Estelle Lloyd, Co-Founder of Azoomee, and Ariane de Bonvoisin, author, speaker and life skills coach, share tips on teaching your kids kindness at a time when physical affection is limited, and everyone is feeling the strain of the pandemic.
Credit: Charlein Gracia via Unsplash
It can be difficult to be kind when times are hard. The general underlying sense of uncertainty brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has affected all of us to one degree or another, and while you might expect that makes people lash out or retreat inward more, on the whole the opposite has been true.
Small acts of kindness are on the rise – from our weekly NHS applause in the UK, volunteering to help those in need or just picking up the phone to lend an empathetic ear, people have been more inclined to help others even while facing their own unique problems. This is exactly what we need to be passing on to children during this difficult time. There is more than enough information on how to keep children ?busy? during lockdown, but what do we expect them to learn from the experience as a whole" Can we use the extra time we currently have with them to ?teach? kindness" Not just by example, but by communicating just how acts of kindness can help improve emotional wellbeing in themselves and others"
With mental health awareness week changing its theme for 2020 to ‘kindness’, now is the perfect time to consider this. Here are some tips on teaching your kids to be kind, to...