Forgiveness Education in Fourth- through Eighth-Grade Classrooms: Development and Evaluation of a New Forgiveness Curriculum

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the efficacy of a new middle-school-classroom forgiveness curriculum in promoting forgiveness and reducing anger. The students in this study were 153 fourth through eighth graders in three regional parochial schools. The students were assigned to forgiveness education or control groups in the fall semester and reassigned to the opposite group in the spring semester. Before-and-after assessments of forgiveness and anger were collected in both the fall and spring semesters. The quantitative results showed that levels of forgiveness increased as expected in both semesters, but anger did not change in expected ways. The qualitative results showed that the children’s conceptualizations of the forgiveness process aligned closely with the core forgiveness curriculum content. The results suggest that meaningful work can be accomplished to promote forgiveness in the middle school classroom using this newly developed, efficient, and effective curriculum that can be implemented by teachers and staff.

1. Introduction

School shootings, bullying, and mental health issues in schools have increased in recent decades, and interventions focused on building healthy relationships, psychological wellness, and preventing and recovering from violence are needed [1,2,3]. Teaching coping skills such as forgiveness in schools provides an opportunity to address the psychosocial and emotional consequences of aggression and violence that further harm students, families, and their communities [4]. Forgiveness education also commonly includes corollary learning in important socio-emotional areas such as the development of empathy skills, including developing perspective taking and emotional empathy [5,6]. The development of compassion, hope, and gratitude are also commonly taught within forgiveness curricula [5,6,7]. In recent years, schools have devoted more attention to including virtue education into socio-emotional skill development [8,9,10], and forgiveness is often considered an important virtue [11,12]. The present study examined a new method of teaching forgiveness to school children. The emphasis in developing this new method of teaching children forgiveness was on the development of lessons that would be brief, focused, and easy to implement in the classroom by minimally trained forgiveness teachers.

Forgiveness is commonly thought to involve reducing negative and increasing positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors directed toward an offender following a transgression [11,13,14]. In short, forgiveness is giving up will and developing good-will for an offender as expressed in thoughts, feelings, behaviors, motivations, etc. [15]. Forgiveness should not be, though it often is, confused for excusing, condoning, denying, or minimizing a hurtful act. Forgiveness is not reconciliation (i.e., relationship repair) or the pursuit of justice. According to the Aristotelean perspective discussed by Kim and Enright [15], although a number of circumstantial, cultural, or religious factors may impact forgiveness, in its essence, it remains, in our view, the reduction of ill-will and promotion of good-will for an offender expressed in thought, behavior, and emotion. For adults, the beneficial effects of forgiveness interventions for enhanced forgiveness, reduced anger, and overall health and well-being are well documented [13,16]. A recent meta-analysis revealed that forgiveness education for children provides similar benefits for forgiveness and empathy enhancement and anger reduction [17].

Rapp et al.’s [17] review reveals a growing body of literature on forgiveness education for children. In this meta-analysis, 20 studies were identified for inclusion. Of these, 18 used the Enright’s Process Model of Forgiveness or a variant of it. An important adjustment to the Process Model is the inclusion of the story-based approach [15]. This adjustment relies on the inclusion of several different children’s books that make the concepts and principles of the Process Model both accessible and understandable to young children in entertaining and memorable stories. Clearly, children’s education on the topic of forgiveness must take difficult concepts such as altruism, empathy, and justice and make them comprehensible to young children. Additionally, Rapp et al.’s [17] work identified two studies that used a version of the REACH Forgiveness model.

Rapp et al.’s [17] review also reveals that several attempts to educate children on forgiveness have been made in children in grades one through eleven, and attempts have been made to examine the effectiveness of the Process Model in children in various challenging life circumstances (e.g., inner city and high prevalence of conflict and violence) and in different cultures (e.g., Greece, Hong Kong, Iran, Israel, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey). Of the 20 studies that have been conducted on forgiveness education in children, eight have been conducted in fifth- and sixth-grade students; five studies have been conducted in seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade students; and two studies each have been conducted in first, third, and eleventh grade. Children’s forgiveness education has been quite variable in how time-intensive it has been. Some studies required as little as three sessions while others required over thirty, with individual sessions ranging from 45 to 120 min. In about half of these studies, sessions were led by teachers. In the other half of the studies, sessions were led by researchers. The majority of the studies included samples of at-risk children, with only six being implemented with typical school children. Overall, these attempts have been successful in producing positive changes in forgiveness, anger, and empathy [17]. The results of this meta-analysis highlighted the need for more intervention forgiveness studies to produce more generalizable results.

Forgiveness education research has also been conducted with children who have experienced relatively minor hurt or offenses. However, some studies have been designed for school children who were identified as having high levels of anger, a significant and deep interpersonal hurt, risk of academic failure, or exposure to adverse conditions such as violent or low-income neighborhoods (e.g., [17,18,19,20,21]). Anger at bullying, harassment, and other interpersonal conflicts is common in school-aged children in the United States and globally [22], and childhood anger management interventions are plentiful [23,24]. A similar array of forgiveness education options and curricula that are easily accessed, adopted, and implemented for the promotion of positive psychological states such as forgiveness are simply not available. The present study seeks to provide support for one such forgiveness education curriculum.

