Essays

Kindness is NOT the answer

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It has recently occurred to me that perhaps we are asking too much of people, especially our children, when we ask them to be kind. Maybe our message is wrong and this is why we are failing. We are all failing at kindness. Perhaps this is why our children are being bullied to the point that suicide seems to them like the better option.

Mothers like to fantasize that each morning when they drop their kids off at school, they are dropping them off to a fluffy, pink world where kindness reigns, walking the hallways giving out yummy candy hearts all day, tirelessly, never resting. We like to think our kids and the ones around them, spend their days being kind, because their parents have parented them right and all kids are balls of empathy that know that the only option is kindness. There is the realistic part of us that knows this is not true but, there is a bigger part that needs this fantasy. We need that fantasy to be able to happily chirp “Have a good day in school” each morning and drive away. We need that fantasy to get through our day. We have to believe, we need to believe, as we see their little backs and sometimes big backs being swallowed by even bigger doors that there is a pink, fluffy world behind those doors.

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I am rudely awakened from my fantasy when, inevitably, one of my three children gets into the car at pickup looking crestfallen and relates an incident that happened that day, an insult, a bullying incident or just an unkind interaction. Each time I am shocked. That other child was “not kind”. I feel let down by mommies and daddies everywhere; did they not give their child the memo about kindness? Kindness should be everyone’s priority at every moment. We need to be exchanging candy hearts all day. I am so overwhelmed by my disappointment, I am easily unnerved by the driver in front of me who has failed to respond to the green light for the last ten seconds. I slam on my horn and wave my hands at the driver, motioning them to move forward, and mouth “What the heck?”

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Kindness in our household is basically my children’s only chore. It is the only responsibility they know they have, besides always trying their best. My husband is often frustrated by the fact that my children do not have chores. I do not make them put away their dishes, or make their beds, or do the laundry. In my mind that is not their job. I do not feel that chores will correlate with the type of people they will be in this world. These specific responsibilities will be theirs later when they are responsible for their own lives and one day, hopefully, their own children’s lives but right now they have three tasks as far as I see it. The first two are be kind and always do your best out in the world. I do not tell them they must succeed at everything they do but I do tell them that they must try their best and they must be kind doing it and lastly, they must hold themselves accountable for both.

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My kids and I have come up with a ritual for when they come home hurt about some kid’s unkindness. I empathize with them about the unkindness in this world. I sit with them being hurt and sad about the incident. “You feel so disappointed, so hurt by what this child did. I feel that too for you.” When I see my children gathering their strength, ready to move on, I say, “I’m sorry that this happened to you. The only thing good that can come out of this is you knowing how this feels and it making you careful not to make anyone else feel this way and also this makes you stronger because while it hurts, that kid didn’t take anything away from you. You didn’t let him because you weren’t unkind back. Probably, that child has experienced unkindness so they think it is how you deal with things.” And then after a long dramatic pause that is so predictable for my kids that their giggles start before I say it, “….and don’t worry, Mommy is going to school to kick the kid tomorrow.” This makes my kids erupt in laughter at the farcical idea that I would ever march into school and hurt anyone, let alone a child. Over the years, it has become our parting wrap-up on our debriefing sessions. It has gotten to the point that sometimes we can skip the whole discussion and wrap it up very quickly and move on. The other day my sixteen-year-old daughter told me that a friend of hers had told her that a boy in one of her classes at her new school had called her a “brick” which unbeknownst to me, at the time, is calling her “stupid”. She looked upset as she told me how sad she felt on hearing this and how flustered she gets now in the class shared with this boy. We were about to start processing the incident when she looked up at me and said “But its ok, you are going to go in and kick him, right?” I knew she needed to hear me say it. It was the bow on our processing and today she was telling me we can skip the processing but I still need you to put the final bow on it and I obliged. “You better believe it baby. I’ll be in that classroom first thing in the morning. One question, though, is he big? Should I wear my boots?” She looked at me and laughed. “Thanks, Mom. I have to go study now.”

