kids. Our goal was to create a very accessible guide for parents and grandparents of young children to help them incorporate these “10 fundamentals of kindness” that we write about into their everyday life.
You mention that children are born with an innate capacity for compassion. It needs to be modeled, but not instilled?
Dale: So often people were asking us: ‘when do you start talking about giving to others?’ From the moment your child is born: it’s the way you relate to them, it’s the way you talk to them, it’s whether you treat them respectfully when you change their diaper. That you have a connection and that you’re treating other people, starting with those in your family, as if they’re human beings with whom you want to have a connection. It’s never too early to start; it’s also never too late. And then things just follow along if this is a value in your home because everybody has to clear the table, everyone has to wait to hear everyone else finish a sentence, you’re reminded to do that, you bring tea to your sick grandmother if she’s not feeling well when you’re sitting next to her. You do these kinds of things and they become habits. This is the kind of nurturing we talk about early on before we even get to outside the family. Kids take this in and they feel so much better about themselves, there are all kinds of benefits.
What are the differences between kindness, empathy and compassion?
Amanda: Kindness: Paying attention, showing patience, communicating respectfully and showing compassion and concern for others. We really try to articulate what we mean by kindness and empathy comes in there as well.
Dale: Most people – and we do to – think about compassion when you’re looking at someone and trying to see what their suffering and difficulties. Often, synonymous with compassion people use ‘concern’ and ‘care’ and ‘empathy.’ The way we differentiate empathy from compassion is when you have empathy, you are really trying to understand the other person’s concern from their perspective.
[One Way of Explaining Empathy}: “Try to imagine another person’s intellectual experience as well as their emotional experience and when we can try to imagine both and experience both, that really is empathy- when you are putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. ”
Developmentally, with kids, that could be very difficult, but you work towards it. How you respond to someone living on the street living in a box, you may show compassion, you may be able to have concern, have sympathy for them, imagine what it might be like to lie on the sidewalk and be cold in the winter. That might be the first step towards developing the kind of empathy that we talk about. One of the early underpinning of empathy is three-month old kids, who choose a preference for puppets that either help or hinder in a situation. They prefer to engage with the puppets that are helping. They want to have more interaction with those puppets.
From the perspective of bullies, what obstacles arise in children’s live to developing empathy? How do you deal with kids who don’t have the ideal situation where parents are equipped to teach them kindness?
Amanda: Whether your child is bullied or is the bully, try to understand what is going on for that child. What might be happening to that child that is causing them to behave in this way. A lot of things come up in kids lives- they might be angry about something and they are taking it out on another child- it might have nothing to do with their [victim] but that’s how they’re expressing it. Sometimes kids aren’t aware that what they’re doing is mean or unkind. Sometimes kids gets swept up in a group dynamic if they’re with a group of kids and they’re making fun of a kid or teasing a kid about something and they kind of get swept up and go along with it. The first thing we ask parents to talk to their kids about is to try to understand what is going on in a particular situation and why somebody might be behaving in this kind of unkind and bullying way.
It can be very difficult if there isn’t a parent in the household who can have these kinds of conversations, who can model this kind of behavior. Sometimes it can be a trusted teacher, for example, who steps in and talks to the kid about what’s going on and try to help them have empathy and create a movement of connection.
[Both] We know from research that kids who engage in acts of kindness on a regular basis are much more likely to be less bullied and are much more likely to be socially engaged and want to do more acts of kindness because they begin to feel better and better about themselves.
What is the role of technology?
Dale: We talk about social media and technologies as forces for [good and bad]. One of the really challenging things for kids is these days there’s no place where you’re really away from the possibility of being bullied and so much of the bullying that’s going on peer-to-peer is anonymous. You can be receiving information from people and you don’t know who they are, so you go to school the next day and you don’t know who said something terrible to you, or insulting, or excluded – or maybe you DO know- and that’s really tough. The other thing is, in the days before technology if you were bullied at school or on the way to school, as terrible as it would be, hopefully when you got home you had a safe environment. Now, with so many kids having [constant access to the internet], there isn’t a safe space. There’s no sanctuary, there’s no place for them to feel like they can get away from these assaults. Having said that, parents want to, especially with older kids, give them their privacy, they also, I think, need to monitor what is going on. If your kid is being assaulted technologically, you need to be able to know what’s going on and help them because a lot of these kids internalize it, get very anxious, get very sad and feel horrible at themselves and they’re at risk.
