Support Children's Innate Compassion

Wendy Hinrichs Sanders, in an article that forms the basis for an Exchange Out of the Box Training Kit, "Cultivating Compassionate Classrooms," encourages early childhood educators to help children find ways to express their own inborn sense of compassion. She provides a number of recommendations, including these three:

• "Name ways children show compassion. ‘McKayla, I see you are helping Lamont pick up the pieces of his puzzle that fell to the ground.’ Be careful to validate rather than reward.
• Expand children’s ideas of ways to help those in need. For example, one set of teachers discussed a child’s idea to gather food for an animal shelter, and the school as a whole adopted the project.
• Help children who might be ‘stuck’ to solve problems. For example, one six-year-old girl said she had heard about children being sold as slaves and cried herself to sleep. She decided to sell lollipops at basketball games to raise money to free a child. We can protect children’s vulnerability by being there to help them problem-solve."   

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