Growing Kindness — How Curiosity About the World Shapes Empathy

 Every parent hopes their child grows up kind. Open to new people, new ideas, new ways of seeing things that aren't their own.

I think about this a lot, because it's really the whole reason Colour the World exists. I've travelled to 57 countries across five continents. I've lived in a tent for eight years. I've eaten meals I couldn't name, slept in homes that looked nothing like mine, and been shown kindness by complete strangers more times than I could ever count. And if there's one thing that's stayed with me through all of it, it's this: the more you see of the world, the harder it becomes to fear the people in it.

Children are born curious. Given half a chance, they light up at anything different — a new word, a strange food, a flag they don't recognise, an animal they've never heard of. Left alone, that curiosity is a wonderful thing to watch. But I think if you nurture it, actively feed it, it grows into something much bigger than just interest. It grows into empathy. Into kindness. Into the genuine ability to imagine what someone else's life might feel like, even when it looks nothing like your own.

The tricky part is that curiosity needs a bit of help these days. Left to its own devices, a child's world can become quite small — the same streets, the same faces, the same routines, often filtered through a screen showing them people who look and live exactly like they do. None of that is anyone's fault. It's just modern life. But it does mean that if we want children to grow up genuinely open-minded, it usually needs a little intention behind it.

What travel taught me about assumption

I remember arriving in India for the first time and realising, almost immediately, how many small assumptions I'd been carrying around without ever noticing them. I assumed things would feel roughly familiar, just with different scenery. They didn't. Everything was different — the noise, the pace, the food, the way people greeted each other, the way time seemed to work differently entirely.

It was uncomfortable at first, if I'm honest. And then, somewhere in those six months, something shifted. The discomfort turned into fascination. The differences stopped being things to get through and started being the entire point. I think that's the real gift of genuine curiosity — it doesn't just teach you about somewhere else, it teaches you how much of what you thought was "normal" was really just familiar.

Children are capable of that same shift, just usually on a much smaller scale, and much faster than adults. A child who spends twenty minutes genuinely curious about a country they'll probably never visit is doing the exact same mental work I did on that train in India. They're just doing it over a book at the kitchen table instead of six months on the road.

You don't need a passport to start. You just need a bit of curiosity of your own, and a willingness to make space for theirs.

Try a Culture Corner at home

Pick a country — any country, it really doesn't matter which — and give it a little corner of your home for a week. A flag, a photo, maybe a fact or two, a single word in the local language written on a card. Let your child add to it as the week goes on. It doesn't need to be elaborate. It just needs to exist somewhere they'll walk past it and notice it, again and again, until it starts to feel familiar rather than foreign.

Keep an Explorer Journal

This doesn't need to be fancy, and it definitely doesn't need to be neat. A simple notebook where your child jots down or draws something that surprised them, something they learned, something they'd like to know more about. Ask them every so often — what do you think it would be like to actually live there? What would be the same as your life, and what would feel completely different? Let them guess. Let them get it wrong. The imagining is the whole point.

Ask better questions at the table

Sometimes it really is this simple. "What do you think children your age eat for breakfast in Japan?" "What do you think it would feel like to live somewhere with no snow?" "If you moved to Italy tomorrow, what's the first thing you'd miss?" Small, playful questions like these build the habit of imagining a different life — and that habit, repeated often enough, is really where empathy begins. Not in a lecture about kindness, but in a hundred small moments of genuinely wondering about someone else.

Let them be wrong sometimes

One thing I've learned from all my own travelling is that half the fun of discovering a new place is realising how wrong your assumptions were. Children are the same. Let them guess what a country might be like before they learn about it properly, and then let them be delighted or surprised when the reality is different. That gap between what they imagined and what's actually true is often where the real learning sticks.

It doesn't need to be a big production

I think sometimes we imagine that raising a genuinely curious, open-minded child requires elaborate trips abroad or expensive experiences, and honestly, it doesn't. Some of the most curious, wonder-filled children I've met on my travels were the ones with the least — living the simplest lives imaginable, and somehow more genuinely delighted by the world than almost anyone I'd met back home. Curiosity isn't really about what you can afford to show a child. It's about how often you ask them to wonder.

This is exactly what I try to build into every Colour the World activity book. A reason to notice. A reason to wonder. A reason to ask "what if, what's it like, why is it different." Puzzles, colouring pages, explorer challenges — they're the fun bit, the bit that gets a book off a shelf and into small hands. But underneath all of it, the hope is always the same: that a curious child slowly, quietly, grows into a kind adult.

Because a child who's genuinely interested in the world tends to grow up wanting to understand it, rather than fear it. They see a person from a different country and feel curiosity rather than suspicion. They see a different way of living and feel interest rather than judgement. And honestly, in a world that can feel increasingly divided, I don't think there's much that matters more than that.

Curious children become kind adults. 🌍💛