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ОглавлениеEMPATHY: WHAT IT IS AND WHY IT MATTERS
What Is Empathy?
IN ONE GRADE 4 CLASS, nine-year-old Sylvie was wearing running shoes that did up with a Velcro strap. Some of the other children taunted her, saying she wore “baby shoes” and “geeky shoes.” She was the target of a double-barrelled criticism—her shoes were not only cheap and unfashionable, they were immature. This is the kind of humiliation that would shrivel the spirit of any nine-year-old. But then something happened. When the class headed outside for recess, Sylvie’s best friend June swapped one shoe with her. The empathic insight and quick thinking of that child gives us hope. Her actions said, “I’m your friend and I’m proud to wear your shoes and be just like you.” She turned a mean, exclusionary attack into something playful, without saying a word. Every other child in the class got the message: “This is my friend, make fun of her and you are making fun of me. Keep it up and you may find yourself outnumbered by kids who care.”
In his paper “Truth and Ethics in School Reform,” the philosopher Thomas McCollough writes, “Moral imagination is the capacity to empathize with others, i.e., not just to feel for oneself, but to feel with and for others. This is something that education ought to cultivate and that citizens ought to bring to politics.”1 Empathy is frequently defined as the ability to identify with the feelings and perspectives of others. I would add and to respond appropriately to the feelings and perspectives of others. Expressed this way, it sounds simple enough. Perhaps it is only when we reflect on what happens when empathy is absent that we begin to grasp the profound, complex and fundamental role it plays in the healthy functioning of human relations.
When we think of the Holocaust or South Africa under apartheid we are horrified at the scale of cruelty perpetrated on an entire race of people. We might try to distance ours elves from the injustice by focusing on the fact it was long ago or far away and couldn’t happen here, couldn’t happen now. But think it through. Were the people who participated in these affronts to human rights, or stood by and watched them happen, fundamentally different from us? And if they weren’t, what force was at work that drew them into a situation that we find unconscionable? In both cases, a tremendous amount of propaganda, indoctrination and intimidation went into convincing the dominant population that Jews, that black South Africans, were alien, threatening or something less than human. But we know that while a great many people were either active or passive participants, many others resisted the propaganda and actively involved themselves in helping victims and struggling for change. It is crucial to understand what accounts for the difference in these two kinds of responses. The difference lies in our capacity for empathy, our ability to identify with the feelings and perspectives of others. If we cannot see the other person as human like us, we will not be able to identify with him. If we cannot put ourselves in his place, we will not recognize his experiences and feel what he feels. This failure of empathy at best leads to complicity and apathy; at worst, it leads to cruelty and violence. We could learn a lot from the nine-year-old girl with the Velcro shoe. She stood up to injustice and confronted cruelty and unfairness where she found it.
On a less historical, global scale, the same forces are at work in the bullying that plagues our schools and communities. The victim is singled out on a number of grounds—perhaps because she is smaller, weaker, has poor social skills and few friends, or is a new immigrant, talks differently, has a different skin colour. Whatever the factors, they are used to marginalize the victim, to define her as different and inferior to the dominant group. She then becomes not only the victim of the bully, but also—to a lesser, but still hurtful, degree—the victim of the onlookers. There search on bullying confirms that a strong characteristic of the bully is a lack of empathy. In the case of onlookers, fear of or admiration for the bully outweighs their ability to feel or act on empathy for the victim. The consequences for everyone are severe: a toxic environment is created in which the bullying behaviour is not challenged, and children are not given the skills and confidence to stand up to the bully, to stand up for themselves and to stand up in defence of the victim. When we do not actively work to turn this around, we are failing to give our children the tools to form healthy, respectful relationships. We are failing to show them that bullying is destructive and we are failing to give them a sense of their role as members of a civil society.
