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This Week · Loyalty

Loyalty — when is it hardest to stick by someone, and why do it anyway?

For littler ones: Who do you always stick by, no matter what?

Loyalty — When is it hardest to stick by someone — and why do it anyway?

This week we're wondering about loyalty — the staying-true kind, the kind that costs something. It's easy to stand by someone when it's simple. The harder question is when it isn't: when leaving would be easier, and you stay anyway. A good one to turn over in the car or at the table.

This week's stories

Classics

Androcles and the Lion

A runaway hiding in a cave pulls a thorn from a wounded lion's paw — and years later, sent into the arena to face a lion, finds himself nose to nose with the very same one, who remembers.

American

The Soldier Who Is Never Alone

The true story of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: one nameless man brought home from war, and the sentinels who have kept watch over him — through rain, snow, and the deep middle of the night — for almost a hundred years, so he is never left alone.

Classics

Beauty and the Beast

A girl gives her word to come back to the Beast, breaks it by a few days, and dreams him dying by the fountain — then races back to a creature with a frightening face and the gentlest heart she has ever known.

Talk about it

  • Beauty almost didn't go back to the Beast, and Androcles could have run instead of helping the lion — what makes it hard to stick by someone?
  • The sentinels keep watch over a soldier they never met and whose name nobody knows. Why do you think they do it?
  • Who is someone you would stay with even when it was hard — and how would they know you'd stay?

A new question every week.

Listen together in the app — short audio stories for kids 4–10, at bedtime, on the drive, in the drop-off line.

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