So. Much. Division. Let's talk about how to change that. Re-engage as neighbors, friends, co-workers and family. Let's set out to change the world. Strike that. Change A World. One person at a time, make someone's life a little better and then do it again tomorrow and the day after that, through kindness. Kindness is a Super-Power that each of us has within us. It is so powerful it has the potential to change not only your life but those around you, too. Let's talk about kindness.
The loudest room in a school can be the most honest one. We’re talking about the cafeteria, that daily moment when kids carry a tray into a crowded space and have to answer a deceptively hard question: where do I sit, and what does that choice say about me?
We map the “ecosystem” almost every lunchroom develops; the confident table with its hidden hierarchy, the quiet table adults tend to overlook, the newcomers taking a social test with no study guide, the floaters who may be flexible or just searching for a home base, and the students who sit alone by choice or because exclusion taught them not to try. Along the way, we share four small stories that prove kindness isn’t a poster on the wall; it’s survival, courage, and real community building.
Then we get practical with four tools you can use immediately at school, at work, or anywhere people cluster and sort themselves: the one-minute scan, the brave invite (“Hey, you can sit with us if you want”), the kindness exit when subtle bullying shows up, and a better after-school check-in that opens the door to your kid’s real social world. If you care about empathy, inclusion, anti-bullying, and helping kids build social confidence, this is a simple guide to doing the next kind thing on purpose.
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“Intro music: ‘Human First’ by Mike Baker – YouTube Music: https://youtu.be/wRXqkYVarGA | Podcast: Still Here, Still Trying | Website: www.mikebakerhq.com
This is the Kindness Matters Podcast, a space for stories that inspire, challenge, and bring us a little closer together. If you've been looking for a reminder of the good in people, you're in the right place. Because kindness matters, and so do you.
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It's kindness we are.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. I am very happy to be back with you once again. And speaking of being back, as you listen to this, most kids in America are either going back or already back at school, and that's why today we're going somewhere that might seem small at first, the school cafeteria. But I promise you, by the end of this episode, you are going to see it differently.
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Let's get into that.
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Think back, not to your first day of school or your graduation or some big milestone photo that your parents still have framed somewhere. Think back to lunch, to the tray in your hands, the noise bouncing off of the walls, and that split second, that walk from the lunch line into the room where you had to decide where do I sit? For a lot of us, that movement feels tiny in memory. But if we're honest, it wasn't tiny at all. It was one of the first times in our lives that we had to navigate a social world completely on our own. No teacher assigning seats, no parents standing next to us, just a tray? And a room full of people who'd already decided where they were who they were sitting with. The cafeteria is loud, it's chaotic, and it's honest. Maybe more honest than almost any other place in a school building, because in the cafeteria, there's no test to study for, no assignment to hide behind. It's just people choosing. And kids learn fast in that room. They learn who feels confident, who feels invisible, who's new and hasn't figured out the map yet, who feels different and is bracing for it. Kindness in that room isn't a poster on a wall or a lesson in a workbook. It's survival. It's courage. It's the earliest, rawest form of community building most of us ever experience. So today we're spending this whole episode in the lunchroom. We're going to walk through the social map of that space. We're going to hear about the tiny moments that quietly change everything. And we're going to talk about what adults tend to forget, and we're going to leave you with real tools for kids and for the grown-ups who love them. Because here's the thing I want you to sit with as we go. In a crowded, loud, unsupervised room, choosing to be kind is a brave act. Let's talk about why.
Every cafeteria, no matter what school, what city, what age group, has an ecosystem. If you close your eyes and picture it, I bet you can already see the layout. There's the confident table, loud, established, sure of itself. From the outside it looks like the group has it all figured out. And maybe some of them do, some of the time. But even at the confident table, there's often a quiet hierarchy. Who gets to speak first? Who's allowed to disagree? Who's one bad day away from feeling like they don't belong there anymore either? Confidence at thirteen is rarely as solid as it looks like from across the room. There's a quiet table. The kids who found each other who don't need to be loud to feel safe. This table gets overlooked a lot because it's not causing problems and it's not asking for attention. But quiet doesn't necessarily mean simple. These kids often carry deep friendships that adults barely notice, precisely because they don't perform them. They're the newcomers, new to the school, new to the grade, sometimes new to the country or the language. For them, lunch isn't just a meal, it's a test with no study guide. Where do I sit? Will anyone notice if I sit in the wrong place? Is there a wrong place? And then there are the floaters, the kids who move between groups, who don't have one fixed table. Sometimes that's a sign of social flexibility and a wide circle of friends. And sometimes it's the opposite. A kid who doesn't quite have a home base, who's performing belonging at three or four different tables, because they haven't found the one place they can just relax. And then there's the table that breaks a lot of adults' hearts when they really look at it. The kids who sit alone. Sometimes by choice, some kids genuinely recharge in solitude, and that's okay. But often it's not by choice at all. It's the result of exclusion, of not knowing how to insert themselves into a group. Maybe they tried once, got a cold shoulder, and decided it was safer not to try again. Here's the insight I want to leave you with from this segment. Every single one of these kids is carrying something anxiety about whether they're liked, excitement about a group they finally feel part of, fear of being judged for what's on their tray, what they're wearing, how they talk, a deep, quiet desire, the same one all of us have, just to belong somewhere. Every table has a story. Every story deserves kindness, not pity, not performance, not just kindness.
