Train a child in the way they will grow and they will not depart from it when they are old.
This is a verse from the Holy Book and it holds truism in many aspects of the human life. How you train the young ones and what you expose to them at their tender age is how they will grow up and that will be also be what they will pass on to their own young ones. So if you want the community and the world at large to be kind and empathetic, you have to begin by training the little ones on that path. Trust me, they are the ones to grow and become the future of the community. How you want the world to be should begin from the home.
Image from Pixabay
At the young age of life, what you imbibe into children will be what they will grow to become. If you plant kindness and empathy in them, they will grow up that way. When I talk about kindness, I mean caring for others through acts of humanity, and acts of goodness. Then empathy, in simple terms, is bringing yourself to feel what someone else is feeling. These two features are very vital and need to be instilled into children as they grow. They need to understand that humanity is their primary assignment.
In order to teach children kindness and empathy, you also should be kind and empathetic towards them and to others. This is because they tend to learn more of what they visualise and observe than what they are told. If your words are kind but your actions are cruel, they will pick your actions first. So as a matter of fact, one of the easiest ways to teach the younger ones kindness is by showing it to them. Your relationship with them should portray who you are and what you want them to learn.
More often than not, kids tend to grow and replicate the actions they see their parents or caregivers do. While growing up, there was a particular family within the neighbourhood that, almost every night, you will be hearing all manner of abusive noise from their house. It is either the father and mother are quarrelling or they are quarrelling with the neighbours. Sadly, the kids also trailed that path. In school, they became bullies and very cruel because of the way they saw their parents behave. For the sake of the future of the little ones, you have to be mindful of your own character. The truth is that the best time to teach someone how to grow is when they are young. There is a Southeastern Nigerian adage that says:
You can only bend a fish when it is still wet. If you attempt to bend it when it becomes dried, it will break.
If you do not teach the young ones the goodness of life and of humanity; kindness and empathy, when they are young, if they grow up to become cruel, it may be very difficult to change them. Many of the adults that perpetrate unwholesome acts and other ills in the society are the people that were not exposed to kindness and empathy as kids. On the same hand, the people that are seen as being good are majorly those that were introduced to goodness as kids and they grew up with it. This is why I believe that even if you will not be able to change the older generation for good, you can change the younger generation to secure the future tomorrow.
Image from Pixabay
One of the benefits of teaching the young ones to be kind is that it makes them to develop their emotional and relationships skills. That is, it makes them to grow with excellent interpersonal skills that will make them better adults in the future. It is worthy to note that everyone has the potential to be kind if they are taught on how to be kind. In the same way, everyone, even the best of them all, has the propensity to become cruel if they are not taught to be kind. It is how you raise up the young ones that they will grow up to become.
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