Having said that, the positive side is that there really is social media for good. Amanda and I would not have been able to write this book had we not had the opportunity to find out how many young people were doing these amazing things. And we found out about so many of them through the internet.
Other kids who are feeling marginalized – the only kid who is x or the only kid or is y – can find an more of an accepting community and feel that they have a connection with kids like them through the internet, which can be very helpful in building a community. The idea is that we can monitor, but also help kids understand how they can use technology to help them and connect them with other kids who maybe have a similar passion and be able to become a part of a group that may not be their group in their school but still feel a connection and validation where they don’t lose their confidence and their self-esteem and feel at risk.
How can this approach with kindness apply on a broader cultural and political scale? When you look at our culture and politics, it doesn’t seem like kindness is really valued. If anything, it is sometimes portrayed as a sign of weakness. How can society and communities promote these values on a larger scale? How can we seed this kindness in the broader culture?
Dale: We are not the only role models for our children. What’s important is to be able to focus with your kid on [how people] respond to a hurricane, or refugees on the border. Try to focus on celebrities and sports figures who are doing things that are very noteworthy. Try and shine light not just on what is going on that is unkind, but really show where things are happening and what’s happening and what corporations are supporting- recently there was a CNN “Heroes” segment and [corporate sponsor] Subaru underwrites the entire thing and gives people money to continue their good works in their communities. People are choosing to shop in stores and at companies that try and do something sustainable – whatever it is their mission is – it’s becoming a bit more public. If you have a choice, you may want to go to a store where if you give back your clothing after you finish wearing it, your clothing is going to be recycled and given to wherever, as opposed to not… Parents can help their children become more aware of that.
The ripple effect is this warm glow that people get and are inclined to do it with another person. Show your children that you thank the crossing guard even though you go there every day and learn his name or learn her name and make the connection. These are the kinds of societal role models.
Your audience probably reads to their children. Most people believe that reading to young children is very important to their academic success, which indeed it is. It has been shown that it is also important to them becoming more charitable people, giving teenagers when they get older.
Research from Canada: It is important for 4-6 year olds to have conversations about central characters and those too are role models. We look to literary fiction, whatever movie, whatever news story – and it’s fine to say ‘we don’t treat people that way,’ or ‘we don’t talk to people that way.” You don’t just ignore the negative role models; you also pair it, or ‘bond’ with the positive role models.
Have you encountered push-back to your approach, particularly when it comes to talking about difficult subjects or relying on openness between parents and children? How does your message apply to parents from more conservative backgrounds who think children should be ‘seen and not heard’ or have more old-fashioned ways of relating to their children? Are they a target audience as well? Have you found ways to communicate with them, as well?
Amanda: We believe that every parent is a good target audience. That said, different families have different feelings about particularly topics, particularly topic in the ‘Starting Difficult Conversation” section.
Not everyone Is as comfortable having these conversations with their kids, but we really want to give parents – especially those parents who may not feel as natural doing it – the tools to make it easier, to have those conversations. It is so important to keep those lines of conversation open and it’s much easier to do that when create the habit of talking to their kids when they’re very young …
We really talk about the idea of the Golden Rule. We have found that is a way in for people who may be from different religions, may have different political beliefs. That really is something that everyone can connect with. It may be that you’re less comfortable talking to your kids about a topic like gay marriage or walking past someone who is obviously homeless when you’re on the street. But to just think about looking at these conversations and how you present situations to your child through the lens of how we want to be treated and how we want treat other people. We’ve spoken at all kinds of venues, all kinds of religious venues, different schools, to people from a tremendous variety of backgrounds and [the Golden Rule] seems to be one aspect of the book that everyone can really connect with and use as a way into the material that is maybe more difficult for some families.
