Something to teach our kids this year: Kindness

I know the first quarter is over, but let's still talk about new year's resolutions. All moms have it. Things we promise to do more for our children (or for ourselves, no guilt there) for this new year. I actually have a lot on my list - reading to them before bedtime, being the one to give them a bath every day, et cetera. 

But with all that's been happening lately, I realized there is something important that I need to do for my kids this year, and that is to teach them kindness. 

How do we really teach kindness? I guess the same way us millennial (naks, nakiki-millennial talaga) moms teach our kids stuff like good manners and independence. We show them what kindness looks like and hope that they catch it. Yes, just like a cold. 

I know it's so cliche to say be a good role model to your kids, but it's true. For Koks and I, we really learned kindness through our parents, especially our mothers. I grew up seeing my mother always lending a helping hand to her friends and relatives. Sometimes it's through financial assistance, but more often it's really her time that she gives to them and that is even more precious than money. 

Being mothers and in-charge of everything in our kids' lives, it's so easy to say that we're too busy with too many things that we would rather go about with our own business and with what's convenient to us. But if my mom who raised five kids and my mother-in-law who had four kids and a full-time job was able to do it, how can we not try? 

It doesn't even have to be grand. More random acts of kindness is even better. Maybe taking a few minutes out of our busy schedules to help out a friend, a listening ear (sometimes that's all a mom needs to get by).  It can be being more patient with our kids. Something as simple as letting them take their time when we ask them to get ready. Or being more forgiving when they pee on the bed the third time that day (potty-training really gets to me). 

That being said, it's really true that kindness begins in the home. I always tell other moms in our prayer group that in everything I do, I always try to set a good example to my daughters. So if I want to raise a kind daughter, then I should be a kind mother first. Even if that means holding my tongue when I feel like shouting at my threenager, or giving in when my one-year old wants to nurse a little longer. 

Easier said than done, I know. But for our children, it wouldn't hurt to try, right? Let kindness be one value that our kids will learn this year.