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The times that my husband has heard these exchanges with my kids, he has opened his eyes wide and stared at me, wondering how I could seemingly condone a violent, unkind response (one pulled off by me, nonetheless) to one of my kids who is feeling hurt by unkindness. His shocked and questioning looks as my kids and I have melted into laughter has made me think this one through. Psychologically, I think there is so much at play as I offer to go in to school and avenge my child. First, I am sharing the depth of my feelings. A hurt so deep that it calls from me a desire to respond. I am normalizing that they feel deeply, that it hurts deeply. I am telling them “I am sitting in this boat with you.” Their story has moved me and I have sat down right next to them. By sharing with them my rage about what has happened to them, a fantasy of returning that pain, I normalize that feeling too, saying it is ok to feel so mad that you want to act, that you want to hurt the person who gave you pain. I am not allowing them to think that their first desire is shameful. Shame I am convinced is the giver of small deaths. I have delivered two of my parenting messages: I am in this boat with you and do not feel ashamed that you are here. My kids know we are just talking and that Mommy will not show up at school ready to kick anyone but I am helping them again, to not feel alone in this boat. Also, I am giving them the opportunity to take power back, agency they may have felt robbed of during and after the bullying. When they were little and first started hearing my quip, they would say “No, Mommy you can’t do that. I don’t want you to do that.” In that moment, they again have the power in the relationship with the bully and they are choosing kindness, to protect that child from threat. I had given them back their power and gave them the choice to be kind. Also, I am reinforcing another parenting message of mine, feelings are always what they are, there is no wrong in feeling, but there is wrong in acting. Feelings are not wrong but behaviors can be.

 

One day, my child gets in the car and tells me that a teacher announced in front of the whole class that she did not like my child’s creative writing piece that it was bad and he would have to do it again. That same day another teacher told my child that if he thought it made sense to sit on the floor in the hallway waiting for his classroom to open he should not be in honors classes. A third teacher of a subject he adores and pours himself into told him that she was going to take off points from his test because his work was too messy. He tells me all this as he enters the car, bottom lip trembling. Now, this presents a problem. When children are unkind, it was easy to help my kids process their unkindness but now I am facing a line of adults. I am also facing myself. As he waited in the back of the car, eyes big, tears brimming, expectantly awaiting my reaction, I took a moment. I envisioned my child in the classroom, handing in his creative writing, his metaphor assignment. I had seen him review his three possible starting paragraphs repeatedly and finally settle on the one he would give to his teacher. He had read them over and over, analyzed them from his perspective, then, as is his way of being, tried to analyze them from hers and settled on the one he would give her. I imagined him sitting there proud of his work as she began handing them back, sitting there as she turned to him in the classroom and told him it was “bad”. “Where are you in the cafeteria or on a mountain?” I could see him looking bewildered, not understanding the obvious disappointment and rejection he heard, as he thought, wasn’t that the point of a metaphor? He was in the cafeteria in the story but he had felt he was on a mountain. I can picture him there in the classroom, among his peers, registering his failure. My heart flooded with anger. Next, I flashed to him sitting in the hallway, between classes, outside the door to his class, waiting. “I was sitting with a friend, just talking.” I see the teacher with all her own thoughts, her own worries circling in her mind, rushing down the hallway to see my son in her way. I see her thinking to herself, “Really? One more thing. Really? This kid is going to get hurt. What the heck is he thinking? He is going to get stepped on or someone else will get hurt. Who sits in the middle of a hallway?” My heart went out to her, partly. I know my son. He is the child who is so in the moment that he forgets his surroundings. In any moment, his full heart is there, his full being is there, and it forgets to look around. In my mind, I want to hug that little boy sitting there and gently move him to the side but I also recognize the teacher’s exasperation. Who sits in the middle of a hallway? That same question has popped into my head frequently with my son. Next, I see that other teacher sitting at her desk, stacked high with papers she must grade. I see her there, worried about the fight she got in with her husband, or how her child had marched off to school angry and she’s sitting there at her desk watching these fifth graders hand her test after test that she knows she must go home and grade and my son walks up and hands her his test. He is proud because this is his subject, part of his identity, this is what he loves, the subject he feels proud of. He hands her his test wrapped in his hope that she will see him, when she grades it. She looks down at his work and there is no order to it. The math runs across the page, sometimes going down, sometimes horizontal and sometimes diagonal. She knows that this paper will take her three times as long to grade, to find his answer and suddenly, she is mad. She doesn’t have that time, she has her marriage to worry about, a child who she feels slipping away, how can this child in front of her be so thoughtless and selfish to hand her a paper that will take her too long to get through, where the answers aren’t obvious and easy to find. She has told him this before. It was careless before, now it is oppositional. She glances at his work. Without looking at him, she says, “I am going to take off points for how messy this is.” He is filled with shame as he finds himself with his peers staring at him once again and thinks to himself “Why am I so messy? What is wrong with me?” Again, my heart fills with sorrow as I watch that boy turn and head to his desk. I want to rush over to him, grab him up in my arms, and snatch him from that classroom, run down the hall, put him in my car and drive away. But I immediately wonder what I am driving him toward: home? Home, where just last night when we were doing practice test after practice test to get ready, I had said, “I can’t work with you anymore if you are going to be this messy. It’s too hard. It takes too long. Why can’t you just be neat?” I realize that last night, I was that teacher, not at a desk with fourteen other tests to grade but sitting on my couch next to him, delivering the same message, with our bodies side by side.

