Teaching your child what is empathy and why is it important

Empathy, sometimes an adult have trouble with having this ability. And we can't expect young child to know what is it all about. However for 5 year olds, they are self-conscious enough to seek fairness and are feels good about being treated well. And it is a good age to start.

What is empathy actually?
Research suggests that empathy is a complex phenomenon involving several component skills:
• A sense of self-awareness and the ability to distinguish one’s own feelings from the feelings of others.
• Taking another person’s perspective (or, alternatively, “putting oneself in another person’s shoes”).
• Being able to regulate one’s own emotional responses.

Why is it important?
It’s a core skill for what psychologists call “pro-social” behaviour – the actions that are involved in building close relationships, maintaining friendships, and developing strong communities. It appears to be the central reality necessary for developing a conscience, as well.

And as emotional intelligence (EQ) has become an increasingly popular idea over the last twenty years. While “IQ” (intelligence quotient) attempts to describe our thinking and reasoning abilities, “EQ” (emotional intelligence quotient) attempts to describe our ability to work with our own and others’ emotions. The importance of these skills for personal, relationship and even work success has become increasingly recognized in the psychological community, and researchers and therapists alike are developing ways of helping folks learn and make use of these skills.

Technically, “emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to perceive and express emotion accurately and adaptively, the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge, the ability to use feelings to facilitate thought, and the ability to regulate emotions in oneself and in others”

One of the most important of the emotional intelligence skills is empathy. When we instinctively tell our kids to “think about how what you did made others feel,” we are training our kids in empathy and inviting them to recognize the importance of taking others’ feelings into account.

There are degrees of empathy, and, with practice and an understanding of psychology, we can probably develop stronger empathic skills.


How do you teach children empathy for others ?
1.Show them empathy. Openly empathize with others as an example.

2.Talk about feelings, a lot. Theirs, yours, anyone’s. Talk about fictional character’s feelings. Connect these feelings to your children.

3.Role play. We use this strategy all the time from preparing our kids for special events like holiday parties to going on the airplane and conflicts with friends.

4.Work to see their viewpoint as often if not more often than we try to force them to see ours. When your kid is acting up it’s hard sometimes to put yourself in their shoes. It might make you feel soft or like a pushover even. You can still have clear and solid boundaries and consequences while empathizing and it will encourage empathetic responses from your kids as well. Teach by example.

5.Don’t wait for your child to feel an emotion before you talk about that emotion. Have them practice putting themselves in others shoes. Tell stories true and fictional. There are a lot of experiences my kids haven’t had but I have and I use those as we explore feelings. It gives them a connection to the feelings without having to have had to experience it themselves, at least not yet.

Once kids can empathize with children in different situations than their own they can really understand why these acts of kindness and giving matter.

=)