It's a decision to be brave, not a feeling

Author Glennon Doyle remembered Adam from her third grade year.

"Adam wore funny clothes and sometime he even smelled a little. He didn't smile. He hung his head low and never looked at anyone. He never did his homework. I don't think his parents reminded him. The other kids teased him a lot. Whenever they did, his head hung lower and lower and lower. I never teased him but I never told the other kids to stop, either. And I never talked to Adam, not once. I never invited him to sit next to me a lunch, or to play with me at recess. Instead, he sat and played by himself. He must have been very lonely."

Remembering, Doyle was filled with regret, and when her son was beginning his third grade year, she wanted to prepare him to do it differently.

"Tell a teaser to stop it and then ask the teased kid to play. Invite a left-out kid to sit next to you at lunch. Choose a kid for your team first who usually gets chosen last. These things may be hard to do, but you can do hard things. And when you find you don't step in right away, that's okay, too. You might choose instead to tell your teacher and then come home and tell your dad and me. Asking for help for someone who is hurting is not tattling. It is doing the right thing.

"We don't care if you are the smartest, fastest, coolest or funniest. We don't send you to school to become best of anything at all. You do not have to earn our love or pride and you can't lose it. We send you to school to practice being kind and brave.

"Kind people are brave people. Brave is not a feeling. Brave is a decision. It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear, than fitting in, than following the crowd."