4 Everyday Ways to Develop Empathy in Your Child

“Empathy is not an ability that anyone is born with. It is a skill that is built over time, and you can help!”

By Guest Contributor, Emily Patterson, LICSW, PIP

By Guest Contributor, Emily Patterson, LICSW, PIP

“My four-year-old will not share her toys, no matter what we do! Why is she so mean?”

“My eleven-year-old son constantly tortures the whole family with annoying behaviors and instigating arguments, and he actually likes it! I think he’s turning into a sociopath.”

Sound familiar?

As parents, we get really frustrated when our child won’t extend the kindness, courtesy or compassion that we’d expect. We’ve labored to model these behaviors for them, taken them to Sunday school for years, and taught them about God’s love and kindness towards us. And yet we ask, “Where have I gone wrong? Is she going to be hateful forever? Why is my kid acting like we have taught them nothing?”

The good news is that the answer to those questions is resoundingly optimistic! The key element that we’re wanting them to possess is EMPATHY, the ability to identify with someone else’s feelings and put himself in their shoes.

Empathy is a skill that can always be improved upon, and childhood and adolescence is the best time to do it.

Although some children seem to have slightly more of an innate aptitude for thoughtfulness than others, empathy is not an ability that anyone is born with. It is a skill that is built over the entirety of infancy, childhood, and adolescence.

Children are innately selfish and developmentally narcissistic, which serves them well as a purely biological survival trait! However, we don’t want them to stay that way. Just as children learn to walk, talk, and read at varying rates, young people acquire the ability to show empathy at differing rates as well.

For 2-5 year olds, difficulty empathizing is developmentally typical and usually decreases as we allow normal development to take place.

For 6-12 year olds, development in this area is normally all over the map.

For 13 and up, they’re fairly selective about when they choose to show empathy, with their favorite peers usually receiving the best treatment.

Here are 4 Steps to help your child develop empathy skills:

Prioritize connecting emotionally with your child.

Empathy is built by developing a secure, consistent relationship with a primary caregiver, usually a mom or dad. A close, connected relationship results from repeated positive interactions in which the parent meets the child’s needs consistently over time. The child learns that when he expresses a need (i.e. hunger, attention), his need is seen as valid and important, and more importantly, that HE is valid and important.

Take the opportunity to play, smile, joke and converse with your little ones as much as possible and with your teens – when they allow it!

Teach “Name it to Tame it.”

This term, coined by Dr. Daniel Seigel, means that we are able to manage our emotions more effectively when we are able to identify each feeling and understand how we experience the feeling in our bodies. Awareness of your own feelings is a key ingredient for developing empathy skills.

Help expand your young child’s feelings-vocabulary beyond the basics of “happy-bad-sad-mad” and start teaching more precise feeling words for what you observe. State: “Learning to tie your shoes looks very frustrating.” Or, “It was very disappointing that grandma couldn’t visit today. When I feel sad and disappointed, sometimes my tummy hurts and my jaw feels tight.”

Provide opportunities to practice empathy skills by identifying feelings in books, movies and everyday situations.

If your child is struggling with reading skills, you’d provide him with more opportunities to practice reading. If your child is struggling with empathy skills, we need to provide him with more opportunities to flex his empathic abilities. 

While reading to your child, stop and ask questions like:

“How do you think Harry the Dirty Dog might have felt when his family didn’t recognize him?”

Or when watching a movie, ask, “What do you think Matilda and the children are feeling with ‘The Trunchbull’ walks into the classroom?”

Or when your high schooler’s team wins the soccer tournament, remind him, “I wonder how the kids on the losing team are feeling right now? Make sure you tell them what a good game they played.”

Allow your child to experience negative emotions.

As parents, we often want to shield our kids from unpleasant experiences. If your daughter can’t attend a birthday party because she’s been sick, we don’t need to find another fun replacement activity right away to distract from the heartbreak. We can let her experience the emotion, hold and soothe her while she cries, and talk to her about the emotions she’s experiencing so that she can connect the feeling to the event.

The ability to express empathy to others requires that she’s felt the range of human emotions herself, because she needs to be able to remember what it felt like to feel angry, disappointed, or sad.

Most kids will begin to show more signs of empathic responses by middle adolescence, as long as they’ve had a consistent, reliable, safe caregiver who has helped meet their needs.

Trust me, your daughter will not go to college still biting people who won’t share their toys!

However, if you want to accelerate your child’s empathy development, give some of these suggestions a try.

Emily Patterson works as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Counselor with Joyworks Counseling, LLC in Daphne, AL.

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