One Hope For The New Year: A Kinder Culture

One Hope For The New Year: A Kinder Culture

- Kristin Van Ogtrop

A FEW WEEKS AGO, MY ELDEST SON, WHO IS IN HIS FIRST year teaching fourth grade in a public elementary school, decided to put a suggestion box in his classroom, though he wasn’t quite sure what the box would yield. The result was not so much suggestions as appeals for kindness. From “Lots of people don’t mind their own business” to “I am stressed out because everybody keeps arguing about little things,” there was a classwide desire for compassion, if no clear sense of how to get it.

As a new teacher, my son is routinely surprised by things his 9-year-old students do, but more than anything he is surprised by how badly they treat one another. The children want to be on the receiving end of kindness but have trouble handing it out. On a daily basis, they are tripped up by three obstacles: lack of impulse control; thoughtlessness; and difficulty with forgiveness, or letting things go.

Because of a complicated set of factors involving fertility, a love of babies and general midlife panic, I also happen to be the mother of a son who attends elementary school, though not the one where his older brother teaches. Seeing what kindness means to young humans through the bookends of my two sons can be a mind-bending exercise, like looking in a fun-house mirror: everything is familiar, but nothing actually matches.