Do you want to discuss future projects?
Dale: I think one of the things we’re so grateful for is connecting with other people doing things in this world of kindness; different organizations, different programs, trying to raise awareness about how corporations can help build kindness. We’re speaking at companies and we really love doing that where people have an hour of their lunchtime to talk about something that has to do with their families, like parenting. For us that’s beautiful, because it connects people who are there in a community where they work and they can talk about things that are not work related but are so much a part of their lives and can maybe even do a project together from the jumping off point of their organization.
Amanda: A lot of the talks we have coming up are for parents at schools.
We also have an article that’s going to be coming out in Web MD Magazine in March.
The big surprise for us is that schools have really taken to the book … We also found out that Greater Good Magazine from the Greater Good science group out at Berkeley chose our book as one of the five best parenting books for 2018.
Describe for our followers and readers some interesting or novel things that are being done to practice kindness
Dale: There’s a really interesting program at Westchester Conservancy of Music where they are doing music therapy with children on the autistic spectrum and soldiers with PTSD. Music therapy is also extremely effective with people who have late-stage Alzheimer’s disease …
Anything else you want to talk about?
Amanda: I think the one thing that really strikes me as a unique opportunity given that your blog is so hyper-local going back to the ripple effect and how can we create change within communities – you probably have a really interesting opportunity to create a challenge for your readers. If everyone who lives in the Flatiron District sees each other in the park as you were describing, you can potentially really encourage people to put kindness at the forefront of their interactions. If you see someone on the playground that you don’t know, introduce yourself; say “hi”. Do all of those ‘old-fashioned,’ everyday things that sometimes we don’t do living in New York City… I think you have such an incredible opportunity raising this topic with such a geographically specific group.
NYC Theater News
“The Kindness Advantage”: Valuable Info for Flatiron Parents from Noted Therapists’ New Book
Reported for the Flatiron Hot! News by Eric Shapiro & Edited by the Flatiron Hot! News Editorial Staff
As our Flatiron/Chelsea neighborhood, home of the Flatiron Hot! News and its sponsor the NYC Seminar and Conference Center, continues to evolve into a truly heterogeneous mixed residential and commercial neighborhood, with its new residential buildings and copious collection of schools, playgrounds, parks, and wonderful cultural institutions, we at Flatiron Hot! News have taken great pleasure in seeing the large numbers of new parents and young children in the neighborhood. Therefore, it was with great interest that our team heard about a fascinating new book, “The Kindness Advantage: Cultivating Compassionate and Connected Children,” by noted authors Dale Atkins and Amanda Salzhauer, that gives new insight into how we can raise kinder, more compassionate children. (Click here to watch the authors discuss their approach at a recent appearance at the Jumpstart Author’s Lunch.) Flatiron Hot! News Writer-at-Large Eric Shapiro gives us an overview of this important new book, and recounts for us his discussion with the authors.
According to numerous studies, every human being is hardwired for kindness. If this is the case, why is it that the world and its inhabitants are so often lacking in empathy and compassion? For mental health professionals Dale Atkins and Amanda Salzhauer, who recently sat down with Flatiron Hot! News for an illuminating interview, kindness is not something that just happens. Rather, it is a quality that must be meticulously cultivated in individuals, families and communities. To this end, the authors collaborated on The Kindness Advantage: Cultivating Compassionate and Connected Children, a self-help book that provides parents with a practical and concrete guide to equip their children with the skills they need to have a positive influence on the world.
Released this past year, The Kindness Advantage has received acclaim from numerous sources, including Greater Good Magazine, a publication of the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley, which named it one of the five best parenting books of 2018. IndySchool Magazine will be featuring the book in their winter 2019 issue, as well. Click here for the book’s website.
