We have just finished our two-week focus on ‘Giving Compliments’. I hope you have heard some positive feedback from your children about this, as we have all practiced the art of giving and receiving praise. Maybe a compliment or two have even slipped out for you at home! For the next two weeks, we are looking at ‘Random Acts of Kindness’. This ties in with Integrity, with these acts not always being acknowledged, and certainly not asked for, but they make the giver feel good. We would love to share the teaching of our tamariki with you, and we hope in all cases you can focus on the same values and activities as we do, at home. Whenever possible, encourage your children to undertake Random Acts of Kindness. The big thing to know about committing random acts of kindness regularly is that they're good for our psychological wellbeing. While the amount of happiness they seem to provoke has occasionally been exaggerated by studies, an overview of the science from the University of Oxford in 2016 found pretty concrete proof that a happiness benefit does exist. The scientists looked at 21 different studies on happiness and acts of kindness, and found that results indicated a "small to medium" happiness boost after committing them. Similarly, a 2015 study found that being "prosocial" in your behavior (including acting kindly towards others) was a boon to mental health, lowering stress levels overall. And scientists in 2016 foundthat being kind to others was actually more helpful to psychological "flourishing" than being kind to yourself; effective self-care, in other words, should probably include some acts of kindness towards others.