 

He is still watching me in the back seat, waiting to see how I will process all this, waiting to see how he must process all of this. I am flooded by sadness and fear that he will continue to have these experiences. I am desperate to end them for him and my answer springs from that. “Babe, maybe you needed to hear all that. Didn’t I tell you last night for the hundredth time that you have to stop being messy. That its unfair to the person looking at your work. I told you I was tired of trying to figure out where your answer were. Did you think about your teacher having to look at that? And sitting in the middle of a hallway at a school? That doesn’t make sense. The teacher was telling you that was stupid thing to do and it is. You could get hurt. Someone barrels into you…” He turns his eyes away from me now. I see his hurt and look back at the road. I can’t stand to see his hurt in the tears cascading down his cheeks as he gulps for breath. I cannot escape it though even when I am staring at the road. I hear those gulps as accusations. I feel what I have done fill the car. It creeps into my body and fills it too. I want to pull the car over and get in the backseat with him and just hold him. I want to unsay everything I have just said. I steel myself though. I am his mother. This is my job. I cannot let him dismiss what these teachers have told him. There are truths in there that he needs to hear, to protect himself. He cannot get so immersed inside moments that he forgets the outside. He cannot be messy and all over the place and make things hard on people and not think about his effect. These are lessons I know he must hear and learn, to make sure that he avoids these hurts in the future, avoids the repercussions of carelessness in this world. It is my job to teach him empathy, to look at it from another’s perspective. I know that while this is painful, it is my job, to teach him painful lessons to guard him from pain in the future but still I wonder….

 

When he looks back at me, I can see the sadness in his eyes but I see something else, I see betrayal. I see that he cannot make sense of my response. His eyes object. There is something not right about your response, they seem to say. There is something wrong here.  I can feel it too. He knew that when he brought me tales of unkindness that children expressed on the playground I would condemn their behavior, empathize with his hurt, applaud his refusal to be unkind in the face of others unkindness and we would laugh about my false promise to redeem him. I could see his eyes asking, why not now? He is right. I know this. I feel it in the pit of my stomach as it knots. I had just excused away their unkindness. I had messed up. I had just justified unkindness, worse, told him he deserved it. He deserved to be ashamed. I confused the messages of the teacher, my messages with their delivery. In my rush to save him from the pain his behavior would bring in the future if he did not learn the lessons, I had excused the delivery of those lessons. Instead of telling him that the delivery was wrong and adults could and did get the delivery wrong all the time, my fear for him not receiving the messages led me to fail to separate for him the truth of the messages and the unkindness of the delivery.  My simultaneous desire to make him resilient in the face of unkindness led me to brush over the pain of unkindness, deliver the message that delivery does not matter, he does not have the right to feel the sting of delivery when the message is fair. I had just told him what was I knew to be wrong was maybe right. I had justified myself by justifying those teachers, by understanding those teachers. I had justified all the times I had been unkind because I thought the message riding on shame, brutal, would sink deeper and faster.