Advice for Rearing Young Children …
Atkins and Salzhauer, an aunt-and-niece team, did not decide to write The Kindness Advantage in a vacuum. The former explained: “For many years, I was talking about issues having to do with raising charitable and compassionate children. In the process of speaking to different groups around the country, I kept hearing concerns about ‘how come kids aren’t more charitable, why aren’t kids more compassionate?’ Through a psychological lens and a sociological lens, it was concerning me that something was going on and kids weren’t as empathetic and kids were not more compassionate.”
As the authors relate, The Kindness Advantage goes a long way towards explaining how to solve this kindness deficit. At the root of kindness is empathy, or trying to put oneself in someone else’s shoes by imagining their emotional and intellectual experience. The book explains how parents can help their children develop empathy from a young age through both words and actions.
As they go on to explain, “There’s a lot of research looking at how these values are transmitted from families to children. One of the things we know is that modeling is incredibly important. Showing your child what you do and talking to your child about what you are doing and why.”
Atkins elaborates further, “Developmentally, with kids, that could be very difficult, you work towards it. How you respond to someone living on the street living in a box, you may show compassion, you may be able to have concern, have sympathy for them, imagine what it might be like to lie on the sidewalk and be cold in the winter. That might be the first step towards developing the kind of empathy that we talk about.”
The therapists explain that children can also learn empathy and compassion from role models, both real (such as celebrities and sports stars) and fictional. The latter is particularly important and is one of many reasons parents should read to their children and provide them with positive media content.
Atkins further elaborates, “It is important for 4-to-6-year-olds to have conversations about central characters and those, too, are role models. We look to literary fiction, whatever movie, whatever news story- and it’s fine to say ‘we don’t treat people that way,’ or ‘we don’t talk to people that way.’ You don’t just ignore the negative role models; you also pair it, or ‘bond’ with the positive role models.”
In addition to offering their own expert advice on how parents can model kindness for children, the authors showcase a series of astonishing “real-life stories” of children empathizing with strangers and coming up with projects to spread kindness within their communities and beyond. The authors stress that a child need not be wealthy or well-connected to carry out acts of kindness. “There is generosity of spirit in all socioeconomic communities,” Atkins observed.
Neuroscience helps explain why. Acts of kindness are not only beneficial to those on the receiving end. Salzhauer goes on to show that when one is kind, they experience a “helper’s high.” She elaborates: “When we do something good for someone else or – and this is really important – we even watch another person engaged in an act of kindness, endorphins – or the ‘feel-good chemicals – are released in our brain, which is why we feel good when we do something kind for another person and/or even when we watch somebody else do something good. That feeling makes us want to do more, creating a ripple effect of kindness … It has the potential to really create this sea change, which is one of the reasons we believe so much in the importance and value of kindness … It is so important to keep those lines of conversation open and it’s much easier to do that when we create the habit of talking to their kids when they’re very young. When you jump in with a 15-year-old, it’s a whole lot harder to encourage them to be open and talk and come to you with their concerns and questions. ”
“We know from the research that we really are wired for kindness. That said, it needs to be nurtured. There needs to be the modeling. We need to tell and show our kids that we value kindness when they express it. We need to notice those acts of kindness. One of the things we learned in the process of writing this book is there was a very interesting study that found that parents of preschoolers – really our target audience – often notice and acknowledge their kids’ achievements – those could be academic achievements, athletic achievements, artistic achievements – but often don’t notice their acts of kindness. That’s one of the things that we want to make parents very conscious of. Yes, we’re hardwired for kindness, but it has to be nurtured. ”
Other Highlights of Flatiron Hot! News Interview with the authors of the “Kindness Advantage”
About the Authors’ Backgrounds and Work as a Team
Authors Dale Atkins and Amanda Salhauzer of the “Kindness Advantage”
Dale: We are an aunt-and-niece team. I am a psychologist and my background is in special education and early childhood and developmental studies and I have a private practice in NYC.
Amanda: I have a masters degree in social work and for many years worked at NYU Child Study Center and had a private practice for many years after that, as well. My practice focused mainly on CBT with kids who have anxiety disorders and mood disorders and obviously that includes working with their families, as well.
