4 - 11 years
Executive function: Empathy
Empathy can be a puzzling concept for a young child. They often need adults to model it for them. When reading stories or playing with the wooden peg people together, ask your child: “How do you think that person is feeling right now? How can you tell? How would you feel in his place?” Encourage your child to notice the clues in their environment and use them to draw conclusions.
In this final episode in the executive function series, Senior Director of Programs at Zero to Three Rebecca Parlakian joins Host Jessica Rolph to look at how empathy fits into the critical thinking skills coming online for your 4 year old.
Transcript:
Building and developing empathy
Jessica: Empathy is such a complex skill to develop. So why is it so hard?
Rebecca: Well, I think because it takes a lot of skills, right? First of all, to be empathetic, we have to understand our own emotional states, and a lot of young children are still working on that, like being able to say, I’m mad instead of just hitting or crying. So we have to recognize our own emotional states, so that’s self-awareness. Then we have to have some flexible thinking, which means that we have the understanding that another person’s experience of a situation may be different than ours. So for example, I might get a pair of fancy cashmere socks for my birthday and be really excited and happy, but if a child opens a pair of socks for their birthday, they probably aren’t going to be as excited. So empathy is sort of this understanding that other people may experience different emotions in a situation than they do, and really taking the perspective of that other person. And then there’s this willingness component, which is an aspect of maturity to really, not just understand another person’s emotion and that they may be affected by a situation differently than we are, but the willingness to accept that their emotional experience is relevant and valid and valuable.
So those are some really complicated processes going on in the brain.
Jessica: Yeah, and you kind of referred to theory of mind or being able to understand that you are your own person, and that other people have their own perspective too. Can you help me understand the stages of development of empathy?
Rebecca: So I just want to preface it by saying that there’s research that’s ongoing. So we may know more over time about how empathy unfolds but we do know that even babies sort of exhibit some, not empathy per se, but awareness of other people’s emotions. So, for example, there’s that typical understanding that when a baby is in a room where there’s other babies crying, they will often start to cry too. And we call that contagious crying. And it’s kind of this rudimentary form of empathy, of kind of understanding and echoing the emotions of others. We also know that as early as six weeks, babies are engaging in social smiling. So they’re responding to the smile of another, they’re kind of responding to the emotion of another.
But if we flash forward to like 12 to 24 months, there was a really interesting study where 12 to 24 month old babies were in a room alone with an adult who was carrying something and repeatedly dropped it over and over again. And what happened? Well, the baby would actually go over and help them by picking up the object for them. So they kind of understood the adult’s intent, they understood that maybe the adult was trying, maybe felt frustrated. And even more interestingly, another similar study with that same age range, 12 to 24 month olds, they were left in a room alone with a very realistic baby doll. And they, the researchers had the baby doll start to cry. And how did the babies respond? The real babies? Well, they responded by trying to comfort the babies.
Some of the children offered the baby a toy, so they recognized the emotion and had this internal drive to try and soothe or respond to the baby’s emotion. So it’s really exciting that even in these early years, the foundation is being built. And then between three and five children, preschoolers develop what you just mentioned, theory of mind. And now with theory of mind, they’re able to take on the perspective of others in kind of emotional understanding as well, and are beginning to be able to generate responses in a way that considers those feelings. So an example might be a new child joins their preschool class and starts to cry when their dad leaves, and the other children might come up to them, give them a hug, ask them to come play, share a snack, do something that shows that they have an understanding of that child’s emotional perspective and experience.
How can parents help foster empathy
Jessica: And how much of this is developing naturally in the child? And then how much of it can be supported by parental engagement, whether that’s little lessons or ways of being as a parent, how can you help foster empathy? I think we all want to have empathetic children. How much of it is nature and how much of it is nurture?
Rebecca: There is some evidence, especially with young babies, that there’s sort of like this innate drive to help others in distress. But for the most part the development of empathy unfolds throughout the relationships we share with our children. And there’s this saying empathy is caught not taught. And it’s because we can model empathy by showing it to others, and our children are witnessing it. We also are teaching our child what empathy is when we are empathizing with them. And that’s meaning like tuning into their feelings, mirroring their feelings, even as babies providing emotionally responsive care as parents, tuning into their physical needs as well.