2. Present Study

Enright’s Process Model of Forgiveness (including the story-based approach) is a sound choice for teaching children forgiveness with 18 studies supporting its effectiveness. The REACH Forgiveness model has also been examined, but only two studies have been conducted. The development of multiple methods for children’s forgiveness education would provide opportunities for comparative effectiveness studies. A form of client–treatment matching could also be conducted where schools, teachers, and students could select curricula that are bested suited to their needs. Opportunities to explore other questions of interest, such as combined intervention effects, would also be possible. New children’s forgiveness curricula might also develop strategies that minimize time and teacher training needed—resources most schools today do not have. The purpose of the present study was to examine the efficacy of a new children’s forgiveness education program that was designed to be brief, focused, and easy to implement in the classroom by minimally trained, forgiveness teachers (in the present case, trained undergraduate students). This work specifically contributes to the development of forgiveness programs that can be implemented in the typical community school setting. Our specific aim is to promote the experience of forgiveness and reduce the experience of anger in children who have experienced a perceived wrongdoing. Ultimately, we hope that learning these socio-emotional skills early in life may pay dividends throughout life and contribute to a more forgiving and flourishing society [25]. Healthy People 2030 and the National Association for Mental Illness (NAMI) emphasize the importance of providing children and adolescents preventive mental health care in school [26,27]. Healthy People 2030 calls specifically for efforts working toward the goal of reducing school violence and improving academic success in adolescents. Forgiveness education can be part of these broader initiatives and promote well-being and success in children and adolescents, and this can be accomplished using newly developed methods that can fit into the small windows of available time in the classroom and can be delivered by minimally trained forgiveness teachers.

Students were randomized by classroom to forgiveness education or control groups for the fall semester, with 86 students in the forgiveness education condition and 67 students in the control group (general health curriculum). After the holiday break, all the students were then reassigned to the opposite condition for the spring semester. Quantitative and qualitative pre- and post-education assessments were completed for both semesters. It was hypothesized that, in the fall semester, the forgiveness and control groups would not differ on quantitative forgiveness or anger measures before education but would differ following education, with participants experiencing forgiveness education showing higher forgiveness and lower anger. Quantitative levels of forgiveness and anger for the fall forgiveness group were expected to be maintained from the end of the fall semester through the end of the spring semester. It was hypothesized that in spring semester the fall control group reassigned to the spring forgiveness group and fall forgiveness group reassigned to the spring control group would differ on quantitative forgiveness and anger measures before education (due to the maintenance of the fall forgiveness group effects). It was further expected that the fall control group reassigned to the spring forgiveness group would close this gap following education in the spring semester and show similar quantitative levels of forgiveness and anger compared to the fall forgiveness group reassigned to the spring control group.

A qualitative analysis allowed for an investigation of what children understood the forgiveness curriculum process to be after completing it. Because the present curriculum was guided by previous forgiveness research with children, it was expected that their qualitative narratives would consist of content related to the curricular themes of defining forgiveness, identifying emotions, empathy, empowering the offended, deciding to forgive, stress management, and committing to forgiveness.

3. Method

3.1. Participants

Our sample consisted of 153 students enrolled in 4th through 8th grades (ages 9–14). There were 75 females (49.1%) and 78 males (50.9%). The distribution across grades in our sample was as follows: 28 fourth graders (18.3%), 41 fifth graders (26.8%), 27 sixth graders (17.6%), 31 seventh graders (20.3%), and 26 eighth graders (17%). Because classroom sizes ranged from only six to fourteen students, multiple grades were included in this study to increase the sample size. Three parochial schools participated, with the distribution across the three schools as follows: 61 (39.9%) students from the first school (11, 15, 10, 11, and 14 in 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grades, respectively), 52 (34%) from the second school (9, 12, 11, 14, and 6 in 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grades, respectively), and 40 (26.1%) from the third school (8, 14, 6, 6, and 6 in 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grades, respectively). Fifteen classrooms received forgiveness education in the fall semester and ten classrooms received forgiveness education in the spring semester. Each classroom served as its own control in the opposite semester. Schools were located in the rural, upper Midwest within 15 miles of each other. Students in grades four through eight participated from each school.

Consent was received from each school’s principal a year prior to the beginning of this study. A month prior to the start of this study, both teachers and parents received consent forms. Finally, student assent was received twice. The first-time teachers read aloud the assent form to the students prior to the arrival and introduction of the researchers at the school. The second time, on the first data collection day, research team members reread the assent to the students prior to administering the pre-test. At all levels (principal, teachers, parents, and students) and at all time points, consent and assent granted permission for forgiveness education and data collection. One parent declined consent, and instead of excluding a single child, the child’s classroom was not involved in the intervention or our analysis.

3.2. Curriculum

The curriculum consisted of seven lessons averaging around 15 min in length. Total forgiveness instruction time was approximately one hour and forty-five minutes. Each lesson consisted of four grade-appropriate lesson plans: K-2, 3–4, 5–6, and 7–8. Although lessons were developed for and delivered to children in grades K-3, the measures used in this study were valid only in grades 4–8. Consequently, data were collected and analyzed from only these grades. The curriculum was developed by the research team. Doctoral-level team leaders and teachers at the schools reviewed and approved the curriculum that was implemented. The theoretical foundation for the lesson topics was derived from well-established forgiveness interventions originally developed for adults [6,7] and adapted for children [28,29,30]. The concepts from Luskin [7] included being able to identify how a situation made you feel, the idea that forgiveness is for you and no one else, that forgiveness does not mean you are condoning the transgression, the use of stress management techniques, and the idea that your current hurt is the result of the negative emotions you continue to hold on to. The concepts from Worthington [6] that were incorporated included empathizing with the offender, commitment to forgiving that person, and holding on to your decision to forgive. The curriculum’s lesson topics included the following: (1) what forgiveness is and isn’t, (2) identifying emotions, (3) empathy, (4) forgiveness is for you, (5) deciding to forgive, (6) stress management, and (7) holding on to forgiveness. Classrooms were visited once a week for nine weeks, with quantitative and qualitative data collection (with no education) occurring on the first and last visits.

