What is “Trickle UP” Compassion?

Rather than reaching out to older adults and hoping that we can somehow get through their thick skin to teach them about compassion, empathy and kindness, I think the better path is to find a way to use the life experiences of teens and tweens to reach out to younger children, so they can skip over the school of hard knocks and go straight to the behavior required to make the world a better place.

The theory is that if we teach young children about compassionate behavior and help them model kindness, then the result will trickle UP, through older siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, teachers, co-workers, boyfriends, girlfriends, communities, countries…. 

If we can make children “nicer” and “kinder”, then we can influence an entire generation, who will then make their children nicer and kinder, and so on and so forth.