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.
Raising children in a digital age makes it essential for parents to help them process and think critically about the messages they encounter online, and to consider the impact that their own words and actions can have on others. This resource is designed to support parents and other adults in helping children identify, process, and think critically about online hate speech to help minimize its harmful effects.
Read MoreThis toolkit provides resources to help you support your teen in developing a reflective and caring mindset during the opening days of the school year. It includes conversation starters and other strategies to foster open, supportive, and reflective dialogue between you and your teen that focuses on community and empathy and works to reinforce the values and principles that help create a caring community.
Read MoreHow we talk about things matters. But in our polarized country, how can we express our opinion while leaving room for someone else’s viewpoint? This resource provides six tips for parents and family members to support teens in building and practicing skills that are fundamental to having productive conversations across different points of view. Review these tips before engaging in a challenging conversation with your teen, especially one in which you hold different or conflicting points of view on issues in the news or current events.
Read MoreWe live and are raising children in a time when our lives are impacted by increasingly complex global crises. This resource invites families to explore complex global issues together and to think through how their actions and the actions of leaders can help to promote the common good in times of crisis.
Read MoreNews and information has never been more accessible for adults—and for children. Though safeguards are available to help shield young people from especially troubling content, it’s inevitable that they will come across disturbing or upsetting news and other content that they may need support to process and understand.
In this guide, parents of middle and high school students will find strategies for reflection, discussion, and more to engage with their children and help them process current events.
Read MoreDiscussing gender can be challenging. For some youth, this is an immensely personal or even heated topic that brings up questions of equality and privilege. Others may question whether gender biases even exist. Finally, the idea that biases can be implicit—and discrimination unconscious—may itself be a novel, challenging concept to some teenagers. Fortunately, the payoff in broaching these topics is huge. By allowing children to explore this topic, share ideas for improvement, and participate in community-building and empathy-promoting activities, you are taking steps towards ensuring that your home is a place where everyone is respected, supported, and empowered.
Read MoreRichard Weissbourd’s book The Parents We Mean To Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development is a wake-up call for a national crisis in parenting—and a deeply helpful book for those who want to see their own behaviors as parents with the greatest possible clarity.
Read MoreMaking Caring Common’s Richard Weissbourd discusses teens’ romantic relationships and our report The Talk in this video for parents.
Read MoreAs a parent, you have a vital role to play in ensuring that the college admissions process reinforces important values and motivates your children to undertake activities that will allow them and others to thrive as adults. The discussion guide below is intended to help parents and their children ensure that the college admissions process is meaningful and constructive.
Read MoreThe college admissions process is a major rite of passage and a formative experience in which students receive powerful messages from adults—including parents, guidance counselors and admissions officers—about what these adults and society value. As a parent, you have a vital role to play in ensuring that this process reinforces important values and motivates your children to undertake meaningful activities that will better enable them to contribute to others and thrive as an adult. The college admissions process can also be a wonderful opportunity to get to know your children in a deeper way—to understand their hopes, worries, values, dreams—and what will help them thrive in college. Below are concrete steps that we as parents can take to make the college admissions process meaningful and constructive for our children.
Read MoreHow can we as parents prepare our teens and young adults to develop healthy, caring romantic relationships? Read our tips.
Read MoreGiven the prevalence of sexually degrading and harassing behavior in young people’s lives, these conversations are critical, but it’s vital that parents go beyond platitudes like “be respectful.” Following are six tips for parents for engaging in meaningful, constructive conversations.
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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