The curriculum content was delivered by pairs of undergraduate nursing students who were trained by study coordinators and enrolled in a public health clinical practicum focused on community education approaches. Study coordinators conducted a one-hour training (including video, in-person instruction, and practice instructional activities) regarding forgiveness theory and instructional components at the start of each semester for the nursing students, with weekly training throughout each semester in preparation and review of each lesson plan. The undergraduate nursing students were assigned to classrooms and visited the same classrooms each week to build and maintain rapport. Additionally, to build rapport, the first visit to each classroom was an introductory “get to know you” day with the pre-test at the completion of that time. Classroom teachers remained in the classroom during all forgiveness education lessons. Validity of implementation was ensured through classroom visits from the study coordinators on a regular basis throughout each semester. All measurements were administered by the research team members to the students in the same classroom where the lessons were conducted. Scripted instructions were read aloud prior to the assessment.

The lesson plans included instructional time and hands-on activities, such as role playing, reflection and sharing, white board activities, or matching games that applied the lesson in age-appropriate levels. For example, in the empathy lesson, the younger grades of 4th and 5th grade were provided a story with two individuals and their perspectives to explore the importance of viewing the transgression from both viewpoints. The older grades were asked to develop their own stories and explore the feelings involved in empathy more deeply through reflections of “I saw, I felt, I need, I request”, considering this from both perspectives of the individuals involved in the transgression. Lessons are briefly described below, and

Table 1. Topics, descriptions, and examples of lessons included in curriculum.

Lesson Plan Topics	Lesson Plan Description	Activity Examples
What forgiveness is and isn’t	Introduce topic of forgiveness Assess student previous knowledge Define and contrast with other constructs, such as condoning, excusing, reconciliation	Description cards, matching (4–6th grade) Examples of construct comparisons (7–8th grade)
Identifying emotions	Identify and label emotions Feelings as natural human reactions to transgression	Discussion focused on who to talk to if the child needed help dealing with emotions
Empathy	How to empathize with someone else, especially who has wronged them View the situation from offender’s point of view and feel what he/she is feeling Distinction between empathizing with the offender versus excusing the offense	Age-appropriate stories of transgression; worksheets to identify feelings and response
Forgiveness is for you	Show students the impact that forgiving can have on a person Choosing to forgive is a choice to let go of negative emotions and instead forgive the offender and move on in life	Filling and removing bag with rocks to demonstrate weight of forgiveness (4–6th grade) Video/story with reflection (7–8th grade)
Deciding to forgive	Process of actively making a decision and commitment to forgive Forgiveness is a process that requires continual commitment	Situation cards, age-appropriate, that the classroom uses to discuss forgiveness
Stress management	Learning ways to relieve feelings of stress	Practice mindful breathing exercises
Holding on to forgiveness/wrap up	Summary of lessons Students commit and recognize they control their life and forgiveness Emphasize the courage it takes to empathize with offender Holding onto forgiveness helps manage negative thoughts and feelings in the present and future	Comic book stories, age-appropriate

contains the topics, lesson plan descriptions, and activities. Although our weekly lessons were focused, well-rehearsed, and limited to 15 min, additional learning and engagement could be gained by spending more time on each lesson.

3.3. What Forgiveness Is and Isn’t

This lesson served the purpose of introducing the topic of forgiveness to the students and getting an idea of their previous knowledge on the topic. Forgiveness was defined and contrasted with several other constructs, for example, condoning, excusing, and reconciliation.

3.4. Identifying Emotions

This lesson focused on being able to identify and label emotions. The students were to acknowledge these feelings as natural human reactions to the transgression that occurred. Additionally, there was discussion on when and who to talk to if the child needed help dealing with their emotions.

3.5. Empathy

This lesson introduced students to what it means to empathize with someone else, specifically someone who has wronged them. The emphasis in this lesson was placed on trying to view the situation from the offender’s point of view and attempting to feel what he/she was feeling. The distinction was made between empathizing with the offender versus excusing the wrong they had done.

3.6. Forgiveness Is for You

This lesson was designed to show the students the impact that forgiving could have on them. The main point was that choosing to forgive is a choice to let go of the negative feelings, thoughts, intentions, and behaviors and instead forgive the offender (i.e., build positive feelings, thoughts, intentions, and behaviors) and move on with life.

3.7. Deciding to Forgive

This lesson focused on the process of actively making a decision and commitment to forgive. This section emphasized that forgiveness is a process that requires continued commitment on the part of the person doing the forgiving.

3.8. Stress Management

This lesson aimed to help students identify signs that they may be experiencing stress in addition to learning new ways to relieve those feelings of stress. In this lesson, the students practiced mindful breathing exercises to help calm them down and have them be in touch with their bodies and the present moment. The students were encouraged to use these stress management tools to help reduce negative and promote positive feelings, thoughts, intentions, and behaviors. The stress response, according to Luskin’s [7] model, is a significant obstacle to the development of forgiveness. Teaching stress relaxation is a key part of the forgiveness process.

3.9. Holding on to Forgiveness

This lesson was designed to combine all of the previously learned topics regarding forgiveness. The students were reminded that they are in control of their life and forgiveness. The point was made that it takes courage to empathize and decide to forgive an offender but holding on to forgiveness helps manage negative and promote positive thoughts, feelings, intentions, and behaviors in the present and future.

3.10. Control Curriculum

The students assigned to the control group received seven lessons averaging 15 min in length throughout the semester. The lessons included general health topics such as dental hygiene, sleep and electronics, first aid, healthy food choices, and winter safety. These topics were meant to support student health but not focus on mental health categories that may interact or supplement forgiveness material.

