This holiday season, consider giving your children something more lasting than another toy or gadget … the gift of kindness as a practice, a skill, a way of moving through the world. Acts of kindness are contagious, impacting the giver, the receiver, and the observer, and will improve your mental and physical health, too.

Kindness doesn't just make the world slightly better for others. It measurably improves our physical and mental health, reduces our stress reactivity, provides our children with concrete evidence that they have power to create good in the world, creates a ripple effect that touches givers, receivers, and observers alike, and literally retrains our brains to notice positive interactions instead of only threats and problems.