Ever wonder why a kind gesture leaves you laughing more? Hoping more? Learning more? Yet, did you know teachers and parents value grades and competition over kindness and caring support?
Or do you question why feeling cared for steps you delightfully toward a magic carpet that carries you past disinterest and into delightfully refreshing adventures regardless of the topic? We now know how the art of kindness leads to the rigor of mindfulness – yet it takes a new choice to attain.
Parents and teachers Value Grades Over Kindness or Care
You may be surprised to discover that problems often enter classes through lack of kindness that starts and fuels from home. How so? In 2014 a Harvard study of 10,000 middle – high school kids, 80 percent of the students said they valued achievement and happiness over caring for others. Interestingly, 96 percent of parents reported that hoped their children would be caring, while 81 percent of teens here said their parents actually valued achievement and happiness over caring or kindness.
Can teachers help? What about kind acts from students and teachers in the above study? Sadly, 62 percent of the participants believed their teachers prized academic success above all else – including kindness. Have you seen it?
Kindness literally impacts learning results both for those who care and those who are cared for. Not surprisingly, kids who ranked care for others as less valuable than happiness and learning achievement, and who believed their parents desired the same outcomes, scored lower on an empathy scale, than kids who valued kindness.
How Kindness Alters a learning Culture
We now have brain facts to demonstrate how kindness alters outcomes. How so? Watch kindness in action in this video that shows how one kind gesture from a football player to an autistic student changed an entire community! Would you agree that one kind person – even from an aggressive sport such as football, can change a learning culture from cut-throat to caring?
Kindness awakens your brain’s DNA much like a light-switch illuminates a room. Kindness also connects your mental equipment to your innate capabilities. How so?
Kindness primes your amygdala for hopeful moods that open you to spot new possibilities. It reduces stress chemicals that hold you back mentally. Kindness fosters the change you’d like others to see in you. It defaults back to that deep desire to mimic its sheer delight. Kindness grows with each new use, and spills over time into pools of genuine care that benefits all, through its use of serotonin – the brain’s wellbeing chemical. 
The universal language of kindness may be compassion and its evidence likely appears within every caring smile, yet it jump-starts mental sparks for any who wave its magic wand.
Kindness is a deliberate attempt to activate brain parts that lie hidden or unused when bullying or disinterest in others emerges. My grandchildren and I have been investigating kindness as a lived experience that builds interest into learning about any topic we tackle.
Have you noticed how kindness can help you even disagree, while building goodwill with those who differ? Or how kindness transforms sarcasm into humor with mental muscle. 
How do you learn kindness or teach it to others? 
Looking to teach the art of kindness through the rigor of mindfulness. Find ready-to-roll resources here at my TpT site. Simply copy – use – and enjoy student enthusiasm tossed into any topic you teach –
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Created by Ellen Weber, Brain Based Tasks for Growth Mindset