4. Measures

4.1. Forgiveness

The Enright Forgiveness Inventory for Children (EFI-C), designed for children ages six to twelve, was used to assess levels of forgiveness [31]. The EFI-C is a 36-item assessment that includes an initial prompt asking the child to reflect on and describe a hurtful time. The EFI-C contains three sub-scales that measure forgiving affect, forgiving behavior, and forgiving cognition. The items were responded to by indicating one’s level of agreement on a scale of Yes!, A little bit yes, A little bit no, and No!. Responses were coded so that higher scores on a scale indicate higher levels of forgiveness. The EFI-C has shown acceptable reliability and validity [31] in previous psychometric work. In the present study, the EFI-C total (αs ≥ 0.95), affect (αs ≥ 0.91), behavior (αs ≥ 0.84), and cognition (αs ≥ 0.92) scores showed acceptable internal consistency.

4.2. Anger

The State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-Children and Adolescents (STAXI-CA), designed for children ages seven to seventeen, was used to assess anger [32]. Gambaro et al. [20] have shown the STAXI-CA to be a reliable and valid measure of children’s anger. Two sub-scales of the STAXI-CA were used in our assessment: state anger and anger control. The state anger sub-scale consisted of 10 statements that the students rated on a scale of 1 (not at all), 2 (somewhat), and 3 (very much). Example items include “I feel like breaking things”, “I feel angry”, and “I feel like having a fit”. The internal consistency for the state anger sub-scale was acceptable (αs ≥ 0.87). The anger control sub-scale consisted of six statements that the students rated the frequency of which they engage in angry reactions on a scale of 1 (hardly ever), 2 (sometimes), and 3 (often). Examples items include “I try to relax”, “I do something to calm down”, and “I reduce my anger as soon as possible”. The internal consistency for the anger control sub-scale was acceptable (αs ≥ 0.83).

4.3. Qualitative Analysis Question

The final question on the EFI-C asked the children, “Please make up a story about one person forgiving someone else”. The students wrote their own words and stories in response to this open prompt.

4.4. Design and Procedure

We capitalized on existing relationships between public health nursing and regional parochial schools to develop and implement this study. Longstanding relationships between these two professional entities offered trust and cooperation. Undergraduate public health nursing students had been delivering socio-emotional, health, mental health, and wellness promotion curricula for several years preceding the launch of the present study. These relationships offered immediate rapport with teachers and students, both of whom expected weekly visits during each semester and to be provided with important, age-appropriate lessons. Although the visits were regular parts of the school calendar, the amount time in the classrooms was strictly limited. As such, the curriculum was specifically designed to be maximally effective in a very short amount of time. Teachers were welcomed to observe the lessons, and most did, but teachers did not participate in delivering the lessons and provided no further instruction once the forgiveness teachers left the classroom. The classrooms were randomized to forgiveness education or control groups for the fall semester with 86 students in the forgiveness education condition and 67 students in the control group (general health curriculum). There was an unequal number of classrooms, and the classrooms were not of equal size. The classrooms were reassigned to the opposite condition for the spring semester. Pre- and post-education assessments (quantitative and qualitative) were completed in both semesters.

4.5. Analyses

The data for the fall and spring semesters were analyzed separately. t-tests were used to examine forgiveness and control group differences on forgiveness and anger before and after forgiveness education and to evaluate before–after changes in forgiveness and anger resulting from forgiveness education. Analyses accounted for nesting of students in schools and classrooms using linear mixed models and also controlled effects of sex assigned at birth. Statistical significance was set at p < 0.05. The qualitative analysis involved an inductive narrative analysis of the responses to the final question on the EFI-C which asked the children, “Please make up a story about one person forgiving someone else”. The primary investigator and a research assistant each coded independently, conferred on the coding and coding scheme, and then coded each child’s response on consensus (the children’s actual names are replaced with aliases in the reported results). The analysis related to the number of times phrases were coded with variations of forgiveness or the forgiveness process to help the research team understand the impact of the forgiveness intervention.

5. Results

5.1. Quantitative Results for Forgiveness and Anger

t-statistics, significance tests, mean differences, and Cohen’s d for comparisons of forgiveness education and control students on all outcomes are presented in

Table 2. Differences between forgiveness and control groups before and after forgiveness education in the fall and spring semesters.

	Group Differences before Fall Education				Group Differences after Fall Education				Group Differences before Spring Education				Group Differences after Spring Education
Outcome	t	p	MD	d	t	p	MD	d	t	p	MD	d	t	p	MD	d
Total Forgiveness	−0.05	0.96	−0.01	−0.01	−3.11	0.01	−0.36	−0.51	−2.39	0.02	−0.28	−0.39	−1.25	0.21	−0.16	−0.20
Forgiving Affect	0.80	0.43	0.11	0.13	−2.99	0.01	−0.42	−0.49	−1.11	0.27	−0.16	−0.18	−0.93	0.35	−0.14	−0.15
Forgiving Behavior	−0.81	0.42	−0.09	−0.13	−3.55	<0.001	−0.44	−0.58	−2.74	0.01	−0.33	−0.45	−0.99	0.32	−0.13	−0.16
Forgiving Cognition	−0.30	0.77	−0.04	−0.05	−1.91	0.06	−0.26	−0.31	−2.76	0.01	−0.37	−0.45	−1.42	0.16	−0.21	−0.23
State Anger	−1.00	0.32	−0.08	−0.16	−1.11	0.27	−0.09	−0.18	−2.12	0.04	−0.16	−0.35	−2.74	0.01	−0.24	−0.45
Anger Control	0.74	0.46	0.07	0.12	0.76	0.45	0.07	0.13	2.02	0.04	0.18	0.34	−0.84	0.40	−0.08	−0.14

. Means and 95% confidence intervals for forgiveness education and control students on all outcomes at all time points are presented in Figure 1 (forgiveness outcomes) and Figure 2 (anger outcomes). In the fall, prior to the forgiveness education, the students in the forgiveness and control groups did not differ on any of the forgiveness or anger scales (see Table 2 and Figure 1 and Figure 2). After the forgiveness education in the fall, the students in the forgiveness education group, as compared to the students in the control group, showed significantly higher levels on total forgiveness, forgiving affect, and forgiving behavior, and the difference approached significance on forgiving cognition (see Table 2 and Figure 1). No group differences were observed on the anger scales in the fall (see Table 2 and Figure 2).

