How To Teaching Empathy To Yourself And Your Child

Teaching empathy is firstly about being able to recognize when either you or your child is having an emotion. Secondly, understanding how that emotion feels for yourself and for your child and finally being able to express and label the feeling.

It doesn't matter whether you wear your heart on your sleeve or keep it closely guarded to your chest either way you can develop the same level of empathy. Once you can understand your feelings you are capable of teaching empathy to your children.

For younger children behaviour modeling is a great approach to teaching empathy. By showing your own empathy and understanding for others and for your children they will then learn from you how to be empathic and understanding.

Tips to teaching empathy to your children

Gottman in his book "The Heart of Parenting" continually stresses that to build on our emotional intelligence we must learn to accept that all emotions are okay for both you and your child. It is the behaviours that result from the feelings that are sometimes not acceptable. This is a point that I cannot stress enough, each time I have read Gottman's book this is the point that really hits home to me. For me this is my biggest challenge in raising my emotional intelligence to new levels. For example, the feelings of hatred, frustration or anger that a child can feel towards his brothers and sisters are okay and perfectly normal, however this doesn't mean that hitting or yelling at his brother or sister is okay.

Always have a non judgmental attitude towards both the feelings and behaviour of others. Now at first I can see that this may seem a bit like a contradiction to the above where all feelings are okay but not all behaviours are. But let me explain. Having a non judgmental attitude is the next step after recognizing that all feelings are acceptable. It means that even though your child (or you) might behave in an inappropriate way it doesn't mean that you should also judge them as bad or selfish because of that behaviour. The inappropriate behaviour was a mistake nothing more nothing less and it simply requires correction. And this is where you step in as your child's emotional coach. Just like the coach of a sports team you step in and acknowledge the mistake and teach your team (your children) how to fix the mistake and move on.

Many years ago when I was counseling youth for a volunteer youth organisation I developed a motto that I would use with the people that I was counseling. This would help me achieve a non-judgmental attitude towards any of their bad behaviours. The saying was

"Everybody does their absolute best in any situation given the skills and knowledge that they have at that time."

Whenever I would start to judge the kids for their behaviours I remind myself that I did not know all the circumstances behind the event. Maybe something like a lack of confidence held them back, or maybe they just didn't have the right skills to get them to a more positive outcome. Besides I have made mistakes and do not like to be judged myself so I am in no position to judge others

Try and put yourself in the other person's shoes. By feeling what another person is feeling is a great way to develop empathy for that person's situation. Questions you might like to ask yourself include:

Was that person put in a no win situation? or
Maybe they were trying to please too many people.
What would you have done in that situation?
How would you have felt if you were in that situation?

Listen to your child without trying to fix the problem. Let them explain their motivations behind their behavior and what they were feeling. By you trying to understand your child's actions and feelings, you are teaching him or her to do the same to others.

Let you children come to their own conclusions and let them develop their own solutions. This is an incredible way to empower your children while at the same time developing long term self-confidence.

Talk freely to your children about your own feelings, their feelings and those of others. This will help to let them know that all feelings are normal and acceptable.

Talk to your children about what you see around you. For example,

Discuss with your children in a non judging way the differences between people. Let them know that people come in all shapes, sizes and color. People have different color eyes, hair and skin but underneath we are all the same.

Try to give possible explanations for both your own and other people's behavior. For example, on first appearances nervousness in shy people is often mistaken as rude or disinterested, while for the true extrovert this nervousness can be mistaken as loud, over the top or pushy.

Watch movies that show how to accept the differences in people (Nearly all the Disney films do this). Then discuss how great it was, for example, that in the Lion King 2 movie, Kiara was able to see past the outsiders differences and realize that they were all one, all the same, all lions. I have found most of the Disney movies fantastic in that they always have positive emotional aspects to them. For example, the need to share, how to overcome obstacles and how to accept others.

My children also love nature films so I use this as a time to talk about the need to be kind to all living things and how our actions effect the environment.

I believe that we all have a huge capacity to be empathic to other people. Teaching empathy is about showing love and understanding to your children and where appropriate correcting their mistakes. Viewing the situation from your child's perspective is one important way to gain this understanding.