Why Naming Goodness in Others Matters More Than Parents and Teachers Realize
I was leaning against the 4th grade bike rack during recess last month, wiping cherry popsicle juice off the knee of my jeans, when I saw Javi grab Mia’s fallen scooter off the main path and prop it against the fence. He’d just stepped back when our assistant principal yelled across the blacktop, “Javi! Slow down—no running by the equipment!”
Javi’s shoulders hunched. He stuffed his hands in his hoodie pockets and slunk off to the soccer field, and I stood there for a minute, thinking how that moment summed up most of Javi’s school year so far. He’s the kid who’s always first in line for a correction: he talks too loud in class, he doodles on his desk, he once turned in a reading response that was just a drawing of a fart. By the time we’re halfway through the year, most of us stop looking for anything else from him.
I walked over to him after a minute, and said I saw him move the scooter. He kicked at a clump of dandelions and shrugged, said it was in the way and someone would’ve tripped. That was it. No big fanfare, no request for praise. Just a small good thing no one had bothered to notice.
A week later I sat across from Javi’s mom at parent-teacher conferences, and she said the same thing I’ve heard a hundred times from parents of kids like Javi. “All I ever get from school is emails about what he broke or what he forgot. And I’m just as bad. I spend all day yelling at him to pick up his socks, stop bugging his little sister, take out the trash. I can’t remember the last time I told him I saw something he did right.”
That hit me, because I realized I was the same way. I thought back to when I was 12, and my little sister was the messy, chaotic one who always got in trouble. One afternoon when my mom had a brutal migraine, my sister snuck out to the front yard and picked every single dandelion, tied them into a lumpy bouquet, and left it on mom’s pillow. Mom’s first words when she saw it were, “Why did you get all those stems all over my carpet? Look at this mess.” The bouquet went straight in the trash, and I don’t think my sister ever picked anything for anyone again after that.
As a parent myself, I’ve done the exact same thing. Last year I walked into the kitchen to find a puddle of coffee spilled on the floor, and my first words were “What did you do?” before I noticed my 12-year-old was already on his knees wiping it up, before I even asked. I’d jumped straight to correcting the mistake, completely missing that he’d already taken responsibility for fixing it.
This is the language I never learned: how to name the small, ordinary goodness that hides in plain sight, especially from the people we’re closest to or the people we’ve already sorted into a box. We’re trained to be problem solvers, as parents and teachers. We look for what’s wrong so we can fix it. That’s our job, right? But what we don’t talk about is that when we only ever name the bad, that’s the only thing people start to see in themselves. If every time you leave the house, someone reminds you you’re the messy one, or the loud one, or the troublemaker, you start to believe that’s all there is to you. The good stuff fades into the background, because no one’s ever pointed it out.
This isn’t about empty praise, either. Generic “good job” doesn’t stick. Naming goodness is specific, it’s small, and it takes almost no time. After that recess moment with Javi, I started trying a simple thing: every day, I find one small good thing that one kid did that would’ve otherwise gone unmentioned, and I say it out loud, or write it on a sticky note for their desk. It doesn’t have to be big. It can be “You put your extra crayon in the class bin today, that’s going to help someone who forgot theirs” or “You let the new kid go ahead of you in line for lunch, that was really kind.” I don’t give out extra recess or stickers for it. It’s just… a name, for something that was already there.
Three weeks ago, I wrote Javi a sticky that said “You helped Lila pick up all her notebooks when she dropped them in the hall, even though you were late for lunch. That was thoughtful.” He stuck it on the front of his pencil box, and it’s still there, edges curled from being opened and closed a hundred times a day. Last week his mom emailed me to say he came home talking about that sticky, and she started trying the same thing. The other morning, instead of yelling at him for leaving his gym socks on the couch, she paused and said “I saw you took the trash out last night without me asking. That was a big help.” She said he just stared at her for a minute, like he couldn’t remember anyone ever saying something like that to him.
It’s not a magic fix. Javi still runs at recess. He still forgets his homework twice a week. My son still leaves his socks on my couch. I still forget to name the good more often than I remember. Last week I missed that Javi walked the new kindergarten kid all the way to the office when she got lost, and I only found out about it from the secretary two days later.
But it’s like learning any new language. You fumble the words at first, you forget what you meant to say, you feel silly sometimes. But over time, it starts to change how you see the world. I don’t scan my classroom for problems first anymore. I notice the small things: the kid who straightens up the reading nook when no one’s looking, the one who shares their snack with the kid who forgot theirs. All that goodness was there the whole time. I just never learned how to say its name.
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