At my daughter’s elementary school, they have a pretty cool program that has the potential to pay dividends far down the road. When you get to fifth grade, you are paired with a kindergarten buddy, and every few days during your fifth-grade year, you and your buddy get to hang out and do projects together. For fifth-graders, it teaches them responsibility and empathy and gives you a built-in person to help guide and show the ropes, and for the kindergarteners, it gives them somebody to look up to and, if both of them so chose, a mentor-mentee relationship for life.