In Session - Notes from the Couch

Most people would agree that empathy is an important trait for an individual to posses. The Random House dictionary defines empathy as the "identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings or thoughts of another person." An individual's inherent personality will dictate, to some extent, the ways we exemplify empathy. But it is in fact a learned behavior.

From a very early age children are absorbing how to care for others. The first and most obvious examples are their parents. Children will learn by their parent's words and deeds. When a very small child pulls their mother's hair, for example, the mom can either get angry and scold them or they can teach empathy by taking their child's hand and saying, "we don't do that because that hurts mommy" and making a sad and pained face that shows the child that the behavior is displeasing.

Many preschools have an effective technique of teaching empathy to the children by enlisting a child's help when another child has been injured. It may be that the child enlisted to help has accidentally (or deliberately) been the cause of the injury. It is particularly meaningful in that case to enlist that child's help in comforting the injured child and understanding that their actions have had a negative effect and now they can have a positive and healing effect.

With few unfortunate exceptions humans, and more specifically children, don't want to deliberately cause harm to another and will feel a sense of distress when they know they have done so. Children need to be redirected to actually witness sadness in others and have explanations made clearly available to them. When another child is crying it is important not to belittle the emotion or distract a child who has taken notice but instead to explain in simple terms why that child is sad. An example of this is the ever common tearful child in the classroom when mommy leaves. Some children may be more independent and run off and play when they are dropped off but they can be told that, "Jimmy is crying because he misses his mommy. Do you think you could ask him to join you looking at that book?" The adult needs to stand by to witness the outcome and facilitate the process so that if the request is rejected the adult can explain that "maybe Jimmy needs to feel sad for a bit but trying to help him feel better was a really nice thing to do".

Feelings aren't always obvious from one's behavior. Anger in children is often a mask for sadness. The more detail we can give to our children about their own feelings, and the more we can help them to identify feelings in others, including ourselves, the more we are instilling empathy in them.