About a year ago, I came across a tweet on Twitter that moved me in the best possible way. It was beautiful. It was genuine. It was, dare I say, the best Twitter tweet in the history of all Twitter tweets ever tweeted on Twitter (nice tongue twister, huh?). The magical tweet that I’m speaking about came from Kid President and it read, “Treat everybody like it’s their birthday.”
Such wise words from such a young soul.
Before I go into detail about how great that tweet is, I wanted to take a second to tell you about Kid President, just in case you’ve never heard of him before. Kid President (real name Robby Novak, a school-aged kiddo) is an amazingly positive and creative child. Together with his adult-aged brother-in-law Brad Montague, Robby and Brad started KidPresident.com in 2012 when Robby was only 8 years old. Their website features a humongous collection of motivational videos that show Robby as Kid President. In each video, Robby, usually decked out in a snazzy suit and tie, confidently jumps in front of the video camera to insightfully chat about life and what it all means to him (THIS is an example of what you can come to expect from Kid President).
Love. Nothing but love.
If I could pick one word to sum up each and every Kid President tweet or video I’ve seen, it would be ‘love.’ Robby loves life, and through his motivational Kid President messages, he reminds everyone that life is lovely and how everyone should be nice to one another. Since Kid President hit the Internet a few years back, I’ve been a huge fan.
“Treat everybody like it’s their birthday.”
One of the biggest (and best) changes that I’ve noticed over the last decade in K-12 education is the obvious school-wide emphasis on bullying prevention that often exists across American school districts. When I was a school-aged student in the 90s, bullying wasn’t really discussed too much because I think that back then bullying was just considered another childhood rite of passage. But in my opinion, it’s not a rite of passage and it shouldn’t be tolerated. So in an effort to do my part with setting the stage for a safe and respectful learning environment, I’ve shared that Kid President tweet with a number of my middle school-aged students and it’s a joy to hear them attempt to describe what “Treat everybody like it’s their birthday” means to them and why they believe it to be a spectacular way to live.
Unwritten goals and objectives.
I’ve said this before but with each child I work with, there’s a list of unwritten goals and objectives that I want him/her to be able to achieve that aren’t written in his/her individualized education program or treatment plan. Unwritten goals and objectives are the kind and caring lessons that live inside of my mind that I want all of my students to learn. These unwritten goals and objectives emphasize the importance of being a kind and caring person. I feel that unwritten goals and objectives are arguably some of the most important things that we could work on with our students while increasing their articulation and/or language abilities.
Sharing some Kid President tweets and videos with YOUR students.
If you’re also committed to consistently injecting kind and caring thoughts and ideas into each of your speech therapy sessions, I recommend you explore the tweets and videos by Kid President.
Here are a few Kid President tweets YOU could share with your kiddos:
- Give people high-fives just for getting out of bed. Being a person is hard sometimes.
- Love changes everything! Fill the world with it.
- Tomorrow can be better.
- Please don’t hide your awesome this week. The world needs you.
- Human beings are capable of war and sadness and all sorts of terrible stuff, but also cupcakes.
And here are a few Kid President videos YOU could share with your kiddos:
- What Kids Really Want From Vacation (Length – 2:58)
- Dear Graduates (Length – 4:12)
- A Letter to the Future From Kid President (Length – 3:17)
- Kid President’s Pep Talk to Teachers and Students! (Length – 3:54)
- An Open Letter To Moms from Kid President (Length – 3:36)
So much can come from talking about Kid President tweets and videos.
Use the messages by Kid President to get the kind and caring conversations going. Limit the amount of talking you do and encourage your students to do the talking. If you’re providing speech therapy services to a small group, encourage the children to talk with one another about the given video or tweet. Did they like what they saw? Why or why not? How did it make them feel? So on and so forth.
In closing . . .
There’s a lot that we can learn from Kid President. And notice how I said WE? Sure, the children we work with could learn a lot, but us ADULTS could learn JUST AS MUCH. After reading that Kid President birthday tweet in 2015, I immediately adopted it as my mantra. “Treat everybody like it’s their birthday” is a sentence that I haven’t been able to erase from my brain and I’m not complaining. It taught me to be a bit more kind and a bit more caring, for sure. So, do me a favor – check out all that Kid President has to offer to see if you might be able to discover a mantra that you think works for you. One that helps you to grow as a human being. Because remember, all of us, we’re all works in progress and there’s always room for growth. Always!
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