Dale: I was raised in a very connected and charitable home. My parents are Amanda’s grandparents. My sister and I were raised to be engaged with our community and to be aware of how we might be able to help. Amanda and her brother were raised in a very similar environment. When I wanted to interview people with charitable children, the first person that came to mind was Amanda. Our family has long and deep roots of being involved in the community and helping and trying to make the world a better place.
Where does the charitable impulse come from and how do you model it?
Amanda: Modeling is incredibly important … For example, I am a big knitter and one of the things I have done over the years is knit things to donate, so when I’m sitting and working on something – and this is obviously more when they are younger – and they say “what are you working on? What are you making, Mommy?” I’ll say “well this is going to be a baby blanket that’s going to be donated to the hospital for a child that’s either in the hospital sick or for a family that needs a warm blanket to take home.” And it’s something that I really like to do and it makes me feel good to know that I can share something that I love with somebody else.
Using those kinds of conversations and having those conversations with kids as they get older- a Pearson Poll shows that it is important to continue to talk to your kids as they get older to create what they refer to as “giving teens.” So it’s modeling the behavior, giving them opportunity to engage in acts of kindness, whether it’s in helping in everyday life, creating volunteer experience through a church, synagogue, or whatever it might be and having these conversations over and over again.
Dale: There is generosity of spirit in all socioeconomic communities and I think that there are people who give of themselves when it appears to an outsider that they have nothing and there are lots people who have so much who don’t give. It really has so much to do with how you’ve been treated and also what you feel your role and responsibility is in the world; people give so much when they have so little. It’s important message for people to have: that you don’t have to have a lot money to be a charitable person, a compassionate person, to be an empathic person.
Can you talk about the process of how you came together and decided to write this, structure it and who your target audience was?
Amanda: I was having my “mid-career crisis,” where everything I was doing every day was taking care of kids and I needed a little bit of a shift. Dale has always been a professional mentor for me, so when she came to me with this idea I jumped on it… We would have the opportunity to work on something together and create a guide for parents… To help give parents the tools they need to manage their kids. Our goal was to create a very accessible guide for parents and grandparents of young children to help them incorporate these “10 fundamentals of kindness” that we write about into their everyday life.
You mention that children are born with an innate capacity for compassion. It needs to be modeled, but not instilled?
Dale: So often people were asking us: ‘when do you start talking about giving to others?’ From the moment your child is born: it’s the way you relate to them, it’s the way you talk to them, it’s whether you treat them respectfully when you change their diaper. That you have a connection and that you’re treating other people, starting with those in your family, as if they’re human beings with whom you want to have a connection. It’s never too early to start; it’s also never too late. And then things just follow along if this is a value in your home because everybody has to clear the table, everyone has to wait to hear everyone else finish a sentence, you’re reminded to do that, you bring tea to your sick grandmother if she’s not feeling well when you’re sitting next to her. You do these kinds of things and they become habits. This is the kind of nurturing we talk about early on before we even get to outside the family. Kids take this in and they feel so much better about themselves, there are all kinds of benefits.
What are the differences between kindness, empathy and compassion?
Amanda: Kindness: Paying attention, showing patience, communicating respectfully and showing compassion and concern for others. We really try to articulate what we mean by kindness and empathy comes in there as well.
Dale: Most people – and we do to – think about compassion when you’re looking at someone and trying to see what their suffering and difficulties. Often, synonymous with compassion people use ‘concern’ and ‘care’ and ‘empathy.’ The way we differentiate empathy from compassion is when you have empathy, you are really trying to understand the other person’s concern from their perspective.
[One Way of Explaining Empathy}: “Try to imagine another person’s intellectual experience as well as their emotional experience and when we can try to imagine both and experience both, that really is empathy- when you are putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. ”
Developmentally, with kids, that could be very difficult, but you work towards it. How you respond to someone living on the street living in a box, you may show compassion, you may be able to have concern, have sympathy for them, imagine what it might be like to lie on the sidewalk and be cold in the winter. That might be the first step towards developing the kind of empathy that we talk about. One of the early underpinning of empathy is three-month old kids, who choose a preference for puppets that either help or hinder in a situation. They prefer to engage with the puppets that are helping. They want to have more interaction with those puppets.
