12 Kids Who Used Empathy and Kindness to Make Someone Feel Seen at School

I’m a single dad. I have a 9-year-old son, Eli. His mom and I split when he was three, and she moved across the country. For Thanksgiving, his teacher, Mrs. Carter, asked everyone to draw what they were thankful for. My son crumpled his picture before anyone could see it and threw it away.
The next day, his teacher called. She sounded concerned and said, “Is everything okay at home? I found his drawing. He drew a Thanksgiving table with six people around it and an empty chair at the end, and none of the people had faces.”
She asked me to come. The whole drive to school, I kept wondering what I’d missed as a single dad.
When I got there, he was sitting next to his drawing, swinging his legs. I knelt down and asked him about the faces.
“Some kids in our class don’t have people to eat with,” he said. “So I didn’t make faces. That way anybody can be there. Even if they don’t have a family, they can pretend it’s them.” Where does a nine-year-old get that much wisdom?
Then he pointed to the chair at the end, the one closest to the pie he’d colored bright orange.
“And if Mom ever wants to come back, she can sit there. She doesn’t even have to say sorry.”
I looked at that table, six empty faces waiting for someone to fill them.

I’m a second-grade teacher. This year has been rough. My husband, Chris, was deployed overseas in September. I’ve been raising our 5YO daughter, Lucy, alone while trying to keep it together at work. I thought I’d hidden my struggles pretty well. Kids notice everything. Apparently, wisdom comes early.
A week before Thanksgiving, we decorated our classroom with paper leaves, handprint turkeys, and orange construction-paper chains and arranged the desks into one long table for a little holiday feast. The kids were excited, but I noticed they’d placed an extra chair at the head of the table. Whenever I tried to move it, someone would put it back. I didn’t understand why until the day of the party.
That morning, I found a strange little figure sitting there, made from a paper bag, cotton balls, and scraps of colored paper. It had huge eyes and a crooked smile. I laughed nervously and asked who’d made it.
Then 7YO Max stood up and said, “That’s Mr. Sad. We made him because you look sad sometimes.”
I felt my face turn red. Before I could answer, Emma added, “We gave him his own chair so he doesn’t have to follow you home anymore.” I’d been teaching empathy. They’d been practicing it on me.
The children had even made him a tiny plate of paper food with a cardboard turkey leg and a slice of pumpkin pie drawn in marker. One little boy leaned over and whispered, “He can stay here for Thanksgiving. You should go home and have fun with your daughter.”
I had to turn away to wipe my eyes, still overwhelmed by their kindness.

I’m a single mom raising my blind 5YO son, Caleb. He started kindergarten 2 weeks ago at a small public elementary school near our apartment. Said he was having fun. But whenever I asked about his new friends, he’d change the subject.
Next day, I arrived to pick him up and stopped in my tracks when I found him surrounded by six of his classmates near the classroom windows. They were all sitting around him with their eyes closed.
One by one, they described the world outside the classroom: the blue sky, the fluffy clouds, the trees swaying in the wind, and the yellow school buses that pick them up every afternoon. My son was grinning from ear to ear, listening to every word. Later, he told me it was their secret club, and he wasn’t allowed to tell.
The kids wanted to understand how their friend experienced the world, and in return, they were sharing theirs with him, out of pure empathy.
I couldn’t hold back my tears. They were so little, yet they’d found such a beautiful way to show kindness and to make him feel included.

It was after my oldest son passed unexpectedly. I had returned to work, but it was really hard. You don’t want to fall apart in front of middle school students. You also don’t want to lie to them and tell them everything is fine.
Anyway, this one boy began stopping by my classroom every morning before the first bell rang. He wouldn’t come in the door. He just poked his head in and said good morning, asked how I was, then left. This went on for a couple of weeks.
One day, I was having a particularly hard day. Missing my boy. This kid, Steven. He stopped by like always. Poked his head in and said good morning and asked how I was. I just looked up at him, and he must have seen the pain in my face because he stepped in the door. He cleared his throat and sort of blushed and looked at the ground... and then he said, “You know, Mrs. DIGGYRULES... It’s okay for you to be sad. We understand. It’s okay.” And then he left.
Really filled my heart. I wrote a note to his parents and mailed it home, commending them on raising such a wonderful boy.

I started teaching ten years ago. In 2012, I remember a girl in my 3rd and 4th period had been talking a whole week about some kind of pastry her mother was going to make her for lunch that Friday, and how much she had missed it. The day of, she was practically jumping in her seat waiting for 5th period.
Well, lunch comes around, and around 15 students were sitting in my room, and I’m watching her take out this pastry (she saved it for last), and I’m excited to see her expression when she bites into it, and she has these big eyes and licks her lips and is SO ready to eat it.
But then she hears this boy who we all knew had a low-income home, and he’s quietly asking his friends with an embarrassed expression and asking them if they have any food. They already ate, so they tell him no and ask when the last time he ate was, and he shakes his head and tells them not to worry about it, so I’m assuming it was probably the day before.
So this girl looks at her pastry, blinks, then stands up and casually makes her way to the boys’ table. She talks to them all for a moment, even makes a joke, then sighs and says she’s full and asks the boy if he wants her pastry. He looks a little confused but takes it, and she sits back down as if nothing happened.
And after a moment, you could hear his moaning as he chewed, and he had the BIGGEST grin. She smiles kinda sadly (probably at the boys life, not because of the pastry) and when she looks up and meets my eyes flushes and looks away.
And that was one of the moments that touched me most as a teacher.

