Warm Fuzzies and Cold Pricklies

I am a pre school teacher. One of the first lessons we teach is about warm fuzzies and cold pricklies, meaning the nice things we say and do verses the cold way we feel when the opposite happens.

To teach the lesson I give each child a cotton ball and have them touch it, feel it and rub it across their cheek. I tell them that this is how people feel when we say and do nice things for them. Then I give them a prickly pinecone or a prickly ball from the sweet gum tree, I ask them to feel and touch it. I ask if they like how it feels. This prickly, stickly, hard thing is like the mean things we say and do to others and how we feel when it happens to us.

The rest of the year when something not quite kind happens, all I have to do is ask if the action is a warm fuzzy or cold prickly and the child I am talking to will hang their head in thought and usually acknowledge the warm or cold of their words and actions.

Sometimes we all need the reminder that cold prickly words and actions put a prickly stickly barrier up, while the opposite is true as well, warm kind words and actions knock down tall sturdy fences and build relationships. I have noticed that in tight situations there are two ways to go about it; choosing words carefully to be sure the situation ends in warm and fuzzy feelings or barreling along with everyone feeling cold and prickly in the end.

Sometimes all that is needed is a little thought and careful word choices to make the same situation turn out either warm and fuzzy or cold and prickly.

May we all be slow to speak and have a warm fuzzy day