And then everyday experiences, like I remember when my kids were little like toddler and preschooler, our friends, Richard and Victor, their pug Oliver passed, died, passed away. And so I had written them a card and bought a bouquet of flowers and packed the kids into the car and was explaining on the way over why we were going to Richard and Victor’s house. And there were so many questions about that, about the flowers and the card and what happened. And it really made such an impression on them, what that experience meant, and how Richard and Victor were feeling and what we could do to help them feel better. So I think it’s just a reminder of how we live our lives is such a profound influence on the social emotional skills that our children are developing.
Jessica: Yeah, and I’ll say that I think that there’s easier times to help foster these skills in children. Like, I loved your example of being able to comfort a neighbor or do something kind for someone else in front of your children, or even involve them in that. Or let’s say that they feel worried or scared about something, being able to empathize or really cuddle them and show them empathy. Where I really struggle is like toddlers and older children, they have this tendency to often, from my perspective, they’re making a lot of self-serving decisions and they don’t take in my perspective or another child’s perspective.
And I find myself wanting to explain and justify why they should be kinder to their sibling, their sibling is younger, why they should be… Also understanding that we have to get out the door. We’ve got a timeline here, and I’m stressed and help me out here. And that goes on throughout parenthood. Talk to me about how to handle those situations.
Rebecca: First of all, I’ll say that, we say that theory of mind is kind of emerging from three to five, but that doesn’t mean it’s there. They’re kind of building these muscles, these social emotional skills, if you will, but it takes a while. And we know that it’s developmentally typical for young children to be egotistical.
And so I would say empathizing with our child doesn’t mean that we’re agreeing with them or that we’re going to do what they want us to do all the time. I think empathy is just acknowledging that what we’re asking them to do is hard for them. And so, for example, maybe we are going to Grandma’s house and you know, we’ve let them have the tablet in the car, but now we’re at Grandma’s house and tablet time is over and our child is throwing a fit. We can say, I can tell from your voice and your face, you just are so sad and frustrated that tablet time is over, but Grandma really wants to have time to play with you, so we’re going to have to leave the tablet in the car. And I know that’s going to be really hard.
And then we leave the tablet in the car. That’s sort of how we walk that line between showing empathy while still being that steady adult decision maker in their lives.
Empathy with hitting or biting
Jessica: It can get complicated, especially around siblings or hitting and biting. A community member’s question echoes this topic: What is the role of empathy when we’re teaching our kids not to bite or hit? I don’t want my daughter to make decisions solely based on other people’s feelings, but it would be nice if she was aware of how her actions actually are impacting others. And I know that there’s a lesson about you’re not supposed to force an apology. This parent is using the techniques like, I’m not going to let you hit. I’m not going to let you bite. And thinking you’re a good kid having a hard time, but if your kid is this good kid having a hard time, why are they struggling so much with caring about their impact on others?
Rebecca: I think if you kind of showed them a picture of one child hitting another, and you asked how do you think the child who’s getting hit, how do you think they feel? They would be able to answer that question. Or do you think it’s okay to hit another child? They would be able to answer that question correctly. But we know that even preschoolers can have a really hard time regulating their feelings in the moment. So that they’re flooded with these big feelings and they have a really hard time processing and stopping themselves from just acting on their feelings. So part of it is developmental, it’s about self-regulation. I think part of it is also at this age, there’s this emerging sense of self-awareness, and with that comes an emerging understanding of shame.
So once you’ve actually done something that you know is not okay, that you’re pretty confident your parent is not going to be happy with you about, or your teacher isn’t going to be happy with you about, it’s really hard because the child has to be really emotionally vulnerable to that sense of shame or embarrassment to take the other person’s perspective because all of a sudden the bigness of what they did really is felt. And so in those moments, first of all, I really always recommend shifting a hundred percent of the attention to the child who has been hurt. Because we don’t want to accidentally reinforce with attention a behavior we don’t want to see.
