I wrote it, dismissed it, and put it in a box. My daughter found it and kept it next to her bed.
Before I opened a single door, I wrote a book.
That detail matters. Not because the book was good — I’m getting to that — but because of what it tells you about why I built anything at all.
I had a belief. A simple one, but one I couldn’t shake: that families could share in the joys of giving together. That kids weren’t too small to do something real. That kindness wasn’t just a value you talked about at the dinner table — it was something you could actually practice, together, as a family. I called that belief KidsGiving. And before I had a space for it, before opened a business, before I welcomed families into it, I wrote a children’s book to hold it.
ABCs of Kindness. A to Z. One real kindness action per letter. Each page a small lesson in what it looks like to show up for the world around you.
I loved the idea. I was genuinely excited. I found an illustrator. I started creating something.
Then life did what life does.
I was finishing renovations on the space that would become HOPS — House of Playful Soul, an indoor children’s learning and development play center in Queens, NY. I was working a full-time corporate job. I was pregnant with my third child.
The book became one more thing on a list that was already too long.
I wasn’t honest with my illustrator about the illustrations. They weren’t quite what I had imagined, but I didn’t have the time or the energy to figure out how to say that, or what I’d even ask for instead. So I said nothing. I kept moving. And as the finish line came into view, I realized I just wanted it off my plate.
So I published it.
Then I called it a vanity project, put it in a box, and forgot about it.
Not dramatically. Not with grief. I just moved on to the next thing — opening HOPS, running a play center, raising three kids, working full time. The book sat in storage while I focused on everything else.
HOPS carried the KidsGiving mission in a physical space for two and a half years. Sandwich drives. Community events and collections. Families coming together to give back in ways their kids could actually see and touch and be part of. The mission was alive. It just wasn’t in the book anymore.
When HOPS closed, I tried to find another shape for it. A monthly learning kit. A kindness project subscription. Neither took hold. And after a while, I stopped trying to force it and let the mission sit quietly.
I thought I was taking a break.
I didn’t realize I was waiting.
We were moving into a new house. My daughter’s room. Unpacking, one box at a time.
I was unpacking books — on autopilot, the way you do when you’re moving — when my middle son picked something up off the floor. I wasn’t looking at him. He walked over and held it out to me.
ABCs of Kindness. My name on the cover.
“Why is your name on this?”
When I told him I wrote it, his face did something I wasn’t ready for. Pure excitement — the real kind, unperformed, arriving before he’d decided how to react. His sister heard us and came in. She was five years old, exactly the age I’d written the book for. She looked at it like it already belonged to her.
I read it to them that night. They each picked favorite letters. My daughter carried it to her room and set it next to her bed.
For the next several weeks she asked me to read it three or four times a week. Sometimes the whole book, sometimes just certain pages — the ones she’d chosen, for reasons only she could explain. She just loved it.
I have to tell you what happened next, because this is the part I wasn’t expecting.
One evening my son asked how many copies I had sold.
I told him to guess.
He said one thousand. Casually. Like he was being conservative.
I had to tell him the truth. About fifty. Mostly family and friends.
I had to be honest with him.
I wasn’t proud of the book. I had rushed it. The illustrations weren’t what I’d envisioned. I had called it a vanity project and meant it. I hadn’t marketed it because I didn’t believe in it enough to try.
My son looked at me like I’d said something that didn’t make sense.
And then my kids — all three of them — started telling me, specifically and seriously, why the book was great. My daughter pointed to pages. My son talked about the words. They weren’t consoling me. They were correcting me.
Then one of them said: “If you don’t like it, we should rewrite it.”
So we did.
All four of us sat down with the original manuscript and reimagined it together. My children weren’t consultants. They were co-authors. The book that exists now — ABCs of Kindness, the start of our journey that led us to expand and create the Alpha Academy series — is the one we made together. Their fingerprints are on every page.
And somewhere in the middle of that process, I started to see something clearly for the first time.
The mission — KidsGiving, the belief that little hands can do big things — had never left. It lived in HOPS. It traveled through every attempt to rebuild after we closed. It sat quietly in a storage box while I figured out what was next.
It was in the book the whole time.
I wrote it as a foundation for everything I believed. Then I called it a vanity project and forgot about it. And five years later my daughter kept it next to her bed and asked me to read it again and again.
The book was an entryway all along. I just didn’t know it yet.
Rebuilding the book with my kids has been equal parts chaos and magic.
They love the creative parts — working on rhymes, designing characters, debating accents, hiding Bean the butterfly on every page. The editing they tolerate. Barely.
But watching them at our book signing sessions, seeing their names on the cover, pen in hand — that’s something else entirely.
At one signing session my daughter looked down at her stack of books, picked up her pen, and said — with the biggest smile on her face:
“Oh my gosh, I have so much paperwork.”
That’s it. That’s the whole mission in one sentence from a five-year-old.
Kids don’t need to be talked to about kindness and giving and making a difference. They need to be handed the pen and shown that what they do with it matters.
That’s what we’re building with KidsGiving Club.
An experience where kids ages 3–8 earn stars through kindness games, complete real-world missions, and at the end of every quarter — vote on which charity receives that quarter’s donation. Fifty percent of net profits, chosen by the kids themselves.
Not a lesson. Not a lecture. The power in their hands and proof that it mattered.
We’re building it now and we’re looking for the families who want to be first. Founding members get lifetime access at our lowest rate, locked in forever — and more than that, your kids get to help shape what this becomes.
[Join the KidsGiving Club waitlist →]
Little Hands Can Do Big Things.
Thuy Petersen is the founder of KidsGiving Press and creator of the Alpha Academy book series. She lives in New York with her three children, who are significantly better editors than she expected.
