entitlement
When Allie Casazza invited us on her podcast to chat with her about raising kids, kindness, and everything in between, we jumped at the chance! We so enjoyed visiting with her about what has worked, what doesn't, and what we still struggle with as moms who are raising kind kids.
We've also written two kindness devotionals, The One Year Daily Acts of Kindness Devotional and 100 Days of Kindness. They tell the story of how our families embarked on a one-year journey of kindness, and
include our successes, failures, and the encouragement you need as a family to incorporate kindness into your own life.
We would love to walk alongside you in encouragement, inspiration, and community. You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram as The Ruth Experience or sign up for our monthly newsletter (no spam, ever), here.
Julie, Kendra, and Kristin
Photo credit: Branding with Savannah @savvyphotagebranding
We're always looking for fun and easy ways to encourage kindness in our homes, and we're sharing our ideas and resources with you!
1. Kindness Bingo. Create your own bingo card filled with simple kind acts your family can do for one another with this free bingo card generator. The first to reach a bingo on their card through kind acts get a prize - maybe it's choosing dinner that night, an extra cookie for dessert, or whatever else motivates your family.
2. Add kindness to the chore chart. My friend incorporates a required kind act on her children's weekly chore chart. Her children have the flexibility to decide what they are going to do, but they are responsible for looking for an opportunity and responding. They talk about it over dinner at the end of the week, with my friend helping the younger children unpack how they kind act made them feel, how their sibling felt, and what other ideas they might have for the next week.
3. Gratitude lists during prayer. As my family sits down to dinner, we've each started listing three things we are grateful for before one of us prayers over the meal. It is a great way to reset our attitude if the day has been frustrating and helps us remember what is going right with our day and week. We've found this to be a simple way to encourage ourselves and one another. It would be easy to turn this into a list of things we are grateful about each other some nights to keep it fresh and to keep us thinking of new things.
If you are looking for additional kindness resources, sign up for our email list. We send out a monthly newsletter filled with resources and freebies.
You can follow us on Instagram as The Ruth Experience for additional encouragement, ideas, and camaraderie.
Finally—have you checked out our books, The One Year Daily Acts of Kindness Devotional and 100 Days of Kindness? They tell the story of how our families embarked on a one-year journey of kindness, and include our successes, failures, and the encouragement you need as a family to incorporate kindness into your own life. If you already have one of our books and love them, we'd so appreciate it if you leave a review on Amazon. God redeemed it all in the most incredible ways.
We would love to walk alongside you in encouragement, inspiration and community.
- Julie, Kendra, and Kristin
Intentional kindness - when you get down to it - does not come naturally. It often requires putting someone else first (emotionally, physically, financially), and that can be really HARD. And yet, that is exactly what we are commanded to do in Micah 6:8:
[W]hat does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8 (ESV)
The question, then, is how do we instill an instinct for kindness in our children? How do we encourage them to set aside their own wants and desires to help someone else? How do we cultivate a mindset of generosity and kindness when much of what we see in the culture around us is self-centered?
When our publisher asked us to submit a seven-day devotional to the YouVersion app specifically devoted to teaching kids kindness, we were excited and yet slightly trepidatious to tackle this subject.
Let's be honest, we're still in the midst of this parenting journey, our kids (and us, frankly) sometimes fall short of the mark. Given this confession, how can we possibly be the "experts" to tell other parents what to do?
But, God.
God is the redeemer of us and our children. He is the redeemer of our best intentions gone astray, and he gives us new days, new tries and new opportunities to get it right. He commands us to be kind and then walks alongside us in the journey.
That's the beauty of learning to be intentionally kind: it is a journey, not a destination. We don't get it right every time, but we apologize when necessary and then try again. We, as parents, are in this for the long haul; we don't quit after a hard day, we regroup, take our failures to God and start the next morning afresh. And we teach our children to do the same.
We've written this devotional with our fellow parents in mind - to act as an encouragement rather than as a guilt-inducer - to cheer you on and equip you with ideas and resources that have worked for us, to share stories that will spark inspiration within your own circles, family and beyond. If you love the 7 day devotional, you'll love our book,
If you haven't discovered the YouVersion app yet, it's an amazing resource filled with tools to support and encourage your entire family's faith journey. We love it, and we are beyond honored and humbled to now be a tiny part of it.
Are you looking for more resources? Have you checked out our books?
Our newest book, the 100 Daily Acts of Friendship for Girls is written specifically for girls aged 8-12 as they navigate friendships in upper elementary and middle school. With a scripture, short story, reflection questions and 50 fun activities to do with you or friends, it's a wonderful way to encourage your daughter, niece, granddaughter, God daughter and her friends to build healthy friendships from an early age.
Julie, Kendra, and Kristin
And our adult friendship devotional, The One Year Daily Acts of Friendship is a perfect compliment to our book for tweens. With a daily scripture, story, and friendship prompt, its encouraging and slightly challenging (in a good way!) as you find, keep, and love your friends.
We've also written two kindness devotionals, The One Year Daily Acts of Kindness and 100 Days of Kindness. They tell the story of how our families embarked on a one-year journey of kindness, and include our successes, failures, and the encouragement you need as a family to incorporate kindness into your own life.
We would love to walk alongside you in encouragement, inspiration, and community. You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram as The Ruth Experience or sign up for our monthly newsletter (no spam, ever), here.
We would love to walk alongside you in encouragement, inspiration, and community. You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram as The Ruth Experience or sign up for our monthly newsletter (no spam, ever), here.
If you already have one of our books and love them, we'd so appreciate it if you leave a review on Amazon.
We're in this together,
Julie, Kendra, and Kristin
"Did you know that everybody has a bucket, Mom?"
The question came out of nowhere. Still rubbing the sleep and early-morning confusion from my eyes, I huddled back into the warmth of my comforter and turned toward the daughter who had just climbed into bed with me. Looking intently at me—her adult teeth still a little too big for her, the sprinkle of freckles across her nose inviting a smooch, her hair in a wild bedhead tangle—she tried again.
"Everybody has a bucket, and you're either a filler or a dipper."
Ah, now it was starting to make sense. She was talking about Have You Filled a Bucket Today?: A Guide to Daily Happiness for Kids (Bucketfilling Books)
by Carol McCloud. In it, the author describes how everyone has an invisible bucket, and that we have the choice to fill other people's through being kind and loving or to "dip" into them by being unkind.The concept is easy for kids to grasp, and it's been a topic of conversation here since that morning that my daughter asked me if I'd read it. After school that day, she asked if I had remembered to be a filler that day and couldn't wait to tell me what she, in turn, had done. "Did you fill a bucket today? I did! I smiled at everyone, and I hugged Jaicie."
I'm a huge book nerd, and my children have started to become that way too. Because kindness is something we want to emphasize, I've been reading through books we owned or borrowed from the library to see if they are worthy of a spot on the bookshelf. With that in mind, I thought I'd share 10 of the books that teach kindness that are kid-approved and mom-approved by our family, in the hope that they might help your family, as well.
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