An extreme outcome of this failure can be seen in the case of Reena Virk, the fourteen-year-old British Columbia schoolgirl who died following a brutal beating by her peers. There were eight teens, seven of them girls, directly involved in the beating. Other boys and girls watched it happen and only one witness made any attempt to intervene. No one reported the attack until Reena had been missing for four days. One of the girls involved has recently been convicted of second-degree murder in Reena’s death following a third trial. At the trial, evidence was given that Reena was kicked in the head, that attempts were made to set her hair on fire and that she was held under water until she stopped moving. Among the lessons we have to learn from this tragedy is that physical bullying has been “degendered”—it can no longer be seen as the purview of the male throwing his weight around. Just as critical is the fact that most of these young people were fourteen years old. It is obvious that, if we are going to change the conditions that allow such things to happen, we have to work with ch ildren from a much earlier age.
Nature is on our side in creating strong, empathic societies. We are born with the capacity for empathy. An ability to recognize emotions transcends race, culture, nationality, social class and age. Researchers have shown photographs of human faces to people of various ages around the world. Without hesitation, the people can point out which photo shows someone who is afraid, someone who is happy, someone who is worried, someone who is sad. Our feelings, and our expression of them, are universal.2 Show a tribal chieftain in Mali a photo of a little Japanese girl who is frightened, and he will immediately be able to recognize how she is feeling—despite the differences in race, clothing and culture. The emotions, and their expression, are the same. Clearly, our emotions and the need to have them understood by others are so basic that the visible signals of how we are feeling have become essential aspects of humans around the world.
This is our deepest connection with one another. Roots of Empathy stretches children to find points of intersection. In their discussions about being sad, children may give reasons for sadness that are different—“My parents fight a lot” or “Kids make fun of me because I have two moms instead of a mom and a dad”—but there is understanding about the feeling itself, and that shared understanding creates channels of connection and belonging that lead to empathy.
Babies and toddlers will spontaneously respond to the sadness or happiness of their mother or other significant people in their lives. They are attuned to nuances of harmony or discordance. This capacity for empathy grows as the child develops a sense of self, separate from other people. The more aware the child becomes of his own emotions and their effect on him, the more he is capable of recognizing emotional states in people around him and aware of the effects created by different emotions. An eighteen-month-old will respond to the distress of another child by giving him a toy or bringing an adult over to help.3 This is the beginning of developing a moral sense and a capacity for pro-social behaviour. These stages in the development of empathy—awareness of self, understanding of emotions, ability to attribute emotions to others and take the perspective of the other person—are critical for positive socialization.4
From the outset, parents are the single most important influence on how a child’s innate capacity for empathy grows and develops. It is this first relationship that affirms the power and efficacy of human connection: Baby is hungry and starts to cry, Mommy listens and cues into Baby’s hunger, Mommy picks Baby up, comforts him and feeds him. Daddy smiles, sings Baby’s name, lifts her in the air; Baby has an answering smile, gurgles, spreads out her fingers to touch Daddy’s face. Circles of communication, understanding and connection are completed. These and similar circles are repeated throughout the first years of life. The give-and-take of reading cues and responding to cues lays the foundation for the emotional learning that allows empathy to take root and flourish.
Home is where the start is; it is where children become themselves; it is where, before the age of six, their values and attitudes are formed. The roots of empathy, laid down in the home, give children the foundation, the confidence, the strong sense of self to build relationships in the bigger world outside the home. The familiar patterns they have learned form the template for reading and responding to the behaviours and emotional expression of other children and adults. The approach to communication, caring and sorting out problems that is built into the emotional ebb and flow of family life can lead to understanding the benefits of sharing and forming friendships in the sandbox, in the schoolhouse and in the boardroom. What more valuable support can we as a society provide to children and their parents than to ensure that this early social and emotional learning, so critical to successful relationships in life is a part of our childcare and education structures? What would add more to our progress as a global society than to place at least as much value on the development of positive, fully realized human relationships as we place on the acquisition of academic skills? What greater contribution could we make to our sustainable future than to promote a development of the heart that runs parallel to the development of the mind?
Why Empathy Matters
One of the parents of a child in a Roots of Empathy class called the teacher and said, “I don’t know what you are doing in that class, but Cody has completely changed the way he treats his baby brother. He is gentle, protective and very loving.” Cody has taken to heart what he has been learning about empathy and the needs of babies in the context of the classroom and transferred it to his home situation. This parent’s story is, happily, very common.