My daughter Maya broke her leg in September. She’s healing well, but she still gets tired fast. The school autumn parade was coming up, and the route is long, so we decided she’d just watch from the sidewalk this year. She was very upset.
The night before, her best friend Ellie’s dad texted: “We have a plan. You can’t say no.” I wasn’t expecting that kind of kindness.
Turns out they’d spent the last three days turning their old wagon into a Cinderella carriage. Hula hoops, blue tulle, fairy lights. Glitter everywhere.
Next morning, Ellie shows up in a princess dress plus cardboard horse ears she made herself. “Every carriage needs a horse,” she announced. Then, softer, to Maya: “You’re the princess. Get in.”
Maya laughed the entire way, with Ellie’s dad doing most of the pulling. I cried. Obviously.
Maya’s fully back on her feet now. Ellie’s dad says the glitter is still in his car. “Worth it,” he told me. “Ellie knew something we didn’t. Wisdom, I guess.”

I work in a preschool, in the three-year-old room. We have a very antagonistic child there. I’ll call him T. Once he finds something another child doesn’t like, he will do it endlessly until they cry or get really angry.
One girl’s parents were coming to pick her up early to go to a birthday party, and she was telling everyone how excited she was. Well, T ran over to her as she was telling a friend this and started mocking her, saying things like “your parents aren’t coming early,” “you aren’t going to a birthday party,” and things like that. I immediately intervened and removed him from that group to have a talk with him, but he had already made her cry.
As I was sitting with him, I watched another child walk over to the crying girl, put his arm around her, and say very sweetly, “You don’t need to worry about him. Mean people don’t matter. You are nice, and you matter.”
Completely true. It’s small, but I loved it. These kids were THREE. I was floored.

I used to work at an after-school program at my old middle school. After about an hour of doing homework, the kids would be allowed to go and play in the yard for a while. There was this one kid who always sort of kept to herself.
One day, I guess she sort of felt more outgoing and tried to play double dutch with some of the other kids, but she wasn’t quite as good as everyone else, and her ankles kept snagging the jump rope. After a few goes, one of the other kids got exasperated and told her to buzz off. The girl walked away and sat down, looking dejected.
Soon, one of the other girls who was playing handed off the rope and went to sit with her. The other kids sort of gave her a look like, “Why would you bother going out of your way to hang out with her”? But she didn’t seem to care. The two sat and talked for a while.
It was a simple gesture, but you should have seen the other girl’s face light up.

There’s a kid at the school I work at. He’s in 1st grade, and while I don’t specifically know his home situation (he’s not one of the kids I work with), it’s not hard to tell that his home life isn’t the best.
Every other Friday, my school does popcorn sales, where kids can buy a bag of popcorn for 50 cents. This boy, he usually doesn’t get popcorn. But one time he was able to bring a whole dollar and get two bags. I think that’s the only time I’ve ever seen him get popcorn too.
Well, on that day, one of his classmates lost her popcorn money. Without even a second thought, he offered her one of his two bags.

I’ve been teaching kindergarten for four years. In my second year of teaching, I had a kid who was just the most empathetic kid in the world. He was cute as a button, and hilarious, and just the nicest kid. He could always sense when I was feeling stressed and would do something silly and make me laugh.
One day, the girl he sat next to (who was another absolute angel) was having a bad day. Her mom had written me a note saying that she didn’t sleep well because her brother was sick with a cough, and she was not her usual self. At midday, she just had an absolute meltdown because another kid took a pencil from her. Normally, she would not have let it bother her, but it was just one of those days.
She’s sobbing, and I’m going to get another pencil for her and give her a hug, and before I can get there, this little guy is there with the box of tissues, hugging his friend. They were both teeny little munchkins at the time, and it was by far the cutest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It was amazing to see how a five-year-old could be so kind and caring to someone else.

I was having lunch with some of my kindergarteners, and they were talking about a boy who had been having some behavior problems that day. One kid said, “I don’t like him, he’s a bad kid!”
One of my favorite little girls, this super precocious, tiny kid with huge glasses that made her look like a little owl, said in the most matter-of-fact voice, “He’s not bad. He’s just learning.”
It just warmed my heart so much! I firmly believe that there are no bad kids, just kids who are still learning.

I’m a single dad raising my 7YO daughter, Lily, who has used a wheelchair since she was little. She started at a new school last month. Everything seemed fine until she began coming home with dirt on her clothes and holes in the knees of her pants. Whenever I asked what happened, she said, “We were just playing.”
One afternoon, I showed up early and heard children shouting near the playground. My daughter was on the ground, surrounded by four classmates. I rushed toward them, worried.
The kids had built a little obstacle course with cushions and cardboard boxes from the classroom supply closet. They were all crawling through it together, cheering as my daughter pulled herself toward the finish line. She’d told them she wanted to play a game where she didn’t need her wheelchair, and they’d invented one where nobody had to stand.
That’s what empathy looks like at seven.