Help Teach Your Kids To Be Bucket Fillers

Yesterday Number 6 came home from school with this book:

 

I had heard of (affiliate) How Full Is Your Bucket before, but I had never read it, and I had never read this, either.

Every night when I put Number 5, 6, and 7 to bed we read a book. Number 6 was excited to share this one.

The premise of this book, if you have never heard of bucketfillers before, is that we all walk around with an imaginary bucket. And our bucket gets filled a little bit every time someone does or says something nice to us, and it also gets filled every time we do or say something nice to someone else.

Just as you can fill someone’s bucket with kind words or deeds, you can empty someone’s bucket by being unkind. This is called bucket dipping.

So by the time you finish reading the book with your kids, you all know what the terms bucket filling and bucket dipping mean.

Critics of the book will say that it is missing the message that you don’t need other people to fill you bucket in order to be happy. That you have to learn to fill your own bucket.

But what we took away the most is not so much how a person is made to feel better or worse by someone else’s behavior, but by being more aware of your own words and actions and how they affect other people.

So this morning when we were in the middle of Duct Tape Drama, instead of saying stop being mean to your brother or sister, I was able to say, “Are you filling her bucket?”

And immediately the kids were able to think a little differently about how their words were affecting other people.

It didn’t necessarily stop the bucket dipping, but it did bring an awareness to my six, seven and eight-year-olds.

So I share this book with you because it has helped me to discuss kindness with the kids in a way that they understand, and it gives us some better vocabulary to discuss less than desirable behavior in the future.

Plus even though the book is for kids, the message isn’t lost on us adults, either.

I highly recommend it.

If your local library doesn’t have it, you can get it here on Amazon.