We also frequently see the healing power of empathy. Liam, who was expressing a lot of anger and frustration in his class at the beginning of the program, gradually responded to the smiles and overt u res the baby frequently directed at him and formed a strong, positive connection with her. Over the course of a few visits, the baby seemed to actively favour connection with Liam, slowly drawing him to her, and the instructor felt Liam turned a corner the day he looked at the baby and the baby smiled at him. At the end of that session, Liam touched the baby’s feet to say goodbye. This was an “opening up” that led to the child, for the first time that year, establishing eye contact with others and beginning to interact positively with his classmates. I have observed this “wise b a by syndrome” in countless classes. The baby has an intuitive sense of who needs her, an uncanny knack of zeroing in on the child who is unpopular, carrying a burden of pain, uncommunicative, struggling in some way. The baby sees the child, this other human being, purely and without judgment. The child sees his best true self reflected back by the baby’s response and, with it, the opportunity to reinvent himself.
These are just two examples of the power of empathy to reshape relationships. Understanding how other people feel is the first step to building caring relationships in the classroom, in the community and in the world at large. In our program the babies teach this lesson for us, because they express their feelings in such a clear, open way. The baby who is happy is happy with every cell of his body. The baby who is frightened is the epitome of fear, and this is easy for children to recognize. The observation of emotions in the baby is the gateway that leads the children to identify and label their own emotions and is a curriculum bridge to learning to recognize emotions in others. In one of the exercises in class the students look at illustrations of children their own age and talk about how the people in the pictures are feeling. The concrete experience with the baby stimulates a thoughtful range of responses. Talking about what they are learning from the baby’s cues gives children the language and experience of talking out loud about feelings; it gives them permission to have a public discourse about emotions and the process of talking fine-tunes their thinking.
Social skills are built on empathy and emotional intelligence: when you understand your own feelings and can recognize those of others, you are able to reach out and make connections. That means giving comfort and solace to those who are hurt, and celebrating with those who are happy. If we could be more present and responsive to each other, we wouldn’t have so many people running on empty. In the Roots of Empathy classroom we encourage the building of friendships, giving children the experience of making connections through shared feelings. When we do the classroom activity in which children look at a picture of a sad girl and talk not only about why she might be sad but also about how they could help her, they often attribute her sadness to loneliness and a lack of friends. The solutions invariably include taking steps to b ring the girl into their circle of friends. While they may not often articulate it, children intuitively know that friendship mitigates pain and bolsters us against the emotional landmines of growing up. Through this building of empathy and emotional awareness we have an opportunity to improve the interactions of children today and affect the quality of human interaction in the next generation.
When I talk about some of my experiences with Roots of Empathy classes, and describe some of the touching incidents when children demonstrate their courage and compassion, people in the audience are often moved to tears. Many are embarrassed by this—I see them trying to wipe their eyes discreetly with tissues concealed in their hands. Why should we be embarrassed? Those tears are proof that we are human—that we feel.
We need to make a healthy place for emotions in the way we perceive ourselves and in the way we deal with each other, regardless of gender or how old we are.
Empathy, Literacy of the Emotions
In our program, we give all the children the words to describe their feelings. Focusing on the core emotions, we ask them to tell us about times when they felt sad, scared, angry or happy. Listening to the other children and sharing their own story enlarges their vocabulary and sparks the recognition that is an essential part of emotional intelligence: “I hear how you are feeling, and I know I have felt the same way. We are alike.” When we have given shape to the solidarity of humankind it will no longer be possible for us to hive off a group and dehumanize them.
Studies tell us that when girls have a problem, they typically talk about it with others. When boys have a problem, often, their response is to act, to do something. It is still a facet of our culture that boys are not often encouraged to talk about their feelings and consequently lack the vocabulary to express emotion. Nurturing an ease in reading and expressing emotion in boys is particularly important. It is still true that parents talk more to girls than they do to boys, and that girls usually have a larger emotional vocabulary than boys. Our experience has found that boys who have gone through the Roots of Empathy program have a vocabulary of feeling words as large as that of the girls, and are more likely to talk about problems and emotions than the boys who have not had this experience. This is possible through the great care t a ken to make the classroom a safe place of trust.
