The American Heritage Dictionary defines empathy: Identification with and understanding of another's situation, feelings and motives.
My daughter felt this was one of the important skills that I had taught her, and placed it on a list of topics that she thought I should share. I confess I have kind of put this topic off because it is difficult to explain.
I guess first and foremost, when my children were ill I expressed a lot of empathy. I made them my priority until they felt well enough to eat normal and play normal again. But when they were miserable, I was right there as much as physically possible. I held them, sat with them, listened to their feelings and their complaints. I put myself in their shoes and gave them the love, care, respect, and attention required to let them know I understood how badly they really felt. Children do not have the life experience to realize that illness goes away and you are going to feel well again soon. Sometimes they are afraid that maybe their illness is fatal. Even though this fear may seem silly to us, to them it is real.
When my children would come home from school and complain about a crabby teacher that was usually nice, I would take the opportunity to point out the thousands of reasons that the teacher could have been having a bad day. I would try to relate it to experiences they were familiar with or age appropriate for them to understand.
Quite often, children can be very mean to each other. Many times my children would come home with stories of instances on the playground where children were mean to other children. I tried to encourage them to help the child that was being picked on or at least approach them after the incident to make sure that they were alright.
There were many instances in organized sports where other kids on the team would express unhappiness with the way that they played that day. I would express the fact that nobody on the team is trying to miss the ball on purpose. Are you playing the best that you can, yes, then that is all that we can ask for of you. Sometimes it would be another parent that has too much invested in the outcome of a game that is supposed to be teaching our children sportsmanship and teamwork.
Another saying that has been popular in our household is "treat others like you would like to be treated." By following this simple directive, my children learned to behave towards others "the way you would want them to behave towards you". So if they were to mistreat each other or say something unkind, I would ask them how they would feel to be treated that way. (This method is more difficult to explain to toddlers, they don't seem to be able to separate the action from the person and how it would effect them.) Sometimes, you may need to come up with several examples, not just the incident that sparked the lesson.
Since our children learn so much from our behavior and our example, we need to be careful how we are presenting ourselves. On the other hand, if we show empathy for their trials and tribulations, we too will receive empathy when we are not feeling well or something upsetting has occurred in our lives. These are steps to becoming a family of grown ups that genuinely care about each other. We show respect for how they are feeling and they learn to show respect for our feelings as well.
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