It may not be a word in your child’s vocabulary, but it’s something she experiences when she wraps her tiny arms around us because we’ve had a bad day. Or tears up over a sad movie. Or offers a friend half her cookie when she sees he doesn’t have one.
Empathy.
A word that sounds big, seems to be built into us – any parent (and non-parents too!) will remember the chorus of ‘sympathy crying’ sparked by a toddler’s howls – but somehow falls by the wayside over time unless nurtured lovingly.
It is “probably the greatest single gift of our species,” psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry and coauthor of Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential – and Endangered, feels. “It’s how we develop gratitude, hope, and compassion – which is the ability to act on your empathy,” Christine Carter, a sociologist and happiness expert at the Greater Good Science Centre at the University of California, Berkeley, explains.
And in fact, the earlier children learn this, the better off they’ll be in the long run. A recent study suggests that children who are taught ‘soft’ skills (as opposed to purely cognitive skills) in preschool have better social skills and fewer behavioural problems than those who aren’t, as children between the ages of five and seven increasingly anticipate feelings of concern for others.
The benefits are not restricted to early childhood either. Researchers from Duke and Penn State followed over 750 people for 20 years and found that those who were able to share and help other children in kindergarten were more likely to graduate from high school and have full-time jobs.
Yet, like a muscle, children lose that capacity for empathy if it is not exercised. “We take our kids to so many practices – sports, music, etc. But do they practice being a good person?” Dr. Michele Borba, author of UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World questions. “We are good at practising everything but humanity.”
And “as stress builds, empathy wanes,” she shares, pointing out that empathy tends to fly out the window when one is in survival mode. Perhaps that would help explain why Yale’s happiness course is its most popular in the college’s 316-year history, with one in four students taking it.
After all, it’s never too late to learn, as Tina Malti, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto and author of a 2016 report on school-based interventions to promote empathy in children discovered.
“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
– Nelson Mandela
Long Walk to Freedom
Here’re seven tips you can consider to raise a caring child.
1. Expand your child’s ‘feelings’ vocabulary.
Children can’t empathise with others if they can’t put words to their feelings. As they go about their day, you could help them label their emotions by pointing out what you see them feel. For example, you could say, “I see you were disappointed that there aren’t any more pineapple tarts left.” Or you could explain your own feelings: “Mummy felt anxious when we missed the bus.” You could also make “feelings flash cards” with your preschooler by cutting out pictures of faces from magazines and gluing them to index cards. Let them learn by doing, or feeling.
2. Be your child’s ‘emotion coach’.
Children understand more than we think, so it’s never too early to tune into what your child is really feeling and thinking. It may seem silly to treat your baby’s babbles as meaningful conversation, but research suggests that it may lead to better self-control and more secure attachments to you. For older children, acknowledge (and not dismiss!) their negative feelings, and engage them in conversation about the causes and effects of emotions. You could also find constructive ways to help them handle their bad moods, such as kids’ yoga, tickling or a healthy dose of laughter.
3. Help your child discover that we’re all the same underneath.
It’s natural to feel greater empathy for someone who’s similar to us, or whom we’re familiar with. As a result, one of the best ways to encourage empathy is to help your child see what she has in common with others. Read about life in far away places, and find out more about the people closer to home. Maybe the Malay boy next door loves LEGO as much as her, or the Indian girl is a bookworm as well. After all, it’s never too early for her to learn differences are only skin-deep.
- Boost your child’s emotional literacy through literature and role-playing.
Empathy is often associated with “emotion sharing” (affective empathy), but that’s only half the equation. To respond helpfully, cognitive empathy – the ability to take another person’s prospective, and visualise the actions to take to make that person feel better – is also necessary. That’s where fictional stories and real-life narratives come in. What do the characters think, believe, want, or feel? And how do we know it? What would we do if we were in their shoes? How would we feel?
By actively asking and discussing these questions with her, she can learn a lot about the way people’s minds work, as research suggests. In one experimental study in 2013, 110 school children (aged 7 years) were enrolled in a reading program. Some students were randomly assigned to engage in conversations about the emotional content of the stories they read, while the rest were only asked to produce drawings about the stories.
After two months, the kids in the first group showed greater advances in emotion comprehension, theory of mind, and empathy, and the positive outcomes “remained stable for 6 months” (Ornaghi et al 2014).
4. Lead by example.
Children learn by example, and they notice if you’re impatient with the waitress when she gets your order wrong, or you don’t give up your seat to that old lady on the train. Following up with questions and statements such as, “How did you think that waitress felt when she got the orders mixed up?” Or “I wonder how the granny would feel if she had to stand all the way to her stop” would help reinforce the lesson.
Even simple conversations help. A few years ago, psychologist Jellie Sierksma presented Dutch school children (aged 8-13 years) with some hypothetical scenarios about school.
It’s your classmate’s turn to stay late and clean up the classroom. But she wants to go home as soon as possible because her mother is quite ill. She asks you to help her. Would you do it?
In one scenario, the students were told to imagine that the girl was one of their friends. In another scenario, they were told the girl was not one of their friends.
Not surprisingly, the children expressed less willingness to help when the girl wasn’t depicted as a friend.
But the results changed once an extra step was introduced into the procedure. Instead of immediately asking children if they would help, they were first asked to think about the girl, and rate how sad or upset she was likely to be.
After rating emotions, the children showed no bias in favour of the friend. They were equally likely to say they would help the girl, whether she was a friend or not (Sierksma et al 2014). The extra reminder of how the girl felt was enough to change their minds.
5. Practise what you preach.
Ultimately, actions speak louder than words. If you tell your daughter to be mindful of what she says, and then turn around to vent your frustrations on your husband, you’re sending her confusing messages. Instead, apologise to your husband in front of her, and show her that you mean what you say. You could add something simple like, “I was disappointed that he left his socks lying around again, and so I took it out on him. I’m sorry I was mean.”
6. Don’t spoil a good thing.
It may feel natural to want to reward your child for being helpful and empathetic, but studies suggest that children are naturally helpful, and conversely become less so when rewarded materially for it.
In 2008, two researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology tested the effects of offering tangible rewards on very children’s helping behaviour. They assigned 20-month-old toddlers to one of three treatment groups each. One group was trained to expect a material reward for helping, the second to expect verbal praise, while the third group did not receive any rewards at all.
They were then given the opportunity to help an adult stranger.
The outcome? Compared to the children who received “verbal praise” and “no rewards”, the children who’d been getting tangible rewards became less likely to help.
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