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The plain, unglamorous kind that says I see you. Now
let's get specific, because it's easy to talk about kindness in the abstract.
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But the truth is, kindness lives in tiny, unglamorous moments.
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Moments that usually don't get an audience, don't get applause, and often don't get noticed by the person doing them.
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I want to walk you through a few stories. Some of these stories are composites drawn from patterns we see over and over. If you've got a story of your own, by the way, send it in.
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We'd love to feature real listener stories in a future episode. Story one.
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A kid is sitting alone, head down, moving food around the tray more than eating it. Another student, not the most popular kid, not a teacher's pet, just an ordinary kid, walks over mid-lunch and says, Hey, you can sit with us if you want. No big speech, no announcement to the room, just an invitation, offered quietly enough that the kid alone doesn't feel spotlighted, but clearly enough that they know it's real. That's it. That's the whole story. But for the kid who was alone, that ten-second interaction might be the thing they remember twenty years later, as the moment they didn't give up on their new school.
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Story two.
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A group is doing that thing that groups do sometimes, subtly excluding somebody. Not screaming, not name-calling, just eye rolls when someone talks, turning slightly away. The small, deniable stuff that's hard to call out because if it did, someone would say, We're not doing anything. One student in the group notices it. It's happening to a classmate. And instead of going along with the group's quiet coldness, says, Hey, that's not cool. Or simply turns their body toward the person being excluded and includes them in the conversation. It's a small act, but it requires standing slightly apart from your own group's momentum. And that takes real courage. Story three. A teacher on lunch duty notices a pattern. There's a kid who always eats fast, way too fast, and then leaves early. Every single day. Most adults would walk past that a hundred times without a second thought. This teacher doesn't. One day, she sits down for two minutes and asks gently, hey, what's going on? You always seem to be racing out of here. That two-minute check-in uncovers something. Maybe it's anxiety about being at that table. Maybe it's something happening at home. Maybe it's something else entirely. The point isn't that the teacher solved it in that moment. The point is she noticed. And noticing is where every act of care begins. Story four. A group of friends realizes that their table, without meaning to, has become a closed circle. So they start something simple. A rotating seat. One spot at their table each week is open to someone new. No big announcement, no spotlight. Just a standing tradition. There's always room. Over time, that one seat becomes one of the most meaningful things at that table. Not because of who sits in it, but because what it says about the people who keep it open. Notice something about all four of these stories. None of them required a program. None of them required a permission slip or a hall pass or an adult standing over a kid saying, Now go be nice. Every single one of these moments happened because someone was paying attention.
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And then chose to act on what they noticed.
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That's the takeaway I want you to carry through the rest of this episode. Kindness doesn't need permission, it needs awareness, the invitation, the pushback against exclusion, the check-in, the open seat. None of it is complicated. It's available to basically anyone in basically any lunchroom on any given day.
Now I want to turn this towards the parents, the teachers, the coaches, the listeners who are grown and maybe haven't thought about a cafeteria in decades, because I think we adults we tend to forget something important about this space. We tend to treat lunch as a break, a pause between the real parts of the school day. I say real, the math class, the reading assignment, the science project. But for kids, lunch is not a pause. It might be one of the most socially demanding parts of their entire day. Kids aren't just eating in that room. They're negotiating identity. Who am I here? Who am I allowed to sit with? What does it mean if I sit somewhere different today than yesterday? These aren't small questions to a ten year old or a fourteen year old, or honestly, to a lot of adults either. We just have more practice hiding that we're still asking them. Social courage, the kind of courage it takes to walk up to a new table to speak up when something feels wrong, to sit with someone who's alone, even though it might cost you a little social capital. That courage is learned. And it's not learned in some big dramatic lesson. It's learned in tiny uncrated moments, day after day, tray after tray. I think adults, myself included, spend so much energy focused on grades, on schedules, on whether homework got turned in, that we can miss the fact that the lunchroom is quietly teaching kids some of the most important lessons of their lives empathy, boundaries, belonging. Nobody grades that. There's no report card category for chose to sit with the new kid, but it might matter more long term than half of the things we do put on report cards. This connects to something I think about a lot, really, which is that kindness isn't something we can just teach. Like a vocabulary list or that a kid memorizes for a quiz. It has to be modeled. Kids are watching what the adults around them do far more than they're listening to what adults say. If we want kids to notice the kids sitting alone, we have to be the kind of adults who notice too. Not just the kids, but each other, our neighbors, the people in our own lives who might be at a metaphorical lunch table by themselves. Kindness is a cultural skill. And culture isn't built in a single lesson. It's built one lunch period, one small choice, one modeled behavior at a time.
