SOTE Article: Building Empathy in Children

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BY CLIVE DUFFY

Empathy is a really interesting topic. Like just about every issue we have with kids, I approach it with this thought in my mind: they’re going to learn what we model. So however we try to deal with it, if we’re not modelling empathy, they’re not going to be able to learn.

It doesn’t matter how many words you say to kids, whether they are young or adolescents, it’s what you do that they’ll always take most notice of. So in teaching them empathy, you have to be able to model it yourself.

My father had great empathy. I can remember in the ’Fifties, there were people in our suburb who had psychiatric problems and everyone would laugh at them. My father would never laugh at them and he would always say: “You have to understand there are things happening within each of these people that cause them suffering, that make them do these things.”

He would always be the one who would go and talk with them and make them feel welcome. So he had great empathy for people even though he had no training. I don’t know where he got it from, but his modelling enabled me to start to understand more about people than other kids who didn’t have that example. As I grew up, I found that I was usually the one in my class who was saying such things to the other kids, so his modelling had a very profound effect on me.

We need to look at ourselves and see what modelling we are providing our children, whether we are actually showing empathy to others.

Then the next thing is actually showing empathy to our own children, so that in the interaction between us and them, they get to experience that we can understand when they’re suffering about something inside. We mightn’t agree with their behaviour, but we understand that they are finding something difficult. Even though it’s difficult, they do have to learn how to use their behaviour in some more respectful way.

They can use their energy on the outside — physically, verbally and all those sorts of ways. There is also using energy inside, for example, the way you think about things and so on. We want to teach them how they are using their energy so that it fits within the principles and values we believe one should follow.

Another way of teaching empathy is by pointing out to children when other people do something which demonstrates the empathy we like to see expressed. This could be on a TV program, a video, a movie or some real-life situation. You can say to your children, “Isn’t that really interesting how that person could understand that the other person was suffering and how they tried to help them”, or something like that, so you are pointing it out to them in a third party fashion.

It’s easier to teach children, particularly adolescents, with a third party observation of two other characters doing something, and not attaching it to the children themselves. The moment you try to deal with something that has lessons for them, immediately they’ve got their shutters up, ready for some attack. So they’re very defensive. Whereas if you talk about something over here, they allow it to come in. So that’s another way.

In teaching, particularly young children, it’s not going to be just one lesson; it’s going to be many lessons over and over. That’s where the consistency of parenting helps children, because if you’re consistent — in your own model that you’re setting, what you say about other people, how you address an issue with your own child, that all fits together. The lessons aren’t just one, two or ten: they’re probably fifties or hundreds before the child absorbs it.



		Clive Duffy is a family counsellor based in Rainworth, Brisbane. He visits the School of Total Education twice a term to see parents, teachers and students, and contributes regularly to the Parents Program.

Family Counsellor, Clive Duffy, shared his thoughts on this subject at a Parents’ Program in March 2000. This article was originally published in the June 2000 edition of the SOTE Newsletter. (Published on web site: September 2001)