In the spring, prior to the forgiveness education, the students who received forgiveness education in the fall, compared to the students in the fall control condition, continued to show significantly higher levels of total forgiveness, forgiving behavior, and forgiving cognition and also showed higher state anger and lower anger control (see Table 2 and Figure 1 and Figure 2). After the forgiveness education in the spring, students in the spring forgiveness education group (former fall control group), as compared to students in the spring control group (former fall forgiveness group), showed no differences on any forgiveness variables or anger control but showed significantly lower levels on state anger (see Table 2 and Figure 2).

Additional exploratory analyses were conducted to determine if grade or biological sex assigned at birth moderated the effects of the forgiveness education on forgiveness or anger outcomes. No statistically significant effects were identified for either moderator on any outcome (ps > 0.05).

5.2. Qualitative Results for Thoughts and Expressions of Forgiveness Curriculum Content

The qualitative analyses were focused on determining the extent to which the children’s conceptualization of forgiveness in the students in the forgiveness groups reflected the focal content of the intervention. Analyzing the children’s stories about forgiveness revealed consistent patterns reflecting their internalization of forgiveness curriculum content. The children identified the most salient aspects of the forgiveness process, and each of these themes are outlined in the subsequent section: (a) identifying the hurt, (b) identifying emotions, (c) empathy, (d) deciding to forgive, and (e) holding on to forgiveness. This section will elucidate how the children reflected each of these components overall, highlighting comparisons from before and after the forgiveness curriculum as appropriate. In both semesters, comparing before and after forgiveness education, the children in the forgiveness groups increased the number of times their stories contained content on identifying the hurt, empathy, and deciding to forgive. However, our focus in the qualitative analysis was not on examining pre–post change. Rather, our purpose was to examine how the children internalized and incorporated concepts they were taught in the forgiveness curriculum into their forgiveness narratives. For this, reason, our analyses focus on the children’s forgiveness stories post-intervention.

5.2.1. Identifying the Hurt

The children first identified a type of hurt, such as the following: (a) physical violence (204 times), (b) taking something (97 times), (c) verbal transgression (75 times) (making fun of someone or saying something mean-hearted), or (d) other types of transgressions such as budging in a line or not inviting friends to birthday parties (182 times). The children stated, “One day a bully said to another being ‘You stink!’ and they felt bad”, “One day Billy was walking in the park when he hit someone in the face but not on purpose because he was trying to get a bee off him”, or “One day this little boy was playing with a ball, and his name was Jim, another kid came and took his ball and Jim started crying, the kid laughed and ran away”.

The children also took time to identify the individuals involved in the transgression, from bullies (19 times), classmates (22 times), friends (115 times), parents (7 times), siblings (46 times), or strangers (9 times). One student’s story articulated a bully. This instance was as follows: “Once there was a girl named Ally. And another girl named Missy. Missy always was the kind of girl who wasn’t the nicest to everyone. One day she pushed Ally into the mud after morning church”. Friends and siblings were the most common, suggesting their socialization into practicing forgiveness and experiencing transgressions in this age. One story exemplified sibling transgression: “There was a mean kid and he took a cookie from his brother”. Although many children identified a setting, such as park, playground, or in a game, most of the children did not include the setting as a consideration in their process of experiencing transgressions and then thinking through forgiveness.

5.2.2. Identifying Emotions

The children then identified the emotional response they had to the transgression, such as anger (88 times), or unhappiness or upset (83 times). Many children wrote about being upset. For example, one seventh grader described: “One day, Bob threw a Frisbee, and it hit Nick in the head. Nick was very mad and thought Bob did it on purpose”. Generally, the children described how individuals were upset after being hurt: “There once was a girl that did not like her friend’s shirt. The girl told her friend. Her friend was upset.” They would specifically articulate the sadness that resulted from being hurt in some cases such as “At recess she wanted to play with her. So she asked. She said NO!… That made Jan sad. So she asked Lila to play with her but she said NO!… So Jan sat on the tires and cried”.

In some cases, the emotional response of the children was tied to understanding if the transgression was an accident rather than on purpose. This story exemplifies that their emotions were placed in context of the intent of the perpetrator: “One day Bob and Fred were playing video games at Fred’s house. Bob accidentally knocked a vase down and blamed Fred. Fred forgave him even though he was angry”. Despite acknowledging their own negative emotions after the transgression, if it was done unintentionally, the children recognized this with readiness to forgive. As one example, “One day Jim was playing leap frog and landed on Tom. Tom was angry but understood it was an accident so he forgave Jim”.

5.2.3. Empathy

Only a small handful of the children’s thoughts about forgiveness addressed empathy. One eighth grader wrote, “Bob and Greg were out on the playground. Greg pushed Bob around. Bob being used to this got really angry and said a silent prayer to God. Bob wanted to forgive Greg because Greg was obviously having a hard time at home. Greg started to feel bad and went and apologized to Bob”. Although empathy is a key part of the forgiveness curriculum, the children’s stories about forgiveness did not highlight empathy as often as the other components. However, several stories demonstrated that some children tried to understand other children’s thoughts or experiences; for example, “Jeffery plays volleyball and is proud of it because he is good at it but one day a kid comes and makes fun of him saying that volleyball is a girl’s sport. Later Jeffry realized that the kid who made fun of him is jealous…so Jeffery forgive the kid and practiced with him on the weekends”.

