When parents take their children to a pediatrician for a wellness check, they expect to get reports on their children’s healthy development—if they’re growing properly, eating and sleeping well, or in need of vaccines.
They probably don’t expect to get a prescription for kindness.
But at Senders Pediatrics, a private practice in Cleveland, Ohio, and one of the Greater Good Science Center’s 16 Parenting Initiative grantees, this is exactly what parents are getting. The clinic’s parent education coordinator, Joan Morgenstern, has developed a program to produce events, lessons, and tools promoting kindness. Based on evidence that practicing kindness and purpose benefits children, the program helps kids care for others and flourish themselves.
While the program is in its infancy, it’s a model that is popular with parents and kids, and has helped the staff at Senders Pediatrics—particularly during this difficult time of COVID. Shelly Senders, the clinic’s founding pediatrician, hopes their focus on kindness and developing the “whole child” is a model that can be replicated more widely.
“My goal in all of this is to get the American Academy of Pediatrics to endorse the concept of teaching kindness in every pediatric practice,” he says.
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