A Little Kindness Goes a Long Way
One of the first lessons a child learns is the importance of being kind. And it is a lesson that can start affecting them from the moment they are born.
According to a recent study, the quality of care in the neonatal intensive care unit can suffer after perceived rude remarks from the parents. The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, used simulated crisis scenarios with actor “parents” and a plastic baby “patient.” After the mother in one scenario complained about the hospital within earshot of the staff, the doctors and nurses on the team reacted.
“All the collaborative mechanisms and things that make a team a team, rather than four individuals working separately, were damaged by the exposure to rudeness,” Dr. Arieh Riskin, the director of the neonatal intensive care unit at Bnai Zion Medical Center in Israel and the lead author of the study, told The Times.
Even mild unpleasantness in a simulated patient emergency was enough to diminish the diagnostic and procedural skills of the individual physicians and nurses for the rest of the day, the findings suggest, which would increase the likelihood of medical errors.
“We are human beings; we are affected by rudeness,” Dr. Riskin added.
Once children reach school age, kindness also begins to have a measure of influence on social hierarchy.
In his new book, “Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status- Obsessed World,” Mitch Prinstein, a professor and director of clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, contemplates the diverse levels of popularity among children.
Dr. Prinstein explores two factions of popularity: the likable and the status seekers. Likable children cement the interpersonal skills that last them well beyond their school years, while children whose popularity stems from negative conduct are “most likely to engage in dangerous and risky behavior” throughout adolescence, he said.
And there is more at stake than just being popular, Dr. Prinstein concluded.
“Being liked creates opportunities for learning and for new kinds of life experiences that help somebody gain an advantage,” he told The Times.
Removed from face-to-face interaction, kindness is a much more difficult trait to decipher, but that doesn’t make it any less important, in the view of Rebecca Sabky, a former international admissions director at Dartmouth College in New Hamsphire.
“The problem,” she wrote in The Times, “is that in a deluge of promising candidates, many remarkable students become indistinguishable from one another, at least on paper.”
But Ms. Sabky was resolute about the quality that colleges find the most “irresistible” in a candidate: kindness.
She recalled an applicant who had a letter of recommendation written by a school custodian, which she noted was a first in her 15 years of poring over student applications. “This student, the custodian wrote, had a refreshing respect for every person at the school, regardless of position, popularity or clout,” Ms. Sabky wrote, and he was admitted by a unanimous vote.
Still, the letter from a custodian was an anomaly. Most college applicants will not have such a powerful example of their kind-hearted nature.
“It’s a trait that would be hard to pinpoint on applications even if colleges asked the right questions,” Ms. Sabky wrote. “Every so often, though, it can’t help shining through.”