Love Is…: Teaching Children About Love, Kindness, and Empathy
What does love look like?
It seems like such a simple question. We use the word every day. We tell our children we love them. We talk about loving our families, our friends, our pets, our favorite foods, and the things that bring us joy. But understanding what love actually looks like in everyday life is something children learn over time, not simply something they automatically know.
That idea is at the heart of Love Is…, a diverse children’s book with only 73 words and a very big message. Love Is… invites children to notice love not only in the words “I love you,” but in the countless ways love appears through kindness, caring, patience, sharing, helping, listening, comfort, and connection. Love is all around us, but sometimes we have to learn how to see it.
Teaching Children What Love Looks Like
Love is an enormous concept for a young child. We can tell children they are loved, but we can also help them understand what love looks and feels like in action. Love might be the person who comforts you when you are sad, the grown-up who listens when you have something important to say, the brother or sister who splits their candy bar with you, the teacher who takes a little extra time to make sure you understand, or the friend who saves a seat for you.
Kindness is one of the most simple ways children can learn to put love into action. We take care of love when we treat the people we care about gently. We protect love when we consider how our words and actions affect other people. Saying “I’m sorry,” including someone who feels left out, offering help, sharing, listening, and choosing not to be cruel are all ways children can practice kindness and care for the relationships in their lives.
This doesn’t mean love requires us to accept unkind behavior or ignore our own feelings. Caring for love also means learning healthy boundaries, respect, and the importance of treating ourselves and others with dignity. When children understand love as something we actively practice, they begin to see that they have the ability to bring more kindness into their families, friendships, classrooms, and communities.
That is one of the reasons I wrote Love Is…. I wanted children to know that love is precious, that it exists all around them, and that each of us has a responsibility to nurture it and take care of it.
Why I Published Love Is…
Love Is… holds a particularly special place in my heart because it was my first published book and, eventually, the beginning of Make A Way Media.
I wanted to write a book for nearly 20 years. For much of that time, I told myself I simply didn’t have enough time. I had a career, children to raise, responsibilities to manage, and all the ordinary demands of life. Writing a book became one of those dreams I kept moving into an imaginary future where I would somehow have more time, fewer responsibilities, and the perfect conditions to exist.
Eventually, I had to acknowledge that time wasn’t the only thing stopping me. I was afraid.
I was afraid of putting myself out there and being rejected. I was afraid of trying something completely different and failing. I wondered whether anyone would care about something I had written or spend money to read my words. The dream had lived inside me for years, but so had all the reasons I had created for not pursuing it.
Eventually, I decided to feel the fear and do it anyway. Eventually, I decide writing was an act of loving myself!
In 2014, Love Is… became my first published book. I could not possibly have known then what would grow from that decision.
The Children’s Book That Started Make A Way Media
Today, Make A Way Media publishes diverse children’s books, creates resources centered on hope and mental wellness, encourages children’s literacy, produces the How to Dream podcast, supports community literacy initiatives, and develops tools that help people see more possibility for themselves and for one another.
Before all of that, there was Love Is….
Looking back, there is something wonderfully fitting about the fact that Make A Way Media began with a children’s book about love.
So much of what we have created since then grows from the same foundation. Our commitment to diverse books is rooted in love for children who deserve to see themselves represented in stories. Our literacy work is rooted in the belief that every child deserves access to books. Our work around empathy asks people to see beyond their own experiences and recognize the humanity of someone else. Our work around hope encourages people to believe that their lives and communities can become something more.
Love was there at the beginning of Make A Way Media, and it continues to run through the work we do today. I feel this is also very timely as our world feels increasingly more isolated and bereft of empathy and care for one another. We are all connected.
Diverse Children’s Books Can Help Build Empathy
One of the extraordinary things about children’s literature is its ability to allow a child to briefly experience the world through someone else’s eyes. Books can introduce children to families, cultures, traditions, communities, abilities, and experiences that may be very different from their own.
That makes diverse and multicultural children’s books powerful tools for developing empathy. Children can discover through stories that families may look different and still be filled with love. People may celebrate differently, eat different foods, communicate differently, have different abilities, live in different kinds of homes, or move through the world in ways that are unfamiliar to them. Those differences do not diminish our shared need for love, kindness, dignity, care, and belonging.
Representation in children’s books is important for the child who needs to see themselves reflected on the page, but diverse books are not only for the children represented in them. They are for all children. Reading multicultural stories helps children understand that their own experience is one experience among many. That understanding creates space for curiosity instead of judgment and connection instead of fear.
