Welcome to Making Caring Common’s resources for families, parents, and caregivers! We offer activities, tips, resource lists, discussion guides, and more to help you raise caring and ethical children who are concerned about others and the common good.
Finding things in common with other people can be a powerful way to help kids learn to appreciate and care about people who are different from them. This resource from Harvard’s Making Caring Common can help adults guide kids in identifying things they have in common with others, especially with those who seem different from them.
Read MoreLooking for an easy way to help kids practice talking about their feelings and the feelings of others? This resource from Harvard’s Making Caring Common helps adults use kids favorite stories to begin these conversations.
Read MoreCaring is good for relationships and research suggests that it supports happiness and success! This resource from Harvard’s Making Caring Common helps kids learn the importance of caring by capturing and talking about caring moments.
Read MoreWe’ve developed a set of guideposts to raising caring, respectful, and ethical children, along with tips for putting them into action. These guideposts are supported by many studies and by the work that our various organizations have conducted over several decades with families across America.
Read MoreEmpathy is at the heart of what it means to be human. It’s a foundation for acting ethically, for good relationships of many kinds, for loving well, and for professional success. And it’s key to preventing bullying and many other forms of cruelty. The following are five guideposts from Harvard’s Making Caring Common can help parents cultivate empathy in children.
Read MoreParents and caretakers want to ensure that their children are safe, respected, and able to learn when they are at school. But many parents and caretakers feel that they don’t know what happens inside school walls. When parents and school leaders talk together about what the school is doing to create a safe and caring community, everyone can learn and engage in positive change efforts. You can set up a time to ask these questions of the principal, assistant principal, or guidance counselor. You can send a letter with some or all of the questions. You can also share them with the parent representatives on your school’s parent council. You can suggest that parents and school staff work together to pick a few questions that are most important for your school community and meet on a regular basis to work on them.
Read MoreEmerging research suggests that family routines support children’s social and emotional growth, the building blocks for strong "empathy muscles." Recently researchers evaluating more than 8,500 children found that kids in families that sing, tell stories, read, play, and eat dinner together are substantially more likely to have high social-emotional health.
If routines build empathy, then intentionally big-hearted routines prepare kids for a lifetime of generosity. Doing Good Together™ – a national nonprofit empowering families to raise caring kids – has compiled a few tips to add more compassion to your family routines.
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