Isabella Anderson, who goes by Bella, is eight, and she runs her own kindness platform. She walks runways and tops the scholar list at school, but the part her family is proudest of is the service she keeps showing up for. It is a good story to read with any child, and especially if you are raising a kind child of your own. Behind every icon is a parent who believed first. Iconic Glam Kids Editorial
Bella built a platform and named it after herself. BELLA stands for Bringing Everyone Love, Light, and Aid. She built it to spread kindness and to help people in her community who need it, and she is already planning her next events at local shelters in her hometown of Mobile, Alabama. This is a story about a child who decided, at eight, that the spotlight is for pointing at other people.
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The line she uses to explain the work is one most adults will recognize, first said by Muhammad Ali. She has been quoting it long enough that her family is used to hearing her say it.
The service we provide to others is the rent we pay for our room here on Earth.
The line Bella lives by
A Moment for Parents
We share these features for more than the child at the center of them. Each one carries a question for the rest of us who are raising a kind child of our own.
Your child earns a crown, walks a runway, appears on a billboard in Times Square. The easy next question is what comes after: the next title, the next stage. Bella’s family let a different question lead: who can she help with all of this? Which question would you reach for first?
More Than a Crown
What makes the platform land is that the rest of her week is already full. She was crowned Little Miss Lower Alabama Grand Supreme 2025. She has walked New York Fashion Week. Her face has appeared on the Times Square billboards. She dances at an academy where her teachers say she moves with a free spirited joy other dancers spend years trying to find. She is in third grade, and was recently named a Top Scholar at her school. She sings in the school ensemble.
She also thinks she is a stand-up comedian, and she will tell anyone who listens that she is that good. The two jokes she tested on us were the kind only an eight-year-old tells with full confidence. What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear. What do you call cheese that is not your cheese? Nacho cheese. She delivered both with the same timing she uses on a runway, which is to say she did not rush them. She let them land.
Off the stage, she reads. Reading is, in her own words, one of her biggest passions. The character she would most want to be is Belle from Beauty and the Beast, because Belle reads too, and because Belle shows that being kind, smart, and curious can make any adventure worth having. Her dream is not modeling. It is to be an artist one day, drawing and designing with bold, bright, beautiful colors that show happiness. Her dream runway is Paris.
The work is the rent. The room is shared.
Iconic Glam Kids Editorial
Behind Every Little Star
Every shining child has a story, and a guiding light behind them. Here are the ideas Bella’s family leans on.
What raising a kind child really takes
Keep it fun and keep it safe. Her family is clear that modeling should be fun and safe first. They let Bella explore and be creative at her own pace, and they support her interests as they change.
Confidence matters more than the title. In one year of being on stage, her mother says her confidence has blossomed. She has become more self-assured, more outgoing, more expressive. The crowns are the visible part. The confidence is the part that lasts.
School first, and balance always. The family keeps school ahead of everything else, plans carefully, and stays organized. The right balance, in their words, is the part that lasts long after the season ends.
Draw it, little star
Draw one way you could help someone this week. It can be small: a card for a neighbor, a shared snack, a hello to a classmate sitting alone. Then go and do it. That is exactly how Bella started her platform, one kind thing at a time.
From the Editor’s Desk
There is a piece of Positive Discipline in Bella’s story that is easy to walk past. Children learn generosity by being given real chances to practice it, not by being told to be nice. The researchers behind the Making Caring Common project at Harvard describe raising a kind child the same way: kindness grows when a child is trusted with real chances to practice it. Bella was allowed to turn her own stage into something useful, and that is where the confidence and the kindness started to feed each other. A child who is trusted to help learns that she has something worth giving. That belief tends to outlast any crown.
Our hope is that these pages help a family raising a kind child recognize the strength that is one day truly the child’s own, and stand beside it while it is still forming. Not performance, but presence.
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.
Audrey Hepburn
ICONIC GLAM KIDS | ISABELLA “BELLA” ANDERSON | AGE 8 | Photograph by Cezar Moffatt, Art Official Photography
Isabella Anderson was featured in Iconic Glam Kids, the magazine for children and the parents who believe in them first.
Read next: Maci OโBrien, the six-year-old behind Maciโs Mission, on teaching kids to give back
For more on raising a kind child, read the stories of Kaia and John in The Luminaries.
Behind every icon is a parent who believed first.