Crisis Art and Kindness: Things Kids Can Do
Empowering us through this crisis with kindness, and a list of empathy-building activities to do with kids, including our new Make Believe Exchange.
Tonight at 8pm our street, and thousands like it, will fill with people clapping. We stand, apart, but side by side, and clap for the carers. And every week I am moved to tears.
I think it’s the strange hopeful hopelessness of the act which makes it beautiful. There is so little we can do at the moment. And so we offer what is left, and what, in the end, matters. Love.
We sing our love in a weekly orchestra of hands and horns and banging pots. We paint rainbows. We put teddy bears in windows.
We can’t hold each other, but we can use the touch that stretches further, art. Art as a big defiant hug for the world.
Letting children be part of that is hugely empowering, and positive acts for them to hold in the midst of their swirling fears.
I want to add children’s imaginative voices to the rest of the lovely art of global solidarity, so we’re starting a Make Believe Exchange. Kids send a line for a story, and we’ll share them far and wide to get us all imagining more, together. Just send a story line (first, last, any!) with first name and age to me on laura@fabledkids.com.
My hope is that this Make Believe Exchange will give children something delightful to do, but also a chance to give their unique gifts to uplift and inspire others.
Once you’ve sent us a story line, here are some other empathy-building activities to do at home with kids:
Rainbows in windows: Put a painting of a rainbow in your window to spread hope and send a message of support for our health service. Here’s how you can safely send those paintings to decorate the new Nightingale hospital in London.
One Million Paper Cranes: Join this movement to make one million paper cranes as a sign of community love and support during the pandemic.
Food Bank Donations: Most online shops or your local shop should have a bank for donating food, this can be a really concrete positive action to take with your kids. Here’s more on how to help food banks during the outbreak.
Kindness by Post: Register to join the new Mental Health Collective Kindness by Post initiative swapping messages of love between strangers. If you don’t live in the UK, consider starting one of your own, or simply draw and write some thank you notes for your kids in support of those helping us through these times, or for those we miss.
Colour to Connect: A Space Between have launched a lovely communal colouring-in project, you upload a drawing to be shared online for others’ to colour in, and the results will all get added to their gallery — art to connect in hard time
Teddies in Windows: Children around the world are putting teddy bears in their windows as a sign of support, and for a fun bear-hunting activity during socially distancing walks.
Art is an act of imagination, connection and empathy. Empathy, that great act of moral imagination, that step into another’s place. Storytelling is how children grow their empathy, and express it.
Study after study has shown that fiction develops empathy and ‘theory of mind’ (how you learn that others think differently than you). Following a story — one you make up or someone else’s — has the same impact on your brain as if you were living that story. The empathy is real, and reflected in our mirror neurons, as researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, US have shown.
If you needed no other incentive to join consider this — research from Public Health England shows that social and emotional skills are more important to children’s attainment than their IQ. So join our Make Believe Exchange and consider that your home-schooling tick for the day!