Empathy begins when we learn to recognize another person’s humanity, even when their life doesn’t look like ours. Especially when their life doesn’t look like ours. Books give children a beautiful place to practice.
Kindness Is One Way We Protect Love
We often talk to children about being kind, but it is worth helping them understand why kindness is so important. Kindness is not simply good manners. It is one of the ways we protect the love and connection between people.
Words can strengthen a relationship, and words can damage one. Our actions can help another person feel safe, valued, and included, or they can make someone feel invisible and unwanted. Teaching children kindness means helping them understand that the way they move through the world affects other people.
A child can practice love by inviting someone to play, checking on a friend who looks sad, helping someone who is struggling, sharing something, listening without interrupting, apologizing after causing hurt, or standing beside someone who feels alone. These actions may seem small to an adult, but they teach children that love isn’t only something they feel. Love is also something they do.
Children who understand this begin to recognize their own ability to influence the emotional climate around them. They learn that they can contribute kindness to a classroom, friendship, family, playground, or community. That is a powerful kind of agency to give a child.
Children’s Books Can Help Kids Notice the Good
Children are growing up in a world where difficult things are increasingly hard to shield them from. They hear adults talking. They see images on screens. They notice conflict, anger, division, fear, and stress even when adults believe they aren’t paying attention.
We cannot promise children a world without difficult things, and we shouldn’t teach them to pretend pain doesn’t exist. What we can do is help them develop the ability to understand that difficult things are not the entirety of their world.
There is also the friend who saves them a seat, the teacher who notices they are having a difficult day, the parent who remembers exactly how they like their sandwich, the grandparent who calls just to hear their voice, the neighbor who helps carry something heavy, the stranger who holds a door, and the sibling who makes them laugh when they were trying very hard to stay mad.
There is kindness. There is connection. There is still love. Lots of it. It’s important that we see it.
Helping children notice these moments isn’t about ignoring what is wrong. It is about helping them develop a fuller picture of the world they inhabit. Hard things exist, and goodness exists alongside them. Learning to notice both is an important part of emotional development and resilience.
Turn a Children’s Book About Love Into a Family Conversation
Reading together provides parents, caregivers, teachers, and children with natural opportunities to have conversations that might otherwise be difficult to begin. A simple picture book can open surprisingly meaningful discussions about emotions, relationships, kindness, empathy, and belonging.
After reading Love Is…, ask your child a simple question: “What does love look like to you?”
Give them time to think about their answer. Then ask them to remember a time when someone showed them love without actually saying “I love you.” Perhaps someone helped them, listened to them, encouraged them, included them, or simply stayed close when they were having a difficult time.
Then turn the question around: “How did you show someone love today?”
This is where the conversation becomes especially meaningful. Love is no longer simply something the child receives from other people. It becomes something they have the ability to create and contribute to the world around them.
Don’t Become So Accustomed to Love That You Stop Seeing It
Perhaps Love Is… isn’t only a children’s book. Adults need this reminder, too.
We can become so accustomed to the people who love us that we stop noticing all the ways they show it. We can move through our days so quickly that small acts of kindness barely register. We can become so overwhelmed by everything going wrong in the world that we overlook the quiet evidence that goodness is still here.
Love requires attention. It requires kindness. It requires care.
If love is precious, then we should treat it as something precious. We should nurture the relationships that sustain us, notice the people who show up for us, apologize when we cause harm, offer kindness freely, protect our boundaries, and remember to tell people what they mean to us while we still have the opportunity.
Children learn these things not only from the books we give them, but from watching us.
One Small Book, One Very Big Beginning
When I finally found the courage to publish Love Is…, I had no idea where that decision would lead. I didn’t know it would become the first book published by Make A Way Media. I didn’t know more diverse children’s books would follow. I didn’t know those books would eventually find their way into homes, classrooms, libraries, community programs, and the hands of children.
I certainly didn’t know that one day I would look backward and realize that the dream I had postponed for nearly 20 years had become the beginning of so much of my life’s work.
I only knew I had something I wanted to say: love is everywhere, love is precious, love is free, and love is meant to be shared.
More than a decade later, I still believe every word. I also understand something now that I couldn’t have known when I began: sometimes the thing we are most afraid to start is beginning a future we cannot see yet.
Love Is… was my beginning. It was a tiny children’s book about love and kindness that became the first step toward something much larger.
Perhaps there is something beautiful in that, too.
Love asks us to care for what is precious.
Dreams do, too.
Love,
Author Deedee Cummings, Founder of Make A Way Media