I spend a lot of time analyzing how children and adolescents enact kindness in schools (and in broader family and societal contexts) and there’s a tendency in kindness research toward emphasizing and collecting data on observable acts that researchers like myself can code and report as reflecting salient themes. Findings from a recent study of 479 high school students just published by my colleagues and I in the Social and Emotional Learning Journal revealed that prevalent acts done by this age group included helping, giving, and showing care and concern for others. In the example here, we see a high school student recall getting a hug as a meaningful act of kindness received:

To access examples of kindness in younger students, we ask them to draw an example of kindness they’ve done at school. As there can be a lot of falling in the early elementary grades, a common example of kindness is a student who stops to help a fellow student who’s fallen. We use “in situ” coding to capture who is in the drawing and what’s happening, transcribing directly what the student tells us once the drawing is complete. This way, students with emerging artistic skills who produce drawings that might be tough to decipher can still have their kindness examples coded:

Examples of kind acts are found throughout the educational and psychological literature, showcasing the external expression of kindness: behaviors that are observable (i.e., helping someone who’s fallen, sharing a snack with a classmate, holding a door open for a teacher, etc.). In fact, we often ask students how they “show” kindness to others. As part of kindness research, students are typically asked to recall and describe kind acts they’ve already done or, conversely, to plan a kind act to be delivered in the future. In my research, I’ve identified a subset of kind acts that involve self-restraint or an absence of action. These are acts by students that draw little attention, that might easily go unnoticed, and that demonstrate students’ ability to self-regulate.

As the example above from a middle-school student who chose to “Hold back insults” illustrates, an absence of action can constitute kindness. In concert with this, we see the example below of a young elementary student who chose not to laugh at the expense of others:

As parents and educators seek to encourage kindness in children, it’s important that they remain cognizant that children and adolescents perform a variety of kind acts including acts that are not big Broadway productions. We might, for example, see students exercise their self-regulatory skills and demonstrate kindness as self-restraint or an absence of action.

I’ve not (yet) asked this question in a study, but I’m leaning toward something along the lines of: “Tell me about a time you were kind by holding back or showing restraint.” Or “Have you ever been kind by not doing something? Tell me about that.” As studies on kindness abound, it’s important that scientists ask children and adolescents about the different ways they’re kind, recognizing that a lack of action via self-restraint can be a rich way that children and adolescents express kindness.