Ten Ways to Cultivate Kindness in Children
Since I started working at EFBA, the month of February has taken on a very special meaning for me. Valentine’s Day has never really been my thing. As a child, however, February meant something else entirely: the Carnival of Nice—the city where I was born and raised—and the Lemon Festival in Menton, with their bursts of color, collective joy, and that subtle feeling that winter was finally beginning to loosen its grip. Today, February holds a different, even sweeter significance. It fills me with a particular kind of excitement, because at EFBA, February has become our Month of Kindness.
At the end of this article, you’ll find ten concrete and accessible ways to celebrate kindness with children. But before getting there, I’d like to take a short detour: to look at how kindness is celebrated around the world, and why it is now widely recognized as a major educational and societal issue.
How Is Kindness Celebrated Around the World?
The Random Acts of Kindness movement began more than forty years ago in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1982, Berkeley writer and activist Anne Herbert published a short but powerful phrase in CoEvolution Quarterly: “Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Acts of Senseless Beauty.” The idea resonated widely and began circulating throughout local communities, encouraging simple, free, and selfless gestures.
In 1995, the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation was created in the Bay Area to structure and support these initiatives. Early celebrations took place primarily in February, around Valentine’s Day. A few years later, the organization was acquired by a private foundation and relocated to Denver, Colorado, where it is still based today. Despite its modest size, the foundation carries a clear and ambitious mission: to make kindness the norm, not the exception.
In Canada—particularly in Québec—the third week of February is officially recognized as Kindness Week. In 2021, Canada became the first country to pass legislation formally establishing this week nationwide. It is widely observed in schools, public services, and municipalities, with a strong focus on school climate, empathy, violence prevention, relationship quality, and solidarity. Here, kindness is not framed as something “cute” or superficial, but as a powerful social and educational lever.
At the international level, World Kindness Day, celebrated every year on November 13, was created in 1998 at the initiative of the World Kindness Movement. Founded during a conference in Tokyo, the movement set out to make kindness a shared commitment, transcending cultures, religions, and political borders. Today, the day is celebrated in many countries, particularly within schools and educational communities, reminding us that kindness is a universal and deeply human value.
This article speaks directly to the moment many families in the United States are living through. At EFBA, our Bay Area community shares a deep commitment to raising children with empathy, resilience, and a strong sense of humanity—especially in uncertain times.
Why We Chose to Celebrate the Month of Kindness at EFBA
Just last week, while training future summer camp directors, one of my students shared his skepticism about what he called the “over-promotion of kindness.” In his view, in a world marked by violence, inequality, and sometimes brutal power dynamics, kindness risks becoming a form of naïveté, leaving the most vulnerable without the tools to face the strongest.
This student, whom I’ve had the privilege of supporting since his early days as a camp counselor, was voicing a genuine concern. Are we truly preparing children for the harsh realities of the world and the social or academic injustices they will inevitably encounter? Can we equip them for the future, he wondered, if we teach them to respond to violence with words, to conflict with dialogue, and to injustice with cooperation?
I won’t spend hours philosophizing here. Instead, I’ll go straight to the heart of my values and those of EFBA. Kindness is neither naïve nor trendy. It is a real societal issue, and it should be central to how we educate children, regardless of culture, religion, values, or political views. At the core, don’t we all share the same hope: to leave our children a more just and more peaceful world, one in which they can grow up feeling safe, respected, and happy?
Some countries have taken this question very seriously. In Denmark, children have been receiving empathy-focused education starting at age six since 1993. Over more than thirty years, these programs are reported to have reduced bullying by nearly threefold. Finland has placed social-emotional learning at the very heart of its education system: empathy, cooperation, conflict resolution, and respect for others are considered just as essential as academic knowledge. In Norway, schools are explicitly tasked with fostering empathy, democratic participation, and non-violent communication. With these examples in mind, I’ll let you guess which countries consistently rank highest in the World Happiness Report, published annually since 2012 by the University of Oxford in partnership with the United Nations. We could devote entire pages to the scientifically documented benefits of empathy- and kindness-based pedagogies (perhaps the subject of a future article…). For now, we’d like to share ten simple, concrete, and accessible ways to cultivate kindness and empathy, whether you are a parent or an education professional.
10 Ways to Cultivate Kindness in Children
All of the actions below have been tested and approved in the field, through our French classes and French-immersion summer camps in Bay Area, where empathy and kindness are central to our pedagogy.
We also strongly encourage adults to participate. Children learn enormously through modeling, and we often shape their future behaviors without even realizing it. One final piece of advice: try to weave these actions into everyday life. Kindness shouldn’t be confined to a single month or a few challenges. It should become a way of being and living together.
- Offer a gift to someone of your choice, without expecting anything in return.
- Lend a helping hand, whether by assisting someone nearby or volunteering with an organization.
- Make a donation in different forms: money to a charity (by offering several options and letting your child choose), clothes or items you no longer use, or participation in a food drive. These gestures often leave a deep and lasting impression.
- Write a letter or message to thank someone for a kind act, support, or simple presence.
- Participate in household or school chores. Kindness also means contributing to a shared goal: setting the table, helping cook, cleaning, organizing—adapted to the child’s age and abilities.
- For five minutes, truly listen to someone. Show interest, ask questions, try to understand how they feel, without interrupting or offering solutions.
- Tell someone what you genuinely appreciate about them, whether it’s a quality or a behavior.
- Check in with someone you haven’t spoken to in a while.
- Take care of your environment, because caring for shared spaces is also a way of caring for others: picking up litter, watering a neighbor’s plants, respecting common areas.
- At the end of the day, silently thank three people for something they did that made your day better. I’ve been doing this every evening for several months, and the impact on my mental health and overall mindset has been far greater than I ever imagined.
Kindness cannot be imposed. It must be cultivated. It grows through small, everyday gestures, in the way we speak, listen, and choose how we respond to challenges. At EFBA, we firmly believe that teaching empathy and kindness does not make children fragile in the face of the world. On the contrary, it equips them with strong tools to find their place without reproducing violence. Kindness month is a meaningful moment for us, but above all, it is an invitation to make these values part of everyday life, far beyond the month of February.
If you participate in these challenges, feel free to snap a photo and share it with us at marketing@efba.us so we can inspire others to join in too.
Written by Julia Peillon, Cultural & Camp Programs Director at EFBA
