3 Easy Ways To Encourage Family Kindness

This past year, our kids have been grieving the loss of friends and school activities at the same time they are suddenly finding themselves navigating distance learning. It's only natural to have days with frayed tempers and big feelings, especially when we're all cooped up at home. 

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