Okay, so we've talked about the lap map of the lunchroom.
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The lap of the lunch room. Uh the map of the lunchroom, the tiny moments that matter, and what we as adults tend to miss. Now let's get practical. I want to give you four tools. Simple enough that a kid can use them, useful enough that the adults listening can use them, and two, in the lunchroom of adult life, which basically is every room you walk into, right? Tool one the one minute scan. Before you sit down, or even after you've settled in, take one minute, genuinely 60 seconds, and look around the room. Is there someone who looks like they could use a smile? An open seat? A simple hello? You're not committing to anything huge, you're just training your eyes to notice.
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That's one step. Always noticing.
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Tool two The Brave Invite. This is the line, and it's almost embarrassingly simple. Hey, you can sit with us if you want. That's the whole tool. It doesn't require charisma. It doesn't require being popular. It requires being willing to say eight words out loud to someone who might say no, might say yes. And either way, they will remember that you asked. Tool three. The kindness exit. This one takes a little more courage. If you're at a table and you see exclusion happening, someone being frozen out, mocked quietly, left off of invitations, the kindness exit means you get up, you go sit with a person who's alone, you're not staging a walkout, you're not making a scene, you're simply choosing with your body and your time to be where the kindness is needed.
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It costs something. That's what makes it brave. Tool four. The check-in.
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This one's for the grown-ups. After school, instead of just asking, how was your day? Which usually gets you a one-word answer, right? If we're being honest, try asking, Who'd you sit with today? And how did it feel? It's specific enough that your kid can't shrug it off with fine. It opens a door into the actual social world they're navigating. The one we talked about all episode. And it tells them, without you having to say it directly, that you think this part of their day matters too. I want you to think about these four tools, less like rules and more like reps at a gym. Nobody walks in and lifts the heaviest weight on day one. You build the muscle with small, repeated reps. The one-minute scan, the brave invite, the kindness exit, and the check-in. These are emotional muscles. Small, repeatable, low stakes on any single day.
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But over months and years, they build something that looks like lifelong courage.
That walk from the lunch line into the room, tray in hand, deciding where to sit. Here's what I hope I take you take with you. The lunchroom teaches us that kindness isn't about being perfect. It's not about some grand gesture. It's not about it's not reserved for the naturally outgoing or the naturally confident or the kid who's always known exactly what to say. Kindness, in its truest and most everyday form, is about being aware. It's about choosing to see people, and I mean really see them, the way that the student saw the kid eating alone, the way the teacher saw the pattern of a child leaving quietly, early, the way that group made room at their table without making it a spectacle. And I think if we're honest, every single one of us, kid or adult, popular or quiet, confident or scared, has felt alone at a table at some point in our lives. Maybe it was literal, maybe it was a lunchroom, or a new job, or a party where we didn't know anyone. Maybe it was just a season of life where it felt like everyone else had somewhere to sit with and we didn't. And if you've ever felt that, you already know. The world changes quietly but completely the moment someone decides to sit beside you. That's the whole idea behind this episode. And honestly, behind a lot of what we talk about here on this show, kindness isn't a lesson you learn once. It's a table you choose to sit at over and over every single day for the rest of your life. So here's my challenge for you this week. Kid, parent, teacher, whoever's listening, do the one-minute scan. Somewhere. A lunch room, a break room, a waiting room. Notice who might be sitting alone. And if you can, choose the seat beside them. Thanks for spending some time with me today. If this episode meant something to you, share it please with someone, a teacher, a parent, a kid who might need to hear it. And if you've got your own lunchroom story, a moment where someone can choose kindness or a moment where you had wish somebody had, send it our way. We'd love to feature it. Until next time, remember every table has a story. Go find out whose story you can be part of today. This
episode is made possible by the generous support of people like Stu Jackson, Dave Lewis, and John Teblett. I appreciate you so much for tuning in to this episode of the Kindness Matters podcast. If you found value in this episode, it would mean the world to you to share that with a friend or a family member or a co-worker. Or take a minute to leave a comment or review one of the best ways to help others discover this show. If you'd like to support the show, like two content, we have both here and one time support options available on Five Minutes Coffee.
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