5.2.4. Deciding to Forgive

The theme of forgiveness occurred more often in the forgiveness group at the end of forgiveness education in both the fall and spring semesters. In the story from above with Bob and Jim and the frisbee, “Bob said he was sorry over and over to Nick, but Nick never forgave Bob, until Nick realized that forgiving was the right thing to do, whether Bob did it on purpose or not. Then Nick forgave Bob”. In line with developmental theories [33], children in early adolescence increase in their abilities to articulate abstract thoughts, and education on forgiveness appears to engage these thought processes. For example, an eighth grader was able to express, “Laquan was playing with toys when Darius stepped on them. Laquan was really mad because those were his last building block toys. He forgave Darius because he knew he could buy new toys, but couldn’t buy a new friendship”. Meanwhile a fifth grader demonstrated simpler reasoning: “Someone said something that was not true about me behind my back and then someone told me to forgive that person so I did forgive that person and we became friends again”.

An interesting response in the children was connecting forgiveness with letting go after a transgression. The forgiveness groups decreased in let it go in both semesters. The children recognized that forgiveness included nuances such as letting go, saying it’s okay, and accept apology. After the forgiveness education, the children mentioned letting go less often, suggesting they were finding a way to articulate that “letting go” of their anger was forgiveness and starting to call it that by name.

Although the decision to not forgive was rare in our examples (the probe was to describe a story about forgiveness), it surfaced with codes such as get even (1 time) and anger (3 times), suggesting that children experiencing negative emotions and intentions may not choose to forgive.

They wrote about strategies such as praying, talking to the offender, or telling someone in their work to forgive. One child described talking to someone about the hurt in this example: “…Jane was so upset. Jane wrote a letter about what Mrs. K is doing. Mrs. K shared a story about her child life and now she is sorry for what she did. Jane forgave her”. Once this sixth-grade student, Jane, opened up to the offender, Mrs. K, the offender shared her own story, and the student chose to forgive.

5.2.5. Holding on to Forgiveness

The children articulated key ways in which they held on to forgiveness. This was through either reconciliation or positive emotional responses toward the offender. Reconciliation took many forms, with the children acknowledging that they felt better after forgiving and showed their forgiveness of others in a number of altruistic behaviors such as donating their socks to charity, baking the transgressor a cake, helping someone up, or shopping for someone else’s groceries. Reconciliation was a common experience of those committed to forgiveness and showed up in the stories of the children who forgave 86 times. For those stories in which forgiveness was not mentioned, reconciliation was mentioned only 34 times. Reconciliation was the most common resolution of the children’s stories. For example, one fifth grader described, “This guy was walking and a bully said, ‘you’re a loser nobody cares you.’ Then everyone started laughing. The next day, the kid was sad. Then the bully felt bad for him cause everyone was laughing. Then he said to the kid, ‘I’m sorry for calling you a loser.’ Then they became friends”. This story involves a clear offense, an apology, and reconciliation, and forgiveness, while not explicitly mentioned, might be implied.

In summary, the children’s thoughts and expressions of forgiveness in their forgiveness narratives confirmed considerable uptake of the forgiveness curriculum. This is as expected given that the curriculum was guided by previous forgiveness intervention work with children. However, the curriculum addressed two topics that were not commonly incorporated in the children’s stories. First, the children did not discuss what forgiveness is defined as within their stories. Second, the children did not mention stress relaxation or anger reduction in the process of forgiveness. As with the quantitative analyses, the qualitative analyses examined differences across development and biological sex assigned at birth. Differences in word count, sentence structure, grammar, etc., were observed, but no discernable differences in patterns of responses to forgiveness education were clearly evident.

6. Discussion

As hypothesized, and in agreement with the other literature on children’s forgiveness education [17], the results of the quantitative portion of this study suggest that forgiveness education is effective for improving forgiveness in school-aged children in grades four through eight. As compared to the children assigned to the control group, the children who received forgiveness education in the fall semester reported significantly higher levels of all forms of forgiveness. Also, as hypothesized, these enhancements to forgiveness persisted across a nearly two-month-long break, and the children who received forgiveness education in the spring semester showed similar improvements in levels of forgiveness reported on total, behavior, and cognition—but not affect—scales after the education. This improvement closed the statistically significant gap between the groups at the start of the spring semester. The effect sizes for these intervention effects in the present study were approximately moderate in size, and the effect sizes were largely maintained across the two semesters. The effect sizes for forgiveness outcomes in the present study are similar in size to the meta-analytic effect size of g = 0.54 for 15 studies analyzed by Rapp et al. [17]. To our surprise, intervention effects on forgiving affect did not persist across the semesters, and this should be examined in future work. Perhaps forgiving affect, like many other emotional responses, is more momentary in nature and easily influenced by situational or other factors that make it less reliable across time. Or perhaps the brevity of our education was not sufficient to consistently move affect in a positive direction. Nevertheless, the forgiveness enhancing effects of the education were largely replicated across both the fall and spring semesters.

Contrary to our hypotheses, forgiveness education did not have effects on anger. Rapp et al.’s [17] review suggests that the findings for anger in the present study are similar to seven out of thirteen previous studies showing no statistically significant effect on anger of children’s forgiveness education. One recent example published after Rapp et al.’s [17] review is Freedman and Chen’s [34] study which showed expected effects of children’s forgiveness education (using Enright’s story-based approach) on two different forgiveness outcomes but showed no effect on anger. Previous research about forgiveness interventions with children has included children with anger disorders or other mental health disorders as a result of multiple or acute transgressions or adverse circumstances [35,36,37]. Additional research studies have included children with either mild or severe offenses, and in studies with samples of children who experience severe offenses (e.g., [34,38]), the effect of forgiveness education on anger was more pronounced than in samples where the offense severity was mild (e.g., [18,39]). Overall, our sample showed low levels of state anger and high levels of anger control at pre-assessment periods in both semesters, and these starting points might have limited possible improvement due to floor/ceiling effects.

