Kids innately understand kindness

Last Sunday's article about Singapore permanent resident Gail Pantin ("Mother goose' gets kids to pick up litter") is a great story.

I am particularly struck by the fact that she was surprised by the children's response to her call to join in the clean-up of the estate.

That the little ones responded enthusiastically confirms what we at the Singapore Kindness Movement have been saying - that children naturally resonate with kindness. We have seen this again and again in the work we do at schools, where children understand kindness and values like consideration for others, which is what keeping the neighbourhood clean is all about.

Since we started encouraging primary schoolchildren to write to Singa and his friends about kindness a year ago, we have received more than 150 letters from children. Almost all these letters show that children not only innately understand kindness, but also spontaneously act kindly.

One of the interactive boards created by us for community events is a magnetic mural with many incidents of kindness embedded in a street scene, such as people helping others, greeting others and giving way to others.

More often than not, we find children identifying them as kind acts much more quickly and completely than adults do.

What we have found is not based solely on our own observations. Research psychologist Paul Bloom and his colleagues at Yale found that babies and toddlers are able to judge goodness and badness in the behaviour of others.

Dr Bloom tentatively concludes that humans are born with a hard-wired morality.

This is indeed good news. We like to believe that the new Character and Citizenship Education curriculum, reinforced by the inspiring examples of adults like Ms Pantin, parents and teachers, will eventually make a difference because children do innately resonate with kindness.

We therefore have reasons to be optimistic - we can become a gracious society if we, as adults, do not fail our children by undermining what is innately in them.

William Wan

General Secretary

Singapore Kindness Movement

ST Forum, 2 Dec 2012