Beyond having the language to discuss emotions, children need to know their feelings are accepted and valued by the adults around them. When you respect children’s feelings, they learn to respect the feelings of others. When our babies are frightened, we cuddle and comfort and reassure them. The message the baby gets is that his fear is acknowledged and responded to. When older children are frightened—especially if those children are boys—we tend to dismiss their fears and sometimes impart a sense of shame or imply weakness. In contrast to the loving acknowledgment they received as babies, they are now getting an entirely different message: their emotions are not acceptable and it is better to suppress them. Every time we don’t see or hear or respond to a child’s emotional expression, we are depriving that child of emotional oxygen. By the time most of us are adults, we are not willing to admit to fear, even to ourselves. We will make ourselves ill rather than become vulnerable emotionally by acknowledging feelings that we define as weak.
We even shroud our positive emotions. Why do we consider it inappropriate for an adult to show unbridled joy when we so prize its spontaneous, unguarded expression in children? If we cannot show fear or sadness, and can’t display our happiness, what is left for us to feel? No wonder so many adults explode in anger or collapse with depression. But we see these effects in children, too. With rapidly escalating rates of childhood depression, it is more critical than ever that we give our children the tools to express their emotions in a safe and healthy way and that we, as adults, give our children the strongest sense of their right to be heard and understood. It is equally critical that we teach them to do the same for others. A remarkable instance of healthy emotional expression emerged from a Grade 7 classroom discussion of “transitional objects,” the soothing blanket or toy that helps a baby go to sleep. The instructor was amazed as Grade 7 boys talked of special toys from babyhood that they still had in their rooms at home. Delighted at the ease of the unfolding conversation, she said later, “It was surprising they felt so comfort a ble sharing this because they do have a certain image to protect!”
Knowledge may influence decision-making, but it is emotion that truly changes behaviour. How many people know they should be eating better and exercising more? They’ve heard the message from their doctors, seen the warnings on television, and yet they continue to eat junk food and spend long hours on the couch. They have the knowledge, but their emotions are not engaged. When a person does change his eating or activity level, it is usually because of some emotional event: the fear generated by a heart attack or the desire to be more physically at tractive to the opposite sex after a divorce. Children exert a strong emotional pull in influencing social change and people will do many things out of love for their children that they would not do for other reasons. Think of wearing seat belts or bicycle helmets, quitting smoking or refusing to drink and drive. It is no accident that children appear so often in advertising, whether the product is cereal or cars. Emotion, not information, makes the difference. We tend to undervalue the role of emotion in our lives and see being emotional as a fault.
Empathy also has an important role to play in fostering interdependence. Interdependence is critical at all levels of our lives—at work, at home, in our community relationships. The idea that independence represents strength and interdependence is a weak distant cousin is deeply flawed. Studies of cultures that place a high value on independence show that the success of the individual is prized more than collaborative achievements. By contrast, in cultures where there is an interdependence of roles and responsibilities among extended family and within the community, where children have a contribution to make to the subsistence of their family, a high value is placed on altruistic behaviour and working for the common good.5 A recent tragic incident in To ronto involved the death of a five-year-old boy who fell from a high-rise balcony. It was ten o’clock at night and his mother had just left her son in the care of two older siblings (nine and eleven years old) to go to work. Amid the gasps of outrage about a mother who would leave such a young child without adequate supervision there were some compassionate voices asking, “Where was her support system? Why was she put in the position of having to leave her children so she could put food on the table?” For this woman, a recent immigrant who had lost both her husband and her mother and who had no support network to rely on, the cost of struggling alone was tragically high.6 A caring society, in which empathy was a core value, would have had answers for her. There would have been people who felt it their duty as members of the community to intervene compassionately when her children needed supervision or help. There is great strength in the closeness of the connections we build through interdependence, and this is ultimately the strength of a community. A community of completely independent people is not a community at all.
