Emilie Silverwood-Cope: I am not opposed to kindness but I’ve had enough of ‘Be Kind’
Do you have an unpopular parenting opinion? I assume we all have at least one and I’ve written about a few of mine in this very space.
I’ve admitted that I am fairly casual about children swearing and how family day trips are overrated and watching TV underrated. I have a new one and I’m worried it’ll make me sound like a monster, but here goes. I’ve had enough of ‘Be Kind’.
First, let’s be clear. I am not opposed to kindness. This isn’t ‘confessions of a sociopathic mother’. I don’t want us to start telling our children it’s great to be unkind. What I think is unhelpful is the demand ‘Be Kind’ which has become more a meaningless slogan than a useful life lesson.
We seem to be stuck in a ‘Be Kind’ loop. We are told that if we can be anything we must be kind. It’s become the mantra of our age, used for social media likes and marketing campaigns. I am now used to reading emails from head teachers about their new initiative to encourage kindness. Kindness awards, prizes for friendship, kindness assemblies, workshops on kindness and days devoted to kindness.
The instruction to ‘Be Kind’ has become ubiquitous. It’s not just in our schools but on posters, stationery and it’s on children’s clothing. One person told me the first thing mentioned on their daughter’s school report was how “kind and considerate” she had been, this virtue being more important than what she had learnt that term. And that’s the other thing that’s bugging me about the Be Kind’ message. It’s very much targeted at our daughters.
I hit peak ‘Be Kind’ when I saw that George at Asda was selling girls’ knickers emblazoned with ‘Always Be Kind’. I don’t even want to attempt to understand the thought process behind this labelling or dwell on why this is so uncomfortable. As someone pointed out: “We don’t see this on boys’ clothes”. We may as well be telling our daughters that they are made of sugar and spice and all things nice.
Of course, when it comes to schools, I can see this comes from a good place. We are worried about the mental health crisis and we worry about bullying. We are also rightly concerned children are seeing cruelty and rudeness on social media and forgetting about the impact words can have. These are important lessons and I am not against our children learning them. I am starting to question what is becoming known as ‘toxic positivity’: that is the pathologising of any emotion that isn’t a positive one.
It is all starting to remind me of the Black Mirror episode ‘NoseDive’ (available on Netflix if you haven’t seen it and well worth watching with your older children). NoseDive is a dystopian look at social media and how the population must develop a credit score from being kind and popular. In the end, it shows how insincere and fake we become when we know we’re being judged all the time. All our protagonist wants in the end is to feel something real.
Real life influencers are being called out for demanding their followers ‘Be Kind’ to them, in spite of their own awful behaviour. ‘Be Kind’ has become a diktat, a demand made on other people without exceptions or context.
We are meant to have a range of emotions. We are allowed to have off days, days when we are down, sad and moody. More importantly, I don’t want my children to be kind all the time. Being kind is not always the best choice. In Gavin de Becker’s excellent The Gift of Fear, he wrote about survival signals and one of them was being abrasive to strangers. Every woman will be able to tell about the unwanted attention they have experienced. Save kindness for friends and loved ones. Good manners for everyone and sensible boundaries for strangers.
We have become so worried about unkind behaviour, bullying and mental health we’ve veered dangerously into helicopter territory. Children and their emotions are being too micromanaged. How would you feel if your every feeling, word, mood was picked over. How would you feel being told to be kind all the time? You’re at work and someone has put up a poster on your desk telling you to be kind - the assumption being that your natural personality is to be unkind unless you’re told otherwise.
What the ‘Be Kind’ warriors are teaching isn’t even the real thing. This insistence that everyone be kind is like telling everyone to have fun, or be spontaneous. You remove the sincerity and authenticity when you instruct someone to do it. Kindness is really experienced when it’s meant and not when it’s been instructed.
Read more Parenting Truths from Emilie Silverwood-Cope every month in the Cambridge Independent.