And then we can bring in empathy afterward when everyone is a little calmer, where we can ask questions like what are you seeing in her face? Does she look happy right now? Why do you think she doesn’t look happy? What do you think you know, you could do to help her feel better? Do you think she liked it when you splashed her in the face when you were in the pool together? How did you know she didn’t like it? And so really asking your child to kind of home in on those clues of what they’re hearing from the other person. That’s how we can kind of bring the empathy piece into that discussion. And just to know that it may take hundreds of repetitions until they really have these regulatory skills down.
Role of books in building empathy
Jessica: I’ve heard about the role of books as being a top contributor to building empathy, and what an easy thing it is for a parent to read a book to a child, it just… It doesn’t involve scripts, it doesn’t involve saying the right thing in the right moment when you might be angry. Can you talk about the role of books in building empathy?
Rebecca: I teach a class on emergent literacy, so I’m a huge book fan, but I think books are great because they’re not personal. They’re not asking a child to reflect on their own behavior, which is very, very hard for a preschooler to do. Instead they’re inviting a child to really think about this character that they, through repeated readings get very familiar with. And it creates opportunities for us to ask questions. How do you think the character was feeling right now? What do you think they’re going to do next? For four-year-olds and above, why do you think they did that? And we can even ask about hypothetical situation, so what do you think Goldilocks would do in our house? We can really help them begin to take these concepts of feelings and expand it to make connections between the book and everyday life, and I think we can also use the book to ask children, what would you do in that situation? Would you do the same thing that Goldilocks did? It just creates these opportunities for rich conversations. I usually recommend that parents read the book through without any interruptions two or three times, because children can’t reflect on a book until they actually understand it, so they need a few repetitions to kind of get that narrative under their belt, and then you can kinda stop almost every page and just talk about what’s happening.
Activities to help build empathy
Jessica: Tell me anything else that we can do around activities or things that we can build into our everyday life to help our young children develop empathy.
Rebecca: There’s three other things that I’d recommend, the first is for parents of babies. I think one habit we can get into is really trying to imagine how our baby is interpreting a situation and putting that into words, so… It’s so frustrating when you can’t reach your pacifier. Here, let me help you, right? So we’re kind of just getting in the habit of talking about feelings even with babies, then we can also suggest ways that children can show empathy, so we can say something like, your cousin fell and hurt his knee. Would you like to help me go get the ice pack for him, maybe that’ll help him feel better? He’s crying, so I think that’s a clue that his knee is really hurting. So that’s the second thing we can do, and the third thing we can do for our three and four-year-olds is really leverage pretend play as a way to build in explorations of empathy. So if we’re playing veterinarian, we can say like, Oh, the doggy has to have a shot, but oh, the doggy is feeling a little scared, Doctor. And we can prompt our child to take the doggy’s perspective and pet him to make him feel better or whatever the child feels is appropriate in that situation, so those are three quick ideas that parents can try.
Saying sorry
Jessica: And can we think through this discussion about, I’m sorry. When should we use, I’m sorry? Or, should we encourage it? How do we do this?
Rebecca: It’s such an important social script in our culture for young children to be able to say that they’re sorry. But we have to remember that for young children between two and four, they really are just repeating, I’m sorry because they’re told to. They really aren’t feeling, I’m sorry. That’s fine. Maybe we still want to maintain that tradition of saying, I’m sorry, but I think what’s also important is to take a moment there with our child when everyone is a little calmer and ask those questions that we talked about earlier. Why do you think Rebecca is crying right now? Do you think she felt happy when you pushed her out of the way to get her toy train? Do you think she’s sad or mad or upset? What can you do to help her feel better? And so these kinds of conversations take longer, but for younger children, it helps them do the social-emotional learning that over time leads to a meaningful, I’m sorry. Which I really think is everyone’s goal.
Jessica: That is our goal. It’s so helpful to get these tips. We include a game in the Examiner Play Kit for four year olds called the Show, Tell and Think Empathy Game, and it provides three ways to practice taking someone else’s perspective. So we have retelling a story as a card that you can pull, or you can pull a card acting on a moment or imagining a full scenario, like what happens if you notice that your friend peed in their pants or that they’re excluded at the park. You’ve actually… we shipped you this game.
