“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” – Benjamin Franklin

 

Schools out and summer vacation has begun.  Students everywhere are excited and parents are counting down the days until school starts up again.  There are 77 days for our school district, but who’s counting?   Truthfully I love spending summers with my daughter but it seems to only take a few days until, like most parents, I will hear those dreaded words.  You know the ones.  “I’m bored!”   

As I am a stay at home mom, I have to be especially creative when it comes to filling our time, and this summer is no different.   I’ve hatched a plan to curb some of the boredom and do some amazing things along the way.  We will, of course, still do all the things that we like do in the summertime, we are already cramming the calendar full of our fun summertime activities; boating, swimming, vacations, beaches, time with friends & family and parties.   You get the idea, the list goes on, and we are extremely fortunate and take pleasure in, our summer months.   I have decided to add a daily element, to our summer routine, to help keep us focused on what’s important.

I must admit, I have always wanted to give back and volunteer for an exceedingly worthy cause; maybe build a house for a needy family, help Africans build water wells or maybe save some kind of endangered animal, you know REALLY make a difference.  The problem is those things are hard to do when you get to living your life.  I have struggled in the past to come up with a way for us to volunteer, as a family, and I‘ve never really found a cause that seemed to fit my families needs.   I got to thinking, maybe I’m trying to be perfect and do something too large.  I have scaled back my expectations, and I think I have found a way to give back all summer long, make a difference and have the impact I’ve been looking for, just on a more modest level.

I’m calling my idea, 77 Random Acts of Kindness.  With this, my daughter and I will be participating daily in a random act of kindness.  Some acts will be very easy to accomplish and involve with no money at all while others  will be more time consuming and require some cash (which will come from my daughter’s allowance – she is donating 50% of her earnings to this project).  In addition, my eight year old will be helping me blog along the way about her positive experiences this summer.  Not only will this help with her writing skills but we can catch a glimpse of her perspective, on this subject.  Don’t you ever wonder what goes on in a child’s head?   I know school is a crucial part of growing up, but I feel the time we spend with our kids, experiencing new things or traveling to new lands, seeing how other people live, is far more important than anything they can learn in a classroom, so I’m making summertime our classroom and having as many new positive experiences, as we can.

Benjamin Franklin was quoted saying, “Tell me and I forget.  Teach me and I remember.  Involve me and I learn.”  By involving our kids with a charity or volunteer programs, we as parents, are teaching our kids the most valuable life lesson, empathy.   We must educate our kids on how it feels to be in other people’s shoes.  If we learn empathy for others, early on in life, our world might make a change for the better.  Can you imagine if everyone did a small number of acts of kindness for someone other than themselves, how amazing the world could be?  We have become a self-absorbed society and we are raising kids who are entitled because everyone feels their lives are more important than others.  It’s a problem I’ve notice in society and I’m sure I fall victim to it every once in a while too.  We can however be part of the solution and stop adding to the problem.  It’s not enough to tell our kids to be nice to others and teach them it’s good to help people, we need to start teaching the importance of giving back, to our youngest generation by involvement.  If we don’t involve kids how will they ever learn?   

My plan is to involve my family, in my 77 Random Acts of Kindness endeavor, and hope we all learn how remarkable it feels to do good and give to others.   I still want to participate in that grand charity and travel the globe doing good deeds one day but for today I’m keeping it simple and simply thinking about others.    Clearly, I am not the first person to come up with this idea but it doesn’t matter.  My goal is to continue on my positive journey, involve my daughter so she can learn the importance of little acts of kindness and hopefully encourage some of you to join in, on our adventure.  Think small, do something every day that makes the world a little better than you found it and maybe even put a smile on someone’s face, in the process.   A little bit goes a long way, isn’t that what they always say?