[This is a two-part series. Check out the first part HERE.]

How do you teach children compassion while protecting them from harm? Suffering often enhances our ability to have sympathy and compassion for others. I want those qualities for my children. I want them to be sympathetic people, but I don’t want them to suffer either. I want to shield them from accumulating the physical, emotional, and mental scars that life can leave on people…but I want them to have the compassion engendering understanding that can (but doesn’t always) come with those scars.

I don’t have the solution for this problem, but I’ve been watching and listening to people for years that I think do have the solution – incredible mom’s and dad’s whose children are old enough for people to see that their workarounds for this apparent impasse seem to be working out.

A huge part of the answer is in the answer to the previous question – How to Grow in Compassion? In at least three ways, these parents help their children see.

1. They set an example for their children to see. The kids grow up watching their moms and dads treat them and other people with compassion. They hear them pray with compassion. They watch them consistently work hard for the good of others through their church, in their community, and sometimes around the world. They see their parents make regular choices to live on less so that they have more money to give to others.
2. They give them experiences that help them see. From early ages their children have had regular opportunities to get to know and serve people in need of compassion. Whether it is through helping their neighbors, serving at local food banks, helping with relief work in another part of the country, or helping with a building project in another part of the world these parents give their children frequent experiences that help them build a store of names, faces, and memories of people who have needed their compassion.
3. They tell children stories that help them see. They tell them stories of heroes of compassion – stories of missionaries and ministers, stories of societal and political reformers, and stories of quiet servants. They also tell stories of people in need of compassion – stories of the people they are serving at the soup kitchen, stories of the people they are helping in their community, and stories of people suffering in their church.

After finding these things out from a bunch of super star parents, I realized that in many ways what these parents have been doing is simply living the Christian life and bringing their children along with them on the journey. Beautiful!