Conversation I had with my seven-year-old yesterday:

… five minutes of conversation about why we don’t push our sister or call her a poo poo head….

Me: jaelyn, do you think the world is fair?

Jaelyn: um… yes?

Me: I’m sorry sweetheart. The world is not fair. I wish I could make it fair. I wish I could tell you the good things always happen to good people and bad things only happen to mean people. But I can’t. 

Bad things are going to happen. Mean things. Sad things. And we can’t control whether they happen or not. The only thing we can control is how we act. We can control our words. We can control if we are kind. We can control how we treat other people, even if we can’t control whether they are nice to us.

The older you get, the bigger the bad things that might happen. It’s going to make you mad. And sad. And it’s not going to be fair. You are going to want to be mean right back. You were going to want to use all the mean words and try to hurt people. It’s your choice who you become. Whether you you’re kind, or whether you’re mean. But you are starting to make that choice now. If you practice doing kind things, you will be a kind person. If you practice doing not nice things, that’s what you are going to know how to do. 

You get to choose the person you are and what you want to be. Even if you can’t choose how the world treats you.