Parent: How do you teach empathy?
Dr. B: Kids learn empathy by experiencing it from others.
Parent: What do you mean?
Dr. B: Remember how we talked about handling two angry kids in the midst of a fight?
Parent: Yeah. The parent empathizes with each kid and lets them know they understand why they are angry?
Dr. B: Exactly.
Parent: So how does that teach empathy?
Dr. B: Kids come to recognize how well they can calm down when the parent empathizes and understands. If the strategy works, the kids start to do it for each other.
Parent: Isn’t it kind of a performance, like from a playbook?
Dr. B: Perhaps to start with, it may be a means to an end they recognize as a good way to calm their sibling.
Parent: But?
Dr. B: But we all have the capacity for empathy. The problem is, it is often blocked or short circuited when some other emotion gets in the way.
Parent: What do you mean?
Dr. B: If you or your child feel threatened or angry, it is much harder to access empathy. Fear and anger trump empathy every time. Excuse my language.
Parent: So, when someone doesn’t feel personally threatened, it is easier to empathize?
Dr. B: Exactly. As a parent, you are able to create that safety, so that the child not only feels your empathy, but also comes to discover their capacity for it.
Parent: Is it just natural discovery or does it need to be taught?
Dr. B: We have an innate capacity for empathy. Seems like some of us more so than others. But when a child sees and hears a parent respond to someone or something with empathy, they have a better means of recognizing the feeling and labeling it.
Parent: Give me an example.
Dr. B: If I am on a walk with my daughter and I see an animal that has been hurt, I may verbalize my empathy for the animal and say out loud how they must be feeling.
Parent: And with people?
Dr. B: It can be very accessible for your child if you can identify a feeling attached to an event that the child has experienced.
Parent: What do you mean?
Dr. B: Say, they know how it feels to lose a game or be excluded.
Parent: You make empathy sound like a cookbook recipe.
Dr. B: That’s a little harsh.
Parent: I’m sorry. Did I hurt your feelings?
Dr. B: Ha. The short of it is that kids learn empathy when someone like a parent knows how they are feeling and can label it. And when they see a parent empathizing with others. Most of that occurs within the normal course of parent-child interactions. But it never hurts to be mindful of it, so when learning opportunities arise, we are able to help a child recognize how someone might be feeling.
Parent: Sorry I made the cookbook crack.
Dr. B: No worries. But thank you for saying that.
