A virtues approach to children’s kindness schemas

ABSTRACT

Kindness is key to flourishing school communities. A social-cognitive approach to virtue emphasizes the importance of having an elaborate set of accessible mental representations (i.e., schemas) for expressing kindness. We employed a multi-informant, mixed method, longitudinal design across 6 months that focused on 4^th and 5^th graders’ (N = 320) kindness schemas using the open-ended question, ‘What are some ways you can show kindness to others?’ Results indicated that children’s schemas entailed wide-ranging content, expressing virtues of generosity, compassion, inclusion, civility, and harm avoidance. The breadth of children’s schema repertoires was positively associated with peer (but not teacher) ratings of their kindness, and virtues that attend to others’ vulnerability (compassion, inclusion) were the most indicative of children’s kindness from peers’ perspectives. Further, the breadth of kindness repertoires was associated with aspects of classroom ecology (e.g., peer acceptance), suggesting that positive classroom relationships may serve as sites for the cultivation of kindness schemas.

KEYWORDS:

• Kindness
• virtue
• development
• education
• classroom ecology
• middle childhood
• mixed method

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the district administration and all participating teachers, students, and families, and all the research assistants who contributed to this study.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

Due to the nature of this research, parents did not agree to have their children’s data be shared publicly, so supporting data is not available.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Materials. The materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/yc4eg/?view_only=866f73554bc64504be85ce9fee9f671b.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2023.2170822

Notes

1. Data were originally analyzed at each timepoint for the prototypicality, visibility, and schema repertoire hypotheses. In the interest of parsimony and because results from Time 1 reflected the most conservative and trustworthy set of findings (i.e., fewer associations were statistically significant and when they were they were replicated in at least one subsequent timepoint), we later decided to restrict results presented in the text to the Time 1 data only for these three hypotheses. For transparency, we present findings from Time 2 and Time 3 data as ‘sensitivity analyses’ in subsequent footnotes.

2. When combined with Time 2 and Time 3 data, the ordering of the virtues in terms of prototypicality was virtually identical to the Time 1 data alone, with the exception that a slightly smaller percentage of children produced compassionate than miscellaneous responses when averaged across all three timepoints: Generosity (57.87%), Miscellaneous Kindness (43.32%), Compassion (41.20%), Inclusion (34.94%), Civility (30.49%), Harm Avoidance (16.33%), Not Kindness-Relevant (8.60%), and Gratitude (2.52%). The ordering of the virtues was identical (across all three timepoints vs. Time 1 alone) for the other two prototypicality indices.

3. Sensitivity analyses replicated the positive association between Compassion and peer-rated kindness at Times 2 and 3, and replicated the positive association between Inclusion and peer-rated kindness at Time 2.

Additional intermittent associations were also observed at Times 2 and 3: Generosity was linked to higher peer-nominated kindness at Time 3 only, Generosity and Civility were linked to higher teacher-rated kindness at Time 2 only, and Compassion was linked to higher teacher-rated kindness at Time 2 only. We suggest that these intermittent associations are not reliable findings.

4. Sensitivity analyses found that breadth of kindness schema repertoire was positively associated with both peer-nominations and teacher-ratings of kindness at Times 2 and 3.

5. Note that these are standardized estimates and therefore they differ somewhat over time. Unstandardized estimates in all models were constrained equal over time.

6. Note that forgiveness responses were very infrequent and did not have their own unique code. Forgiveness responses were assigned the miscellaneous code.

7. We use the term ‘practical reason’ rather than ‘practical wisdom’ in recognition that the latter is conceptualized as a highly developed achievement not likely possessed by children (Wright et al., 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible through generous support from the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the granting agency.