How to Teach Kids to Include Others

Here's something most parenting articles won't say out loud: your child has probably excluded someone. Not out of cruelty, not because you raised them wrong, but because exclusion is one of the earliest and most instinctive social tools children reach for when they're trying to work out where they fit in the world.

The question isn't whether your child has done it. The question is whether they know what it costs the person on the other side, and whether you can help them understand that before the habit becomes the person.

How to Teach Kids to Include Others Without Shaming Them for Getting It Wrong

I need to tell you something I'm not particularly proud of.

When I was in seventh grade, I was one of a group of three friends. At some point, I decided it would be better if it were just two of us, and I set about making that happen. I have absolutely no memory of doing it. None. To me it was probably a small social decision that lasted a week and then dissolved into the general noise of being twelve.

I found out what it actually was about forty years later, when I reconnected with the other girl from that group, my friend. She and the girl I had excluded were first cousins, and they had stayed in touch all those years, which meant the story had lived on in a way I never knew. She told me what I had done, and I sat with that: the fact that two cousins had carried this memory between them for four decades while I had none of it.

I reached out to the girl I had excluded. I told her I was appalled at my own behaviour and genuinely sorry for how I had treated her. She never responded.

I think about that a lot. The asymmetry of it: something I did without thinking, something she carried for four decades.

What's Actually Happening When Kids Exclude Others

Exclusion at elementary school age is rarely calculated or cruel in the way adult exclusion can be. More often it comes from one of three places: a desire for control in a world where children have very little of it, a need to define the group by deciding who isn't in it, or simple thoughtlessness, the social equivalent of not noticing someone standing at the door.

That third one is the most common and the most fixable. Most children who exclude are not thinking about the child they're leaving out at all. They're thinking about themselves, their friendships, their place in the group, and the excluded child simply doesn't enter the picture.

What this means for you as a parent is that the conversation isn't "why did you do that to them," because the honest answer is often "I didn't really think about them at all." The more useful conversation is: "I want to tell you about someone you might not have noticed today."

Ray Knows This Feeling Too

In Radical Ray: Australia's Little Champion for Big Change, inclusion isn't something Ray talks about; it's something he does, repeatedly and without fanfare, because he notices people that others walk past.

When he sees Jack sitting alone at lunch on his first day, Ray doesn't weigh up whether Jack is worth the social risk of crossing the playground. He just goes. When he meets Tarek across the street, a boy a year older, from a different background, reading a book in a language Ray doesn't speak, Ray grabs his soccer ball and crosses the street anyway.

What strikes me about Ray, and what I tried to write deliberately into his character, is that he includes people not because he's been told to, but because he genuinely can't not notice them. He has the particular gift of seeing people who have made themselves small, and responding to them as if they are exactly the right size.

That's what we're trying to grow in our children. Not rule-following inclusion, but the kind that comes from actually seeing another person.

What Your Child Actually Needs From You

Not a lecture about kindness, because the most effective way to teach kids to include others isn't through rules they recite and forget, it's through story, reflection, and being asked the right questions.

Try this: instead of "make sure you include everyone today," try "I want you to notice one person at school today who seems to be on their own, and tell me about them tonight." That small shift moves the focus from behaviour to attention, and attention is where empathy begins.

When something happens and exclusion comes up, whether your child was the one excluded or the one doing the excluding, resist the urge to deliver a verdict. Ask instead: "How do you think they felt when that happened?" and then wait. Children have more empathy than we sometimes give them credit for; they just need someone to point the lens in the right direction.

Model it yourself, consistently and visibly. Let your child see you include the person on the edges of a group, invite the neighbour nobody talks to, make room at the table for someone who wasn't expecting to be included. Children absorb what they witness far more deeply than what they're told.

One More Thing Before You Go

I moved to a small town in Ohio and found a monthly social gathering for women, the kind of thing that feels like exactly what you need when you're building a life somewhere new. I loved it. I loved the idea of it, women coming together, getting to know each other, building something.

One month I made a suggestion: could we include some other women from the neighbourhood who might benefit from the same connection? The woman who had started the group got angry with me, claimed ownership of the group and said no. I left, not just that month but for good, because I recognised in that moment that the group had become about who wasn't in it as much as who was.

Exclusion doesn't stop at childhood. It follows us into adulthood, into book clubs and neighbourhood gatherings and workplaces and monthly social events for women who really should know better by now, including me at twelve years old in seventh grade.

The greatest gift you can give your child is helping them understand this early: that the decision to include someone costs you almost nothing, and means everything to the person you've chosen to see.

I learned that too late to matter to Suellyn from seventh grade. Your child doesn't have to.

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Radical Ray: Australia's Little Champion for Big Change is a story about kindness, belonging, and what it means to truly see another person, set in the sun-drenched streets of Botany, Sydney, where one eight year old boy is learning that the smallest acts of courage can change someone's entire day. Written for children aged 7 and up and their families. Find it at meetradicalray.com.

For free weekly SEL activities to use at home or in the classroom, visit meetradicalray.com/readyraygo every Friday.

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