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We got home and he went to his room and closed the door to announce that I had betrayed him and he would now go into his room, away from me, separate from me, and lay in his bed curled up with that betrayal. He had done this before and later, he would come out, decided about something and resume our relationship as if nothing had happened. When I would try and talk about it later, he would listen to me, not saying anything and then move on. I never know if he is in his room forgiving me for not being right, for betraying him or if he is there looking for what is the message in my betrayal and trying to understand it as something necessary for him to learn.

I go to my room too, accepting our separation, what feels like punishment to me, to think as well. I too think about my betrayal and wonder if I should work to forgive myself for it or look for the message in my betrayal and understand it as something necessary for me to learn. I feel furious with those teachers, furious with their unkindness. I am those teachers. I start to think that perhaps kindness is too much to ask of people. Demanding kindness from my kids, when they see me being unkind to them in moments, to their dad in moments, is it fair? Is kindness a realistic demand on them? Or are we setting everyone up for failure? If I cannot even be kind to my children in each moment, children I would shield from every unkindness in this world if given a choice, how can I expect them to be kind in each moment and expect those in their world to be kind to them in each moment. Kindness is too much, I think. It is an unrealistic burden that no one can carry and not even love can ensure.

What then, if kindness is too much? I had told my son that unkindness was ok but why? I had told him unkindness was ok because I believed he needed to hear the message. I believed that hearing it now would rescue him from far harsher unkindness in the future. But I had rushed my response for so many reasons. I had in my response justified myself by justifying the teachers, believed I was teaching him empathy for others, believed I was saving him, when I was saving myself and all of us who are unkind daily, all of us. His eyes had said to me, “But Mom, you demand kindness from me, all day saying, ‘Be kind. Remember to be kind.’ I go out and try to be kind but you don’t demand that of other people.” He was right. The teachers’ messages had been right but the delivery was unkind. I had delivered those messages in similar ways when I too felt overwhelmed and exasperated but I needed to separate the correctness of a message from the rightness of the delivery. Still, I asked myself, how realistic is it to demand a kind delivery of a message that is harsh but necessary? How do you deliver the message, your behaviors are wrong and unthoughtful and there will be consequences if you do not change them, kindly? And if the goal is to change behavior what is the mechanism of change if it is delivered on kindness?

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Isn’t change in humans, instruction on behavior, socialization often built on shame? Psychologically, it is discomfort with maladaptive behaviors, usually shame, that drives psychological change. Any therapist will tell you that any client that does not feel discomfort with their behavior will not change, it is a prerequisite for change. We all instinctively know this. The moment you are a parent and your task is to socialize these little beings who come with no rules, we become agents of shame. When our child is not following the rules, we basically tell them that not following the rules of society is disgraceful and shameful. Not going to the bathroom on the toilet and in your pants is disgraceful now you are this age. Hitting another child because you want what they have is disgraceful and shameful. The mechanism of socialization is discomfort and more often than not it has shame at its core. We must create discomfort to create change, to create a child that is playing by the rules for everyone’s benefit. We know this. It is human nature and works at all levels from children, to adults, to movements within a society, to society on a whole. Discomfort at the level of individuals is the mechanism of change.