In the fall, there were no group differences in state anger or anger control either before or after forgiveness education. At the beginning of the spring, the group that received forgiveness education in the fall showed higher state anger and lower anger control, as compared to the fall control group. The fall forgiveness group received no further training in the spring semester and maintained a higher level of state anger at the second measurement point. Group differences in anger control at the second measurement point in the spring were not evident. There was some tendency for anger to increase in both the forgiveness and control groups in both the semesters, and this may be the result of increasing stress as the semester wore on or other social or school-wide factors (e.g., disciplinary actions of school staff, etc.) that resulted in greater frustration or hostility. It might also be the case that children may not see forgiveness and anger as connected, and growing in forgiveness might not require reductions in anger at injustice. Alternatively, our education may have focused exclusively on future-oriented aspects of coping with wrongdoing, while anger might engender more of a reflective emphasis on wrongdoings of the past, and for this reason, our education impacted forgiveness more directly and not anger. Research has confirmed that future time perspective is related to forgiving others in adults, and the effect of future time perspective on forgiveness is greater in younger as compared to older adults [40,41]. Anger has also been associated with past–negative and present–fatalistic time perspectives [42]. Perhaps, similar time perspective mechanisms might be at play in children, and if so, perhaps our intervention was too focused on present and future time perspectives to also positively affect anger.

Our findings regarding anger appear to be inconsistent with expectations; however, one philosophical argument portends that more forgiving individuals will initially show heightened levels of anger, compared to less forgiving individuals [43]. In this line of thinking, forgiveness often prompts a review of the reasons for anger in the first place. Reviewing reasons for anger can stimulate a search for related, past events that also elicits anger, and this type of thought process can easily lead to what might be called anger rumination [44]. Inhibiting this ruminative tendency is key and may likely require cognitive resources and coping strategies (e.g., distraction) that children may not have developed yet, and the present forgiveness intervention did not supply or does not offer time for the children to develop these skills. Although anger at wrongdoing is often justified, Boleyn-Fitzgerald [43] suggests that inhibiting continued focus on anger and anger-eliciting events and avoiding aggressive responses is important. Provided that the negative responses proceeding from anger can be mitigated, the forgiving individual may be more likely to eventually let go of anger and forgive the wrongdoer. The timing of our assessments may not have allowed sufficient time for any increases in anger to later subside. In other words, our study timing was based on the school calendar and not on critical milestones of the forgiveness process. Perhaps we unknowingly truncated our follow-up assessments. It may also be that our education raised issues of anger but did not offer sufficient time in the educational process to examine and deal effectively with anger issues. More time spent with the curriculum might allow for beneficial effects on anger to emerge. Nevertheless, the possibility remains that something about our forgiveness education unknowingly elevated anger in a way that may have caused it to persist. This requires further investigation.

Qualitative findings illuminate children’s understanding of the forgiveness process. Children’s understanding of the forgiveness process largely mapped onto the forgiveness curriculum that was designed for use in their classrooms. That is, children told stories that commonly incorporated notions of identifying the hurt and emotions, empathy, deciding to forgive, and holding on or committing in some real way to forgiveness. Although forgiveness has been discussed as an important component for reconciliation, it is also widely agreed upon that forgiveness need not bring reconciliation as a requirement of the process [45]. Interestingly, for children, the common representation of the forgiveness process is one where the primary outcome of forgiveness is indeed reconciliation. Many stories ended with the relationships that were originally damaged being repaired. This may represent a heuristic that children have about the ultimate goal of forgiveness [46].; this may be the result of socialization on moral values [47] or a simple confounding of the two principles of forgiveness and reconciliation. In any event, children appear to see the process of forgiveness as one that ends is a commitment, a holding on to the relationship once repaired. There have been numerous objections raised to the idea that forgiveness and reconciliation are one and the same [15]. These are different constructs with different sets of necessary conditions, processes, and outcomes. Confounding these constructs might interfere with forgiveness or promote inappropriate or unsafe reconciliation. Future work is needed to refine and strengthen definitional components of our curriculum and ensure that this distinction is made clearer.

Taken together, our quantitative and qualitative results paint an interesting picture of the efficacy of our intervention. The quantitative results support the efficacy of the intervention in promoting the experience of forgiving others in children, and this confirms the findings of previous forgiveness interventions with children [17]. The qualitative results showed that, when the students were asked to formulate a story of forgiveness, many of the key elements of our forgiveness curriculum were present in their stories. The children understood that important parts of forgiveness include identification of an offender and emotional responses. They recognized empathy as a key process in promoting forgiveness as well as the decision to forgive. The children also emphasized the importance of holding on to forgiveness in the future. Evidence from both quantitative and qualitative data suggest that the intervention promoted forgiveness, and the mechanisms taught to them for experiencing forgiveness are, at minimum, components they include when constructing a forgiveness narrative.

