‘One Good Thing’: THIS is what middle schoolers are like

Give yourself a gift this holiday season and watch this 3 min. video. You might find you want to share it with your children or students. Not because it represents who they should be or what they should do but because it represents who they (and all of us) really are.

This is the kind of goodness that’s happening all the time, all over the world – especially among the youngest generation, I’m convinced as a long-time journalist – though unfortunately it rarely turns up in the news. So this is the kind of goodness we’re teasing out with “One Good Thing” as part of Safer Internet Day US 2014 (February 11). Over the next two months, we’re collecting the evidence – short cellphone videos or text messages capturing the myriad of things big and small, individual and collective, young people are doing to make the Internet a better place and the world a better place with the help of the Internet.

So this month or next – the sooner the better – encourage children you know and love to go to SaferInternetDay.us/one-good-thing and share their One Good Thing. Good is going viral.

Related links

• Listen to the part about bullying in a public conversation between authors and activists Polly Higgins and Charles Eisenstein last month in Oslo, Norway (both of them were bullied as children, she in a UK school where bullying and violence were the everyday norm, she said). Starting at about 35:35 with his description of Kalle Lasn’s loving care of the 95-year-old mother of his deceased ex-wife, Eisenstein basically describes what the boys in the video I mentioned above were doing for a friend and themselves (which one of the boys explains eloquently, movingly, himself at the end of the news report). Kindness could be considered the ultimate disruptor that shifts the conversation and sets things on a better course. Also in that video, in the 5 min. between 1:23:43 and 1:28:38, Eisenstein talks about how a courageous activist is changing the story in (and changing) his rough neighborhood and beyond.
• For more on shifting the focus and helping our children out of painful situations, see our Parents’ Guide to (dealing with) Cyberbullying at ConnectSafely.org.