 

When we want change in another, we make them feel uncomfortable with their choices and actions. Is it realistic to simultaneously demand kindness from ourselves and others? I sit alone in my room, exiled by my son, trying to figure out if we can deliver discomfort wrapped in a bow of kindness? I think about how many times kindness is used as an excuse to justify the dismissal of discomfort, even if discomfort is needed. Social movements are often dismissed as spewing unkindness because they are trying to create discomfort. Should we really be prioritizing kindness? What about hypocrisy and kindness? This one punches me hard in the gut, as I see myself in my car, driving my kids to school, a few days before, in a moment of hypocrisy that still makes me flush red days later. I am driving my older kids to school and saying that recently I feel that they are being unkind more frequently to each other. I tell them that I understand that they may be witnessing moments of less than kindness between their dad and I. I tell them that we have a history of sixteen years that they are not aware of, that lurks behind our interactions. I say, “We are working on it but it does not excuse you all. You are not off the hook for being kind to each other.” Even as I am delivering these words, I am burning with shame. In their eyes and bodies, I can see that burn is consuming them too. Hypocrisy burns white hot. This is my clue that I am saying something wrong. My message is wrong. I am demanding kindness from them while I tell them that I am not accountable for delivering it.

All the stories my children tell me of incidents with teachers and other children, tell me that we, all of us, fail at delivering kindness all day. None of us woke up and thought, I don’t need to be kind today, but we all fail at kindness all day. Although I feel aware that demanding kindness is unrealistic, presenting too insurmountable a task, everything in me is fighting this realization, yelling back, fighting back against me throwing up my white flag and acknowledging this defeat and giving up on kindness. I think of the multitudes of stories of children and adults ending their lives because they can no longer take the unkindness. We cannot give up on kindness. There is too much at stake. I think of messages that flood our schools promoting kindness and wonder, if they are the solution why aren’t they working? Why are kids dying from being bullied? Why are teachers modelling unkindness as they demand kindness from our kids? Why are we parents doing the same? If we just admit that kindness is unrealistic, what are we left with? While it is obvious our demanding kindness from each other is not working, what now?

Kindness is an output, a giving output, we demand of others. Often, I feel that I am not kind because I do not feel that the other person has earned it from me in that interaction.  It is mine to give and judge if another is worthy. What if we admit that it is too difficult to pull off, too much to ask of people, to be giving to others at all times? What if we admit that there are times that another has not earned a giving act of kindness? What if instead of demanding a giving act, the generous act of kindness from others based on who they are, we change the demand. Instead of each person needing to provide kindness, we need only recognize each other’s inherent value, humanness. We no longer need to give kindness. We just need to make sure our acts do not trample on their value as a human, a value they do not have to earn, one that is inherent.

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On December 10, 1948, in Paris, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document sets out the rights of every human being. “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This document does not declare that kindness is needed. This declaration for all of humanity does not declare that the burden of relationships and acts toward another individual are on one individual, or country, to give/grant, an act of bestowing, originating in the giver, a giving of worth through the voluntary act of another, but shifts the focus. Instead, this document declares that worth is inherent to all beings, inalienable, and that the robbing of this “inherent dignity” is a crime against humanity. The conversation shifts from the burden of kindness to the crime of unkindness, suggesting that robbing one human of their inherent worth and dignity, and their inalienable rights, is the robbing of all people, the betrayal of humanity. The conversation shifts from giving kindness to taking from another. The conversation shifts from a focus on one person giving to a focus on the possessions we all have by virtue of being human. Perhaps this is where our conversation needs to go.

 

Instead of demanding that children give kindness to each other and doubling down on a directive that is obviously failing, what if we turn the directive on its head and demand that children are not unkind? What if we work to have children redefine bullying not as a failure to give something that is theirs to give, kindness, but as the aggressive crime of trampling on the inherent worth of another human, of robbing the possession of another? What if we help adults to see, embrace and teach this paradigm shift? What if instead of insisting on kindness we demand that each one of us respects the inherent dignity and rights of others? We move the conversation from the worth of the giver to the rights of the receiver. What if?

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