The forgiveness education appears to have been effective, but, having said this, there remains a possibility that the children could simply be parroting back the things they were taught and did not genuinely internalize the teaching. We take the consistency of the quantitative and qualitative findings as some degree of assurance that the changes were authentic. Students who simply say what they are told to say are likely to show inconsistencies across the quantitative and qualitative results. Students might show no change in quantitative forgiveness levels (having not experienced more forgiveness) but provide excellent, well-articulated qualitative responses. They might report what they believe they are supposed to say but not genuinely feel, think, or act in a more forgiving manner. Alternatively, students might show changes in quantitative measures but provide nonsensical qualitative responses when asked to describe what forgiveness is in story form. Each of these instances would be evidence of what Enright [48] called “pseudo-forgiveness”, the experience of false forgiveness. Though pseudo-forgiveness, perhaps driven by socially desirable responding in the present case, remains an ever-present concern with studies of this type, we find the consistency of our quantitative and qualitative results encouraging. In the event that socially desirable responding is influencing our findings, this would likely impact both the control and forgiveness intervention groups equally. Hence, it might impact absolute levels, but it would not likely affect the size of the group differences and, hence, not confound the tests of our intervention effects.

Another conclusion from our results might be that, as effectively as the intervention has performed on forgiveness, it seemed to be ineffective in changing anger. Most of the group differences in anger were nonsignificant. However, the students who received forgiveness education in the fall returned in the spring with higher levels of state anger (before and after spring forgiveness education) and lower anger control (before spring forgiveness education). Approximately two months of time elapsed from the end of the fall semester forgiveness education to the beginning of research activities in the spring semester, and we have no data pertaining to the events that may have transpired during that time regarding holidays, family experiences, or other life events. Furthermore, the qualitative data provide no further evidence that the forgiveness education had a beneficial effect on anger. This might suggest that students see forgiveness and anger as potentially very separate things, that they may simply have overlooked mentioning anger in their stories, or that they may have felt anger (that the quantitative measures captured) but felt that it was inappropriate to express aspects of anger in a “forgiveness story”. Although quantitative and qualitative data are sometimes collected in sequential fashion where questions and unexpected quantitative findings can then be interrogated specifically using qualitative techniques, that was not the case in this study. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected simultaneously, leaving open the question of how forgiveness and anger levels might have diverged. The cognitive structuring of these constructs, processes of forgiveness, or the timing of these experiences may diverge in some meaningful way for children that was regrettably not captured in the present study. Nevertheless, what remains a point of future interest is the extent to which forgiveness and anger are understood, processed, or experienced in simultaneous or sequential fashion in children and how this might be written into forgiveness curricula such as the present one to maximize the benefits for children.

Limitations

This study possesses limitations that should be considered. First, this is a relatively small sample of students from a rural midwestern region of the United States. Although some studies have examined forgiveness education for children in different cities across the United States and in different cultures [17], this particular forgiveness education children’s curriculum has not yet been replicated or culturally adapted. Replication and extension to other social and cultural contexts is recommended, and an examination of potential differences across age/grade and sex could be insightful. Second, although the findings for forgiveness were as hypothesized, the findings on anger measures were not as expected. Further work should investigate this divergence. Perhaps younger children conceptualize of these phenomena differently or simply respond to forgiveness education in a very specific fashion that does not extend as completely to negative emotions. The benefits of forgiveness, in addition to greater forgiveness, should be more fully examined in children. Third, although an important aspect of our curriculum was its brevity, the effects of forgiveness education, like most types of education, are often enhanced by spending more time with the content. The forgiveness curriculum content was also not reinforced by and integrated within other parts of the curriculum. Rather, it was taught as an isolated topic. In this regard, the results of the present study may be lower-bound estimates, and expanding the time spent, depth of content, and integration with the broader curriculum may reveal stronger intervention effects. Fourth, this study was conducted in parochial schools which may present a selection bias that facilitates the effectiveness of a forgiveness intervention. Replications in public schools would be useful in this regard. Fifth, all measurement was self-reported which prevented us from collecting data from the youngest children in grades K-3. Self-report data are also vulnerable to response biases such as socially desirable responding. To address these limitations, behavioral data, observations from teachers, parents’ ratings, and input from school administrators might allow for enhanced validity in evaluation of forgiveness education. Also, as only four studies [18](; Holter et al., 2008) have examined forgiveness education in the first and third grades, further work in these younger age groups would be welcome. Last, our findings showed maintenance of effects across one academic year (nine months); however, the durability of these effects as children grow older and eventually develop into adults is not known. Future studies with longer periods of follow-up would be welcome.

7. Conclusions

The present findings echo findings from several previous studies of children who experience transgressions or consistent pain in their life [17]. Children can be taught to consider the process of forgiveness, and future research should focus on how to help children retain these skills as they move into adolescence and early adulthood [37,49]. Doing so allows children a greater likelihood of having a positive response, releasing stress, and protecting oneself through resilience when faced with future transgressions [14,50]. Additionally, forgiveness may reduce the likelihood of children retaliating against other individuals who hurt them, including taking revenge [36,51].

In line with federal calls to improve mental health initiatives, provide health promotion interventions for children in the school setting, and improve adolescent health through lower violence and improved academic success, forgiveness education in schools with fourth through eighth graders has the potential to support these goals. Toussaint, Worthington, and Williams [52] call for strategies to teach children at an early age with age-appropriate curriculums to equip children with necessary skills to build resilience and promote health and well-being throughout life. This study demonstrates the success of a seven-week, one-hour-and-forty-five-minute total forgiveness curriculum for children in grades four through eight. School professionals, such as psychologists, counselors, or nurses, have the opportunity to work collaboratively in building school curriculums that identify, advocate, and implement interventions related to forgiveness promotion. Additionally, school personnel trained in forgiveness education can be involved in crisis intervention teams working with children who have experienced offenses or violence against them [53]. As federal data show, nearly 80 percent of gun violence, including that which occurs in school shootings, is revenge-based, and the importance of equipping school professionals with forgiveness education skills may be a viable violence prevention approach [54]. Working with children on forgiveness skills might offer the opportunity to intervene early and for children to reap both immediate and lifelong benefits.