From the perspective of bullies, what obstacles arise in children’s live to developing empathy? How do you deal with kids who don’t have the ideal situation where parents are equipped to teach them kindness?
Amanda: Whether your child is bullied or is the bully, try to understand what is going on for that child. What might be happening to that child that is causing them to behave in this way. A lot of things come up in kids lives- they might be angry about something and they are taking it out on another child- it might have nothing to do with their [victim] but that’s how they’re expressing it. Sometimes kids aren’t aware that what they’re doing is mean or unkind. Sometimes kids gets swept up in a group dynamic if they’re with a group of kids and they’re making fun of a kid or teasing a kid about something and they kind of get swept up and go along with it. The first thing we ask parents to talk to their kids about is to try to understand what is going on in a particular situation and why somebody might be behaving in this kind of unkind and bullying way.
It can be very difficult if there isn’t a parent in the household who can have these kinds of conversations, who can model this kind of behavior. Sometimes it can be a trusted teacher, for example, who steps in and talks to the kid about what’s going on and try to help them have empathy and create a movement of connection.
[Both] We know from research that kids who engage in acts of kindness on a regular basis are much more likely to be less bullied and are much more likely to be socially engaged and want to do more acts of kindness because they begin to feel better and better about themselves.
What is the role of technology?
Dale: We talk about social media and technologies as forces for [good and bad]. One of the really challenging things for kids is these days there’s no place where you’re really away from the possibility of being bullied and so much of the bullying that’s going on peer-to-peer is anonymous. You can be receiving information from people and you don’t know who they are, so you go to school the next day and you don’t know who said something terrible to you, or insulting, or excluded – or maybe you DO know- and that’s really tough. The other thing is, in the days before technology if you were bullied at school or on the way to school, as terrible as it would be, hopefully when you got home you had a safe environment. Now, with so many kids having [constant access to the internet], there isn’t a safe space. There’s no sanctuary, there’s no place for them to feel like they can get away from these assaults. Having said that, parents want to, especially with older kids, give them their privacy, they also, I think, need to monitor what is going on. If your kid is being assaulted technologically, you need to be able to know what’s going on and help them because a lot of these kids internalize it, get very anxious, get very sad and feel horrible at themselves and they’re at risk.
Having said that, the positive side is that there really is social media for good. Amanda and I would not have been able to write this book had we not had the opportunity to find out how many young people were doing these amazing things. And we found out about so many of them through the internet.
Other kids who are feeling marginalized – the only kid who is x or the only kid or is y – can find an more of an accepting community and feel that they have a connection with kids like them through the internet, which can be very helpful in building a community. The idea is that we can monitor, but also help kids understand how they can use technology to help them and connect them with other kids who maybe have a similar passion and be able to become a part of a group that may not be their group in their school but still feel a connection and validation where they don’t lose their confidence and their self-esteem and feel at risk.
How can this approach with kindness apply on a broader cultural and political scale? When you look at our culture and politics, it doesn’t seem like kindness is really valued. If anything, it is sometimes portrayed as a sign of weakness. How can society and communities promote these values on a larger scale? How can we seed this kindness in the broader culture?
Dale: We are not the only role models for our children. What’s important is to be able to focus with your kid on [how people] respond to a hurricane, or refugees on the border. Try to focus on celebrities and sports figures who are doing things that are very noteworthy. Try and shine light not just on what is going on that is unkind, but really show where things are happening and what’s happening and what corporations are supporting- recently there was a CNN “Heroes” segment and [corporate sponsor] Subaru underwrites the entire thing and gives people money to continue their good works in their communities. People are choosing to shop in stores and at companies that try and do something sustainable – whatever it is their mission is – it’s becoming a bit more public. If you have a choice, you may want to go to a store where if you give back your clothing after you finish wearing it, your clothing is going to be recycled and given to wherever, as opposed to not… Parents can help their children become more aware of that.
