Random Acts of Kindness Recap

I worry that I am not doing enough to teach my children to be kind. Often times their behaviors are anything but and it makes me worry about how they will be as adults. So, I decided to have us prepare for Christmas by performing 24 random acts of kindness. It seemed like a big way to show my kids it was good to be nice and it didn’t have to cost us much to be kind. Love Bug didn’t seem to grasp the idea at all and, as per his usual M.O., he participated under his own terms. Sometimes he would really be involved and then skip out after a few minutes. The one task he loved was collecting the shopping carts, mostly because he was pretending to couple trains together. Other than that, he was mostly ambivalent to our tasks. Chica Marie seemed to really catch on to our scheme and she even asked me, after Christmas was over, what we would do for our act of kindness. So, there is some understanding and she seemed to recognize doing something kind felt nice. But, I worry it might be another way for her to seek attention. Still, it would better for her to seek positive attention than the negative attention she seems to relish.

 

I made a promise to myself to not broadcast our acts on social media. I didn’t want to use the acts as a way for other people to congratulate us or call to attention what we were doing. I wanted us to remain as anonymous as possible. This wasn’t a publicity stunt. I don’t want my kids doing nice things and then snapping a selfie to congratulate themselves. I wanted it to be more natural than that. To be honest, it was awkward sometimes. We handed out cards with positive messages. It’s one thing for that to come from a child, but another when it comes from an adult. Monetarily we didn’t have much to spend with the holidays coming up, so I struggled to find things we could do that wouldn’t cost much money. Honestly, for me, this was the hardest part. How easy it would have been to just toss money around! But, that really wouldn’t have been the best example, so I found non-monetary ways to be kind for the most part. It did get grueling for me to add this to our already busy lives. I got creative and lazy, to be honest. But, for the most part, we persevered. If we do this again next year, we will definitely choose less time. But, I am also thinking about us doing something once a month. There are things on our list we still haven’t done, so maybe we could do one a month for the next year and end the year with two weeks of daily acts of kindness. My take away is, this needs to be more of a habit instead of being linked to a holiday. Maybe then it will become more second nature for my kids.