Perhaps the most useful and powerful of all social-emotional skills, kindness can be viewed as a foundational skill upon which other important social-emotional skills are built. For this reason, teaching and reinforcing kindness as a skill that should be practiced and celebrated is especially apt at the beginning of a new school year. In a 2023 study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, researchers Warren, Braun, and Schonert-Reichl explored the integrality of kindness to flourishing school communities, particularly at the elementary level. The study adopts the premise that kindness reflects far more than 'being nice' and instead encompasses several specific virtues, such as compassion, generosity, and gratitude. 

The researchers explored the importance of well-developed kindness schemas (i.e. accessible mental representations) for children to influence prosocial behavior: "A child who has a well-developed schema of kindness has a general sense of what kindness means; has seen kindness modeled in various ways by parents, teachers, and peers and therefore it comes to mind often; and can generate different kindness responses that fit various situations. Their elaborate network of mental representations about kindness helps them ‘see’ the kindness-relevance of daily situations, and supports a range of kind behaviors, whether by offering emotional comfort (compassion), playing with the new student (inclusion), or thanking a classmate for their help (gratitude). As such, mental representations are critical ingredients that serve as the intermediates between environmental inputs and virtuous responses. Indeed, mental representations are linked to real-world behavior within the moral domain . . . . Moreover, focusing on mental representations is important from an educational perspective because they develop through learning processes (Warren et al., 2023)."

Concluding their findings, the authors continued to posit that helping children build strong kindness schemas by explicitly teaching, practicing, and reinforcing acts of kindness is critical to supporting children's moral and social development and the fostering of positive school communities: "Evidence indicated that children with more robust kindness repertoires were . . . more accepted by their peers and had closer and less conflictual relationships with their teachers" (Warren et al., 2023). This study further supports existing research demonstrating the social benefits to children who are viewed as kind by their peers, as well as the emotional benefits inherent to performing acts of kindness regardless of response.