The ripple effect is this warm glow that people get and are inclined to do it with another person. Show your children that you thank the crossing guard even though you go there every day and learn his name or learn her name and make the connection. These are the kinds of societal role models.
Your audience probably reads to their children. Most people believe that reading to young children is very important to their academic success, which indeed it is. It has been shown that it is also important to them becoming more charitable people, giving teenagers when they get older.
Research from Canada: It is important for 4-6 year olds to have conversations about central characters and those too are role models. We look to literary fiction, whatever movie, whatever news story – and it’s fine to say ‘we don’t treat people that way,’ or ‘we don’t talk to people that way.” You don’t just ignore the negative role models; you also pair it, or ‘bond’ with the positive role models.
Have you encountered push-back to your approach, particularly when it comes to talking about difficult subjects or relying on openness between parents and children? How does your message apply to parents from more conservative backgrounds who think children should be ‘seen and not heard’ or have more old-fashioned ways of relating to their children? Are they a target audience as well? Have you found ways to communicate with them, as well?
Amanda: We believe that every parent is a good target audience. That said, different families have different feelings about particularly topics, particularly topic in the ‘Starting Difficult Conversation” section.
Not everyone Is as comfortable having these conversations with their kids, but we really want to give parents – especially those parents who may not feel as natural doing it – the tools to make it easier, to have those conversations. It is so important to keep those lines of conversation open and it’s much easier to do that when create the habit of talking to their kids when they’re very young …
We really talk about the idea of the Golden Rule. We have found that is a way in for people who may be from different religions, may have different political beliefs. That really is something that everyone can connect with. It may be that you’re less comfortable talking to your kids about a topic like gay marriage or walking past someone who is obviously homeless when you’re on the street. But to just think about looking at these conversations and how you present situations to your child through the lens of how we want to be treated and how we want treat other people. We’ve spoken at all kinds of venues, all kinds of religious venues, different schools, to people from a tremendous variety of backgrounds and [the Golden Rule] seems to be one aspect of the book that everyone can really connect with and use as a way into the material that is maybe more difficult for some families.
Do you want to discuss future projects?
Dale: I think one of the things we’re so grateful for is connecting with other people doing things in this world of kindness; different organizations, different programs, trying to raise awareness about how corporations can help build kindness. We’re speaking at companies and we really love doing that where people have an hour of their lunchtime to talk about something that has to do with their families, like parenting. For us that’s beautiful, because it connects people who are there in a community where they work and they can talk about things that are not work related but are so much a part of their lives and can maybe even do a project together from the jumping off point of their organization.
Amanda: A lot of the talks we have coming up are for parents at schools.
We also have an article that’s going to be coming out in Web MD Magazine in March.
The big surprise for us is that schools have really taken to the book … We also found out that Greater Good Magazine from the Greater Good science group out at Berkeley chose our book as one of the five best parenting books for 2018.
Describe for our followers and readers some interesting or novel things that are being done to practice kindness
Dale: There’s a really interesting program at Westchester Conservancy of Music where they are doing music therapy with children on the autistic spectrum and soldiers with PTSD. Music therapy is also extremely effective with people who have late-stage Alzheimer’s disease …
Anything else you want to talk about?
Amanda: I think the one thing that really strikes me as a unique opportunity given that your blog is so hyper-local going back to the ripple effect and how can we create change within communities – you probably have a really interesting opportunity to create a challenge for your readers. If everyone who lives in the Flatiron District sees each other in the park as you were describing, you can potentially really encourage people to put kindness at the forefront of their interactions. If you see someone on the playground that you don’t know, introduce yourself; say “hi”. Do all of those ‘old-fashioned,’ everyday things that sometimes we don’t do living in New York City… I think you have such an incredible opportunity raising this topic with such a geographically specific group.