Making Time for Kindness
Most of you read my “Kind Words” writing-related reflection in my July 2025 The Art of Writing newsletter and know that I was planning to encourage the students in my Writing Critique classes to, in their free time, write and send a kind well-written and well-edited note to a person of their choosing (e.g., a family member, friend, classmate, coach, mentor, etc.) at least once a month and possibly share what they wrote in their most recent note with their Writing Critique class.
What I didn’t expect at the time was that my encouragement would be met with resistance: 5th–9th graders who adamantly insisted that they didn’t have approximately ten minutes once a month to write a kind note to someone.
Taken aback by the busyness of today’s youth and concerned about the lack of time for kindness in today’s world, I decided to integrate my “kinds words” writing mission into the allotted weekly Writing Critique class time, and for the last couple of months, my critique students have been working on strengthening their correspondence skills through drafting, receiving feedback on, and revising correspondence to people of their choosing (and a lot of them learned a new vocabulary word, “correspondence,” in the process).
Reading and discussing the students’ heartfelt messages to meaningful people in their lives and seeing the growth in the students’ correspondence skills literally brought tears to my eyes. It has been wonderful to hear from the students that they have been sending or hand-delivering their special notes to the people whom they wrote them to (and that some of them have been making homemade cards to write their notes in). It has also been wonderful to have the students enthusiastically ask me if they can write another note to someone!
It’s small acts of kindness like these that create a ripple effect and spread kindness, and it could go without saying that we could all benefit from being surrounded by more kindness these days. Let’s all help our youth regularly make time for kindness so that kindness will be a predominant part of life’s tapestry in the future.
Founder & Owner of ★ W O R D S, LLC