A Child Is a Person
Our approach to children is not working, and the consequences for all of us are huge. It is clear that inaccurate and inadequate information about the needs of children continues to undermine our efforts. To oversimplify, despite all the new knowledge we have about children’s cognitive and emotional development, a theory of childhood that remains all too pervasive in our society is that children are in many ways less than fully human. This theory sees children’s emotions, for example, as being unimportant. A baby cries, and the parents a re warned, “He’s just spoiled. Leave him to cry.” A little seven-year-old boy is frightened by a barking dog and someone is sure to say, “Big boys don’t cry. There’s nothing to be scared of.” We are a child-illiterate society. We have begun to have legislation that recognizes the unique needs of disabled citizens but have not yet to plan for the unique needs of our youngest citizens. Children are seen as nuisances and are unwanted in many public buildings, public spaces and some apartment buildings.
We replace an understanding of real, individual children with cliché s. That all children lead lives of happy innocence, without worry or responsibility, is a common cliché that can have tragic consequences. By failing to see that a child’s range and depth of emotion can be as complex as our own, we allow ourselves to ignore the signs of stress or depression in the troubled children around us. In Roots of Empathy classrooms we have ample evidence that even when children do not have well-developed intellectual abilities, their range of emotional expression can be rich and fully developed. We may tell ourselves that the child who is crying is not really distressed and cannot have a good reason for his tears, or that the child who is imitating the violence she experiences at home by fighting with her classmates is just misbehaving and deserves punishment. But if we do, we are throwing a blanket over a child’s emotions and there will be a price to pay.
There are still adults who subscribe to the theory that children are naturally cruel and self-centred. That belief ignores the many examples of children who demonstrate a thoughtfulness and kindness that often surpasses that of adults. In a Roots of Empathy class that included a nine-year-old boy in a wheelchair who drooled uncontrollably, we saw how brilliantly children can advocate for the human rights of a classmate. Children in this class explained to the other children in the school how their friend felt when others made fun of him. All name-calling stopped. I believe also that adults must always take responsibility and must always intervene when bullying occurs, not just to protect the victims but to give the bullies and the onlookers the support they need to act differently. That belief is supported by a substantial body of research, indicating that a bullying environment takes stronger hold when adults do not intervene to protect the victims and deal with the bullying behaviour.7
Children know this. In a Grade 5/6 class, the instructor introduced the topic of bullying and how to end it. When one student suggested that you could “teach the bully a lesson” by doing to the bully whatever he had done to the victim, another student immediately said, “But then wouldn’t you become the bully?” Other voices joined in, strategies were discussed, and the student consensus was: “Bullying is never justified. Believe in yourself. Trust your friends. Ask an adult for help.” The children’s solution illuminates their understanding that everyone is involved in putting a stop to bullying.
With a little support from us, children reveal depths of understanding and social genius that will astound us.
Empathy Is Caught Not Taught
Our program seeks to build a classroom environment where strength arises out of connection and respectful relationships, a classroom environment where, as children build those relationships, they learn how they are alike. Out of this arise skills in consensus-building, negotiating, empathy and self-awareness. Through the Roots of Empathy baby’s first year of life, children are inhaling the social environment of relationship-building, not through dependence on instruction, but through the intrinsic learning experiences of a continuing connection. Values are communicated, and attitudes are internalized. The subtlest learning lies in what children catch from what they see and hear and from people’s responses to them cumulatively, over time. We can only expect children to be empathic if they’ve had real and repeated experiences of empathy in their daily lives. Roots of Empathy opens a door to this world. For some children, who have ingested empathy with their breast milk, it is a familiar world; for other children, whose early circumstances have been less fortunate, it is a world they can feel welcome in and begin to own.
In our classrooms, each individual’s emotions, preferences and opinions are important. No individual is more important than the other, and the goal is to find a way that everyone can feel validated—not the instructor at the expense of the child, or one child at the expense of another child, but everyone, each in a way that accords respect to that person.
One classroom teacher describes her Roots of Empathy children this way: “After a year of exposure to the program, I am amazed at their collective abilities to engage in critical thinking tasks. They are keen problem solvers, in small and large group settings. Individually, they are able to make independent decisions, no small achievement for six-year-olds! I have absolutely no bullying in my classroom, a feat I attribute solely to the program. In fact, my students have become self-appointed “peacemakers” on the playground, often bringing students from other grades and classes to our classroom to “solve the problem by talking it over.”
