How to Generate Empathy in Young Children
Parents and teachers often wonder how to teach children to care for others, especially when the world is full of discord, conflict and aggression.
This post was originally published in The Conversation .
As developmental psychologists, we know that children begin to pay attention to the emotions of others from an early age. They actively consider the emotions of others when deciding how to respond.
Does this mean that children from an early age have sympathy for others? And is there a way that parents can teach their children to be empathetic?
What is sympathy?
Feelings of caring for the other person or empathy are based on awareness of the unfortunate situation and the emotional state of the other person. This often accompanies feelings of pity for the upset other person.
Empathy is different from empathy, which is more like “emotional contamination.” If you feel like crying when you see someone crying, you feel empathy. You may even be overwhelmed by this person’s suffering.
And unlike empathy, empathy takes some distance. Thus, instead of being repressed, feelings of sympathy could allow people to behave prosocially , such as helping or sharing.
We start to show concern for others very early on. For example, infants exhibit basic signs of caring for others in their anxious reactions to another infant crying, although in the case of infants it is also possible that they do not fully understand themselves as a separate entity from others. So their screaming might just be an expression of emotional contamination.
Either way, these are early forms of how we express anxiety. Later in our lives, they develop into more complex experiences of empathy . Instead of just crying over another crying child, children start thinking about ways to ease their suffering.
These empathetic responses become possible because they begin to include cognitive understanding of the other person’s situation. Empathy goes beyond simply feeling sad about the suffering of others. Rather, he guides our actions .
What Makes Children Share
How do children at different ages display prosocial behaviors differently based on their sympathy?
To understand this, we conducted research to find out how children share with each other. In our study, 160 4- and 8-year-olds received six equally attractive stickers. They were then given the opportunity to share any number of these stickers with the hypothetical child in the picture.
The children were shown several pictures depicting four different conditions, including “needy” recipients and “needless” recipients. The poor recipient was described as:
“He / he has no toys”, “He / she is sad”.
And no needy or neutral recipient like,
“This girl / boy is four / eight years old, just like you.”
We found that kids tend to share a lot of stickers with a recipient in need. We also found that 8-year-olds shared an average of 70 percent of their stickers with a recipient in need (versus 47 percent with a neutral recipient). Four-year-olds shared only 45 percent of their stickers in needy (versus 33 percent in neutral).
What makes 8-year-olds share more than two-thirds of their stickers with a recipient in need, while 4-year-olds only share half of them?
Deliberate exchange
The answer to this question can be found in the growing ability of children to put themselves in the shoes of others. In addition to feeling caring for others, being able to understand the circumstances of others can improve helping or sharing behaviors that are sensitive to the situation of others .
For example, our study found that older children shared more stickers with a peer who looked sad and had fewer toys, even if they gave up theirs. This is different from simply sharing an equal number of stickers with colleagues, regardless of each other’s personal circumstances.
The point is that children may show emotional empathy early on, but as they develop their “ability to look ahead,” they tend to show higher levels of empathy. The ability to look ahead means knowing that others may have desires, knowledge and emotions that are different from their own, and that they come from their point of view.
For example, a child who wants to play baseball will realize that his friend has a different desire – perhaps to play football. Or that another friend who smiles in front of his parents is actually hiding his disappointment because he didn’t receive the birthday present he really wanted.
In this regard, a recent observational study summarizing the results of 76 studies conducted over the past four decades in 12 different countries, led to the following conclusions:
The study involved a total of 6,432 children between the ages of two and 12 to find out how children’s perspective and prosocial behavior relate to each other. The results showed that children with a higher ability to accept the other person’s point of view exhibited more prosocial behaviors such as comforting, helping, and sharing.
In addition, when they compared preschool children between two and five years of age with children aged six and over, they found that this relationship increased as children got older.
As children increasingly use contextual information, they become more selective in choosing when and how to help others. This is what our study also showed: 8-year-olds take into account the information about the recipient and make more selective decisions about the exchange of information, guided by their sympathy.
Increasing sympathy in children
The question is, can we encourage children to empathize with others? And can children learn how to best remember the unique circumstances of others?
The ability to care for others is one of the key characteristics that make us human. Empathy brings people together and increases collaboration between members of the community. This has been seen in developmental studies. For example,in a long-term study of 175 children, we found that when children showed high levels of sympathy at age seven, they were better accepted by their peers and shared more with others before age nine.
So, according to developmental research, one of the things we can do to develop empathy in young children is to use so-called inductive thinking . Inductive thinking implies that parents and teachers emphasize the consequences of a child’s behavior during social interaction. For example, when a child takes a toy from a friend, the caregiver might ask the child:
“How would you feel if your friend took the toy away from you?”
This can encourage children to reflect on how their own actions might affect the thoughts and feelings of others. It can ease empathy .
Researcher Brad Farrant , who and his colleagues studied the relationship between parenting and helping and caring behavior in children, came up with similar results.
Farrant studied 72 children between the ages of four and six. Research has shown that children exhibit more helpful and nurturing actions when mothers encourage their children to see things from the other child’s point of view. For example, if a child was “beaten” by another child, mothers who encouraged perspectives would help their child try to figure out why the other child is choosing a child.
Telling your child that he needs to help and share with others can be one way to teach him how to be a good member of society. However, talking with your child thoughtfully about the needs, feelings, and desires of others can go one step further – it can help children develop empathy.