The late Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize winning author, once asked this question during an Oprah’s Book Club discussion:

“When a kid walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, does your face light up? That’s what they’re looking for.”

Then Toni continued: “When my children used to walk in the room when they were little, I looked at them with a critical eye: Was their hair combed, were their shirts tucked in, and their shoestrings tied?”  Then Toni continued, “What did my children see? They saw: A critical person.  They must have thought, ‘Oh what is wrong with me now?’”

Eventually, Morrison learned to dial back her judgement and instead started leading with a warmer, kinder, lit-up face that said, “I am so happy to see you.”  Toni learned “to put her gladness out front and up first, not just with her kids but with all kids.  She made a point of starting kind.”

Michelle Obama agrees with Toni’s idea of “starting kind.”  She says in her book, The Light We Carry, “I can still summon the warmth I felt from my third-grade teacher, Miss Seals, who seemed genuinely happy to see her students each day. When we are given a kind start, when another person greets us with unfettered gladness, it can have a lasting lifting sort of effect.”

Yes, studies show that when teachers greet students at the door, the level of academic engagement in the classroom goes up by more than 20 percent and disruptive behavior goes down.

As Michelle concludes: “When someone is happy to see us, we get a little steadier on our feet.”

So, let us greet the child, greet the spouse or partner, or greet the friend with a lit-up face that says, “I am so happy to see you!”

Start with Kindness,

God Bless