“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” The line turns up on classroom posters, coffee mugs and social media feeds, very often with the name Plato underneath it.
Plato almost certainly never said it. The idea behind it, though, is one of the more useful things a parent can pass on: the child who snaps at the playground, the cashier who barely looks up and the mother wrestling a screaming toddler out of the grocery store may all be carrying something nobody else can see. Research on children’s development, on how we judge each other and on what parents themselves are dealing with gives that old saying some solid footing.
Where the saying really comes from
The researcher behind the website Quote Investigator traced the line back as far as it will go and found no source connecting it to Plato, or to the philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who is sometimes named instead. Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, has called the Plato attribution anachronistic by almost 2,500 years.
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The earliest known version came from Ian Maclaren, the pen name of John Watson, a Scottish Presbyterian minister who served a church in Liverpool, England, for about 25 years and wrote Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush in 1894. In a Christmas message to the religious newspaper The British Weekly, probably in 1897, he wrote: “Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle.”
“Pitiful” meant full of pity, or compassionate, rather than pathetic. Over the following century the wording softened into the version on the mugs. The meaning held.
The battles children can’t see in each other
Children often don’t know what their classmates are going through, and the numbers suggest a lot is going on. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drawing on the National Survey of Children’s Health for 2023 and 2024, about 11% of US children aged 3 to 17 had a current diagnosis of anxiety, 8% a diagnosed behavior disorder and 4% diagnosed depression. Those figures count only diagnosed conditions. They leave out the many children dealing with a divorce, a sick parent, money worries at home or a bad night’s sleep.
In a class of 25, that is likely to include two or three children with diagnosed anxiety, and others with troubles no one at school has heard about. The child who pushes in line or bursts into tears over nothing may be having the hardest week of their year.
None of this means children should excuse behavior that hurts them. It means they can learn that the behavior and the whole person are two different things.
How parents can help children see the battle
Empathy isn’t simply a trait a child has or lacks. The way parents talk about behavior appears to shape it.
In a study published in Child Development in 1996, Julia Krevans and John Gibbs looked at 78 sixth and seventh graders and their parents. They compared parents who mostly used what psychologists call induction, explaining how a child’s actions affected other people, with parents who leaned more on power and punishment. Children of parents who used induction were more empathic, and more empathic children were more helpful and caring toward others. Empathy appeared to be the link between the parenting style and the kindness.
It was a small study, and it shows an association rather than proof that one causes the other. But the approach is easy to use at home. After a playground scuffle, instead of only “That was naughty,” a parent might try: “How do you think Sam felt when you took the ball? Why do you think he was so upset today?”
The second question is the one that echoes the old saying. It invites a child to wonder what else might be going on.
Why we all jump to conclusions
Adults need the reminder too, because the human mind tends to explain other people’s behavior by their character and to underestimate their circumstances.
In a classic 1967 study, psychologists Edward Jones and Victor Harris asked people to read essays for or against Fidel Castro, at a time when supporting Castro was deeply unpopular in the United States. Even when readers were told that the writers had been assigned which side to argue, they still judged the writers as personally holding those views. In 1977 the psychologist Lee Ross gave this pull a name: the fundamental attribution error.
The same habit is at work when we decide that the child who hit our child is “a bully,” or that the parent on the phone at pickup “doesn’t care.” Sometimes that’s true. Often there is a reason we can’t see.
Parents are fighting battles too
Parents are on the receiving end of quick judgments more than most. In a 2017 national poll by C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, 61% of mothers of children under 6 said they had been criticized about their parenting. Discipline was the most common target, followed by diet and sleep. The criticism usually came from family members, but 12% had been criticized by other mothers they met in public. Among those criticized, 42% said it had made them feel unsure of their choices.
The pressure behind those moments is real. In a 2024 advisory on parents’ mental health, then US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy reported that 48% of parents said their stress was completely overwhelming on most days, and 41% said that most days they were so stressed they could not function.
So the parent in the supermarket aisle with a howling toddler may already be at the end of a long week. A sympathetic look, or a “We’ve all been there,” costs nothing. The Mott poll offers one hopeful detail: 56% of the criticized mothers said they had stopped criticizing other mothers themselves.
Passing it on
Children learn kindness partly from what they’re told and partly from what they see. When a parent says, “Maybe that boy is having a hard day,” in the car on the way home, or lets an irritable waiter’s mistake go with a smile, a child learns that people are more than their worst moment.
A Scottish minister put it plainly more than a century ago. The saying is far younger than Plato, and no less useful for it.