When children are given the opportunity to take charge of their own problem solving, they develop inner motivation and begin to find their way to becoming confident, contributing adults. They acquire a sense of pride that has nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with conviction. They don’t do things so someone will like them or because they hope to get some recognition or another reward. They become true givers, because they have something extra to give. I believe that we will never get to altruism without empathy.
Empathy and the 3 R’s
Debates on what constitutes a “good” education often pit the proponents of the “three R’s” against those who place an emphasis on the need for schools to inculcate values. What is heartening to me is the growing body of thought that not only links these two positions but places empathy at the foundation of what is essential to academic success.
An empathic person has not only learned to understand the feelings, behaviour and intentions of others but also cares. Being able to communicate that understanding requires emotional literacy. The cognitive scientist B.F. Jones writes, “Successful students often recognize that much of their success involves their ability to communicate with others . . . they are also able to view themselves and the world through the eyes of others. This means . . . examining beliefs and circumstances of others, keeping in mind the goal of enhanced understanding and appreciation. . . . Successful students value sharing experiences with persons of different backgrounds as enriching their lives.”8
A program that focuses on the development of empathy opens the doors of social and emotional learning for children, giving them skills of emotional perception that strengthen their sense of self and their ability to connect to and collaborate effectively with others throughout childhood and adolescence. This learning comes from emotion shared with classmates, attunement with the baby and communication with adults who are on the same emotional wavelength.
A school vice-principal who is also a Roots of Empathy instructor once shared just such a moment with me:
By the time of Jenna’s second visit to the classroom, she was almost four months old and trying very hard to roll over. When we spoke about this in the post-family-visit class, the children found it awesome that a baby so small could be so determined, could put so mu ch energy and concentration into this single accomplishment. They were particularly intrigued with what a little gymnast Jenna was as she grasped her feet and pulled them up. “She really, really wants to roll over—you can see it in her face and in her whole body!”
What was even more perceptive in this group of six- and seven-year-olds was the profound understanding of the concept of frustration. “It is so hard to want to do something really badly and just not be able to do it.” There was general agreement on that. Then Daniel, with one of those insights that young children frequently show but which never fail to amaze the adults in their lives, said, “It must be so scary to not be able to control your own body.” What an intuitive sense Daniel gave us of the complexity of emotions we experience when we are confronted with something new—the eagerness to make it happen, the thrill of discovery, and yet, the fear of not being in control.
The children were full of anticipation, awaiting Jenna’s third visit. We had discussed their predictions about what she would be able to do by now and “rolling over” was a hot favourite. On the family-visit day, Jenna’s mother placed her on her back on the green blanket. Almost immediately, she started twisting her body, stretching her arms, and swinging her feet off the floor and over to the side. Within seconds, she had flipped over onto her tummy and the class went wild. Every child was clapping and cheering. There was a community of delight that Jenna had reached a new milestone.
Daniel turned to Shakeel and said, “See, Shakeel, just like you. She can do it now.” In the general excitement, no one asked Daniel what he meant. Later that morning, the children were drawing. Shakeel drew a picture of himself learning to ride his bike. “Just like Jenna,” he said. Shakeel explained how difficult it was to learn to ride a two-wheeler. He had experienced lots of frustration. He was so glad that Daniel had been helping him after school and stuck with him till he was able to do it. Daniel had told him he deserved to succeed because he had worked so hard for so long to get it right.
It all clicked into place. Jenna’s milestone, Shakeel’s milestone. The children had transferred their insights in the classroom to their world outside the classroom. The vehicle was empathy.
This was a rich experience for everyone involved. Together, around their eagerness for the baby’s achievement, they shared an emotion, established a strong sense of wishing others well and formed the kind of connection that binds people together and builds civil societies.
The immediate gains for children in the Roots of Empathy class are skills that enable them to be understood and to understand, and the critical blending of emotion, cognition and memory that will make them successful learners. And as future parents, they gain living experience of a model of competent parenting that they can bring to raising, caring for and teaching their own children. And, perhaps, most importantly of all, each of these advantages builds on the other to enrich our everyday interactions and creates the base for a society that values collaboration, interdependence and respects the voice of every member.
