I only recently learned that the second week in November is set aside for kindness with the 13th declared Kindness Day, and I think it sad that we have to single out a specific time to be kind; and sadder still that it is only one week out of the year. We should have, at the very least, a Kindness Month. A month might be long enough to give everybody time to make kindness a habit. Ideally, we should try for kindness every day of every year and shouldn’t have to remind people to be kind. Think about all the relatively frivolous weeks and days there in any given year. Tomorrow is National Pickle Day, and the 16th is National Guacamole Day; It makes more sense to have a week to remind us to make a conscious effort to be kind to each other than to encourage us to eat pickles or guacamole, doesn’t it?

I looked up some ideas as to how to celebrate Kindness Day (or week) and the first thing I came across was a list of ways to encourage our children to be kind. That, I think, is a no-brainer. Children are naturally kind and all they need is your examples of ways to be kind for them to develop the habit. I say “habit” because a kind person is kind instinctively and it is their nature to empathize with others and to avoid doing things they have experienced as hurtful. It is sometimes difficult to perform kind or generous acts without being condescending or gratuitous, and that is one of the things our children can learn only by seeing how we, as role models, handle such situations. Most children, by the time they are age three or four, have experienced misguided or thoughtless acts of kindness that turned out to be hurtful. Such things as broken promises, teasing meant to be humorous, misunderstandings or ignorance of sensitive topics can leave lasting scars and children who have experienced them are very aware of the hurt they can cause. A naturally kind child will instinctively avoid making those mistakes.

Two incidents from my own early years remind me of how easy it is to hurt a child’s feelings unintentionally. In elementary school, it was the practice, prior to Valentine’s Day, to send home with each student a list of the children in their classroom, with the suggestion that each student should bring Valentine cards for all his classmates. Each classroom had a Valentine Box where we and friends from other classes deposited our “mail” during the week before the Valentine party. On the big day, when the boxes were opened and the cards distributed, the more popular children obviously received more cards than others (the letter home helped lessen the difference to some extent.) It seems obvious that the practice was intended to avoid some disappointment among the less popular, yet I remember one unthinking teacher who actually awarded a prize to the student who received the most Valentines!

In a sixth grade geography class, the teacher was fishing for a specific answer that none of the students seemed to know, indicating that they had not read the assigned pages in the textbook. “What do pigs eat?” she asked. I remembered watching my uncles shovel a load of half spoiled pears into the hogs’ feeding trough after an early frost, and when nobody else came up with the expected “corn” I raised my hand and said confidently “Pears.” The teacher burst into laughter, my classmates followed her cue, and I dreaded geography class from that moment on.

Having been a teacher myself, I know that teachers are just people and they make mistakes, but some things are hard to forgive or to believe. One thing that has always been difficult for me to understand is a letter I received from my children’s grade school requesting my permission to spank my children if they committed certain designated misdemeanors. I replied at once that I did not spank my children and would not give anyone else permission to do so. I believe that spanking is the same as hitting, and by resorting to that as a means of discipline, we are sending the message that it is okay to hit someone if they don’t do as you want them to. And this was Horace Mann School, named for an educator noted for his stand against corporal punishment.