It’s important to raise your child with kindness and compassion as you set the earliest examples for your child. Aside from being a good role model, there are a number of things that you can do to help your child become a compassionate person. First of all, they will need an awareness of others’ emotions and must know how to handle them appropriately in social situations. We have shared some guidance below from an independent boys’ school in London to help you with this.
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Talk About Feelings
Talking about feelings is not only important because of the dialogue that it creates between you and your child, but it also helps them to get better at identifying them. They will be able to tell when those around them aren’t themselves and be able to offer comfort. This is something that you can do by pointing out body language when you see it on TV or around you.
Acknowledge Bad Behaviour
It’s just as important to acknowledge bad behaviour as it can send mixed messages to children and create poor examples for them. Verbalise why what has happened is bad and talk to them about the consequences, e.g., how another’s feelings may have been hurt.
Teach Them About Communication
Communication is important because it helps us to understand those around us and convey how we feel correctly. Listening forms an important part of this and while it sounds simple, a lot of us fail to do so and miss important things that people try to tell us. This is something that you can do by having more conversations with your child and spending more time with them.
An Emotions Card Sort
Card sorts are fun and can help you to make learning fun. You can create a card sort with different faces and help them to recognise which emotions bring them on.
I do teach my daughter to be kind and im very lucky that she seems to have turned out a very empathetic child. She is like the mother hen of the group which is lovely. She is 7. I have done this by constantly talking about feelings. She is not very good at handling emotions herself though in all fairness.
My daughter was the same, she seemed to know if someone was unhappy but with herself she would be quite emotional. We have always talked about everything and it does help them know about their feelings and those of others
This is so important!