The Language of Kindness

The Language of Kindness: My signature framework for building  skills and tackling tricky moments.

Listen to the episode HERE

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The Language of Kindness - Episode Notes

Note: The transcript below may not be exactly the same as the podcast.

Today I’m gonna talk about my signature framework the language of kindness and how it supports parents. It didn’t start out as something for parents. It started out as the systems and frameworks I developed for myself when I owned a preschool. I created it to manage all the things I was responsible for. Things like supporting skill building, tackling tricky situations, creating a clear sets of limits and boundaries, a foundation for development…  You know… all the things… I can’t possibly list them all and I know you have a similar list. There’s a lot of responsibilities involved with raising children and there’s an added layer when you are trying to show up and do it the best you can and it never quite seems good enough.

The Language of Kindness wasn’t created over night, in fact it’s roughly 10 years in the making, but when I really think about it, the foundation is heavily rooted in the work I did in my Masters in Education. I don’t want to make this conversation too technical so let’s get to the important stuff.

I have called it the Language of Kindness intentionally. One part is really obvious. We need to focus our language around kindness. The other part, and maybe the part that is actually the more important piece is that learning new languages takes time, practice, patience, repetition, doing it wrong, going back and trying it again. It’s also something you lose when you don’t keep it at and have to rebuild skills for it. 

As I was literally helping children build their language it just came together so naturally… I help families foster the Language of Kindness. This part is so important because habits and behaviours take time to develop, attention, consistency and commitment. When we think of building this skill like a language it supports us with knowing it isn’t a fast fix and it isn’t about the short game, but the long one. And just like learning a language you start small with words, then put those words into simple sentences from there to more complex ones and so on. This system is designed the same way. We start small and build up.

So how did it go from the thing I did to the thing I teach parents. Some might think it’s because of the pandemic. This is partially true, but not entirely. For the last couple of years my preschool clients had been saying to me… you know this stuff, what you do here and how you help us.. this is meant for a bigger audience. I had just started rolling that ball and putting in place a slow phase out of my preschool and a slow phase in of doing what I do now, supporting parents with the tools and skills they need to become the parents they want to be. Then March 2020 came and changed the trajectory on that plan and everyone else in the world’s.

So for the past couple years I’ve been working on building the Language of Kindness in a format that is accessible to you, something parents can use with their children to build essential life skills for resiliency while giving you some clear concise tools for problem solving as well. The bonus, the pandemic highlighted kindness and empathy have become benchmarks for life long success and using kindness for discipline has become a buzzword as people look for new and more effective ways of raising their children.

The reality is, we have learned that suppressing feelings is highly problematic and using punishments are harmful. So how do we raise children with effective boundaries, validate their feelings and still get out the door on time?

It’s not easy, but there’s something I learned along the way. In our efforts to parent differently, to avoid using the tactics that were used with us.. we talk too much. We rationalize, we use logic…we talk we talk we talk… our kids hear nothing… they are in Dino brain…. And you’re headed that way too. This is something I teach in my program and I’ve also created a lesson on in my FREE Parenting Toolkit Bootcamp.

Ultimately, this is where the Language of Kindness is so helpful. We have to say something… I know we can’t just say nothing and that something can’t just be validating feelings. 

Our children’s moral compass doesn’t magically build itself. It  needs the careful guidance of caring adults. But we need to talk less in the wrong moments and talk more in the right ones. We also need to make sure we aren’t only talking about those tricky moments when we are talking to our children.

It happens and we don’t mean for it to. As parent detectives we are always searching for clues to raising amazing children… to ensure they are showing up as the best people they can possibly be….This means sometimes we problem solve more than we recognize the other amazing things going on. This is where the Language of Kindness is so important too. It gives you clear concise language for tricky moments and it encourages you to build balance by reinforcing positive moments too.

The Language of Kindness is built on Three Pillars

Kindness to self

=> how to we foster our child’s inner voice 

=> internal pride vs external

Kindness to others

=> Calm and conflict

Kindness to the planet

=> this guides us with making choices about sustainability

=> it also guides us with understanding how consumerism and materialism are impacting your parenting decisions and you might be doing things that aren’t developmentally appropriate simply because of access to things versus needs

What is it at at the basic level?

Essentially we start by approaching things in terms of kindness and unkindness. We do this in a variety of ways - reading books, narrating our day, problem solving challenges etc. There’s all kinds of things, I teach it in my program, Building Resilience Through Kindness.

Through this process, you and your child start to develop a strong foundation in the Language of Kindness and social emotional understanding.  

A key element of this framework is the idea that unkind actions are things we can change into kind actions. This is a key differential in good versus bad…. Unkindness is fixable, something we can learn from, something we do because of impulse control or Dino brain…. 

This is part of the parent clues for problem solving framework. The two systems work together. How do we start to understand behaviour and why children are doing things and how do we teach them to be accountable without shame, judgment etc. 

The reality is, children may know they’ve done something wrong, but not exactly what OR some children don’t actually know…. 

As their parent you know you need to guide them in that moment and your experience and your emotions are likely leading you to do or say something you might end up regretting or just not having the outcome you are hoping for. And the truth is, this isn’t helping your child learn how to behave differently next time. 

That’s the key. In order to learn how to do something differently we need to be taught… This is where the language of kindness is helpful. It gives you something to say and a system for looping back to figure out the missing skill etc and then some guidance on how to build it.

Okay, hopefully now when I talk about the language of kindness in future episodes you can see that it’s so much more that simply being kind or trying to be a kinder parent. It’s about the layers of problem solving, it’s about the practical skill building, it’s about working towards balance. It’s about implementing a system to support you with what you need to become the parent you want to be. My favourite part, it isn’t a cookie cutter approach. It was designed to support multiple children within a group and it’s been adapted to support different family needs. My goal is to support you, not have you sound like me.