Rebecca: Yeah, I got it. It was really cute.
Jessica: Yeah, so what are some ways that parents can engage with their children around this game to reinforce this learning, do you have any additional tips beyond what we included there?
Rebecca: So what I think is that parents can keep those cards as tools in their own tool box for supporting empathy, because if we think about acting out, when we encounter a situation in our child’s world or even during play time, we can ask them how another person or an animal or how a doll is feeling in a particular scenario that we’re acting out. We can use that as a way for them to better understand the world, so we can say, Daddy can’t find his car keys, that’s why he’s running around the kitchen and is really cranky. That kind of helps them understand their world, and at this age between two and five, that is a child’s entire job, is noticing the patterns in their world and decoding them and making sense of them. I think for the Imagine-if cards, we can use that tool in our tool box to help our child prepare for new situations. We can use an Imagine-if tool by saying to our child, let’s talk about starting preschool, let’s imagine it’s your first day meeting your new friends, what can you say to introduce yourself, or how do you think that…
If you see a friend who’s feeling sad about saying goodbye to their mom, what could you do to help them feel better, or we could even do something like imagine… You love our dog Daisy, but your friend Tomas is afraid of dogs. What do you think we could do when he comes over today? So those three cards just really aligned to the strategies that we parents can use in everyday situations to support empathy and social-emotional learning.
More empathy-building tips
Jessica: That’s so helpful. To get that extra support for how we can use these tools. Do you have any parting thoughts for parents of young children around empathy? What else do we need to share?
Rebecca: I think the most important takeaway that I think is so important for busy parents and for parents of more than one child is that as long as you’re living your family values and you’re modeling empathy and your relationships, especially with your children, that this skill is really nurtured and comes to life through relationships, through experiences, by watching it and seeing it and feeling it, and that empathy in that kind of a context is the skill that is going to emerge very naturally and organically over time, forgive yourself and forgive your child for all those situations where they are behaving a little egotistical, it truly is a stage and just stick to course by being who you are as a parent, and that loving, caring, emotionally responsive who you are is exactly what your child needs to become an empathetic person.
Jessica: Yeah, and I think that it was so helpful to hear you connect shame to digging in and not taking someone else’s perspective, I think there’s a big, deep connection there, and so helping our children work through that shame and feel okay and seen in their feelings can really help.
Rebecca: And really normalizing that sometimes everybody makes a decision that can be hurtful to a friend, and what’s important is that we just make a different choice next time.
Jessica: Great. Begin again.
Rebecca: Begin again.
Jessica: I live by those words. Well, it’s been wonderful having you here with us, Rebecca, thank you so much.
Rebecca: Thanks for having me.
Here are my takeaways from the conversation:
- Empathy is caught not taught. We are teaching our child what empathy is when we model it, but also when we empathize with them.
- Empathizing with our child doesn’t mean that we’re agreeing with them or doing exactly what they want us to do. Rather, it involves acknowledging that what we’re asking them to do is hard for them.
- In order for a child to recognize that what they did was wrong, they have to accept some degree of shame. That’s asking a lot of a 4 year old. Rebecca recommends shifting 100 hundred percent of the attention to the child who has been hurt, and only later (in private), asking your child questions like: How did you know she didn’t like it?
- Rebecca has 3 suggestions for building empathy in the day-to-day with your child:
- Try to imagine how your baby is interpreting a situation and put that into words. For example: “It’s so frustrating when you can’t reach your pacifier!”
- Suggest ways that your child can show empathy. Something like: “Your cousin fell and hurt his knee. Would you like to help me get the ice pack for him?”
- Explore empathy in pretend play. So if we’re playing veterinarian, we can say: “The doggy has to have a shot, but look, he’s feeling a little scared…”
- Finally, Rebecca suggests using the Imagine-if cards in the Examiner Play Kit as a way to build empathy. For example: “Let’s imagine you’re at preschool. What if a friend is feeling sad about saying goodbye to their mom or dad? What could you do to help them?”
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