10 Moments That Prove Kindness Doesn’t Need Superpowers to Make a Child a Hero

My 13YO son started locking himself in his room for hours after school. He looked exhausted every morning. One night, I spied on him at 2 a.m. I heard his muffled laughter first. Then a girl’s flirty voice. I opened the door. I wasn’t ready for what I saw. He was on a video call with a girl his age. She looked slightly familiar. Both of them seemed shocked. “What’s going on?”. His face fell. “You weren’t supposed to find out... Not yet.” Turns out there’s a program through his school where kids design and 3D-print custom parts for people with mobility issues. He and a classmate (the girl on the call) had been working together on a custom piece for a little girl’s wheelchair. They started out just as classmmates. But after weeks of teaching themselves the design software together, they got close and became friends. “Ok but why didn’t you just tell me?” He said he wasn’t sure they could actually pull it off. “If we failed, you’d say we were aiming too high. So it had to be a secret.” I felt a little bit sad. While I worried about what my kid was up to, he’d been working so hard trying to do something kind for someone else. I told him how proud I was and that I’d support him 100%. But no more working until 2 a.m. He could help someone and still get some sleep.

Once we had just gone to the thrift store and my son scored a big ziplock bag of little dinosaur toys. Then we went to our favorite beach on the lake for a picnic. We walked around afterwards and he hid a whole bunch of little dinosaurs where kids could find them, and talked about how fun it is to find a toy on the beach. So we do that kind of thing when we need an act of kindness.

Tonight when I was cooking dinner, instant mashed potatoes popped and burnt my hand really bad. I have never had pain like this even though I have burnt myself on fry cooking oil. Every time I would say that my hand hurt my 3-year-old son has came up to me and kissed it so many times tonight. Motherhood can be really frustrating at times, it definitely looked a lot easier as an aunt and my husband and I have no village, but man all his little kisses on my super bad hurting finger is just the kindest act. Let’s all brag on our little one’s empathy and kindness please.

My 2.5 yo has been real sweet this week while our newborn is in the NICU. I pumped for the first time next to her and she wanted to “help.” She kept cheering me on “the bottles are getting fuller and fuller! Good job mama!”.

My daughter froze on stage mid-recital, forgot every word of her lines, the whole auditorium went quiet, a boy in the front row stood up and started saying her lines back to her loud enough that she could hear, she finished the whole scene off his voice, afterward I asked him why he did it and he shrugged and said “I’ve been forgotten before too, nobody helped me”

We were three months behind on rent and I thought nobody at school knew, turns out my daughter had overheard me on the phone with the landlord and never said a word to me, just started skipping the school store and pocketing her lunch money instead, saving it in an envelope in her backpack. I found it by accident while doing laundry, sixty-some dollars in crumpled bills. I sat on the bathroom floor and cried for twenty minutes. She was nine.

My nephew is nine and called 911 on his own grandmother, everyone panicked when they found out, thought something terrible had happened. Turns out she’d been slurring her words and he recognized it from a school assembly, didn’t hesitate, didn’t call his parents first, just dialed. Doctors said those extra six minutes mattered. She’s fine now. He still gets shy when people call him a hero.

I picked my five year old daughter up from the bus stop today and she asked where her sister (2 years old) was and I said she’s not feeling good so she stayed home with daddy. We got home and she takes her shoes off and uses the bathroom and then grabs a blanket and her tablet and laid on the couch next to the 2 year old, covered both of them up, and put on the 2 year olds favorite show and cuddled her. It made my heart so happy. And when the younger one was ready to go to bed the older one held her hand and walked to the bedroom with us and surprised me by putting her own pajamas on while I was changing the little one and went to bed too since they usually go to bed at the same time every other night.

I was washing my hands in the women’s restroom when a man suddenly appeared at the door holding a little girl’s hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m her dad. She really needs to use the restroom, and I didn’t know what else to do.” He looked uncomfortable, but he was polite, kept his eyes down, and took his daughter straight into a stall. A few seconds later, a woman beside me quietly said, “But where is her mother?” Before anyone could answer, the little girl came out of the stall and looked at the woman. “Mommy isn’t here today,” she said. “Daddy is taking care of me.” Then she grabbed her father’s hand again and asked if they could go get ice cream. The woman didn’t say another word, and honestly neither did I. There was nothing strange about that father being there; he had a little girl who needed him, and he was simply doing his job as her dad. Sometimes a four-year-old understands decency better than a grown adult with an opinion about bathroom policy. I’d much rather see a father carefully take his daughter into the women’s restroom than leave a little girl alone outside or force her into a men’s restroom where she might be uncomfortable.