The situation was this: at the end of the school day, my babysitter was in a conversation with another adult that felt like it was taking forever, so I rolled my eyes behind her back. Although the babysitter did not see it, another adult saw me roll my eyes and told my parents about it. My parents made me write an apology letter to my babysitter. At the time, I felt both humiliated and infuriated because the babysitter had not even seen the eye roll, so now I was having to tell her about my bad action towards her; also, I didn't feel like it was that big of a deal, and now there was a whole group of people involved in resolving the situation. But I wrote the letter, my babysitter received it graciously, and we moved past it.
Here are the lessons I am grateful that I learned from that situation (which I don't always execute perfectly, but which are good ideals to strive towards):
1) You should treat people with kindness, patience, and respect, even when no one is watching, because this is the right way to conduct yourself in the world, because this will build the right kind of heart attitudes, and because this is what it means to be a person of integrity.
2) You should treat people with kindness, patience, and respect because you never know who is watching. A small little throwaway word or action might have ripple effects into relationships and your reputation that you never know about.
3) It's annoying when people call you out for acting badly, but this is often at least *partly* because you know that you shouldn't have done the thing and now you are being held accountable and needing to acknowledge that you were wrong. So when you're annoyed because someone is saying something hard to you, it's good to start with introspection about whether any of the annoyance is because they're right.
I'm grateful to all of the adults involved for planting the seeds of these important life lessons at a young age.
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