There’s a line near the end of The Magic of Friendship that I didn’t think much about while I was writing it, but parents keep bringing it up when they message me. Oliver the owl looks around at his friends and says, “Kindness is like magic. When we help each other, it makes our hearts shine.”
That’s it. One sentence. But apparently it’s the one kids ask to hear again. A mom told me her son says it to his little sister now when she’s upset about something: “Remember, kindness is magic”; and honestly, that’s exactly what I was hoping would happen when I sat down to write this book. Not a lesson kids sit through. A phrase they pick up and just… keep.
Bedtime does something to a message.
I’ve spent a lot of years around kids, both as a nurse and now as a mom of four, and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed, it’s that bedtime is when kids actually let their guard down. The day is over, the noise has stopped, and they’re not performing for anyone anymore. Whatever gets said in those last few minutes before sleep tends to land differently than it would at 3 pm in the middle of a tantrum.
So a short line like this one works precisely because it’s short. You’re not lecturing a four-year-old about empathy at 8 pm. You’re giving them one warm little idea to drift off with. That’s really all it needs to be.
Where the line actually comes from
It’s worth saying: Oliver doesn’t just announce this out of nowhere. It comes after the whole group has spent the story figuring out, clumsily and honestly, how to include a new friend. Hazel is shy. She’s nervous about playing tag because her feet hurt when she runs too fast, so the others just… change the game. Take turns being the tagger. No big speech about it.
Then later her home gets flooded in a storm, and everyone shows up; Lulu with leaves for a bed, Daisy dragging twigs to fix the nest, Oliver flapping his wings to block the wind, Benny handing over his own blanket. By the time Oliver says his line about kindness being magic, the kids reading along have already seen four separate examples of what that actually looks like. The sentence isn’t the lesson. It’s just him naming something they already watched happen.
I think that’s why it sticks. Kids don’t need to be told kindness is good. They need to see it, and then hear someone put a name to it right after.
A few ways families have made it a habit
I didn’t design this as some structured activity, but a few parents have told me how they’ve folded it into their own bedtime routine, and I like these enough to pass along:
Some just have their child repeat the line back after the story ends; nothing fancy, just saying it out loud together. Others ask, before lights out, “did you see any kindness magic today?” which is a nicer way of getting a kid to reflect on their day than “how was school.” And I’ve heard from at least two families who now say “goodnight, remember kindness is magic” as their actual goodnight phrase instead of the usual sweet dreams. Small thing. But it changes what a kid is carrying into sleep.
Why simple works better than accurate, sometimes
I could tell my kids that kindness improves social bonding and long-term emotional wellbeing; I actually know the research behind that; it’s part of what drew me to write this in the first place. But none of that means anything to a five-year-old. What means something is “it’s like magic.” They can picture that. They can feel it.
That’s really the whole argument for writing children’s books instead of, I don’t know, parenting pamphlets. A good story does the translating for you.
It doesn’t mean the same thing at three as it does at seven.n
One thing I’ve noticed watching this play out with my own kids and with readers who write in: a toddler likes the sound of the sentence. By five or six, they start to actually understand it. And somewhere around the age where they notice a kid sitting alone at recess and go say hi anyway, the way Benny did with Hazel, that line tends to come back to them. Not because anyone reminded them of it. It just resurfaces.
That’s the part I didn’t fully anticipate when I was writing this; that a children’s book on kindness and friendship you read to a three-year-old might still be doing something for them at seven.
