Empathy. It is often confused with sympathy. Sympathy is feeling sorry for another person. Empathy is recognizing another’s struggles and understanding and feeling what they are experiencing.

It’s feeling someone else’s joy, pain, or confusion. Empathy is what helps us connect to others. All anyone has to do to know that our society is lacking empathy is read the comments on a social media thread, visit a playground at recess time, or turn on the nightly news.

So how do you teach empathy? Researchers call empathy a disposition. Dispositions are traits that employers often describe as “soft skills”, qualities like curious, honest, analytical, etc.

According To Ron Ritchhart, senior research associate at Harvard’s Project Zero and the author of several books about culture and visible thinking, “The key aspect of these dispositions, even though they are manifest in the exhibition of specific skills and actions, is that they cannot be directly taught or directly tested. Dispositions must be enculturated – that is, learned through immersion in a culture.” (Ritchhart, “Creating Cultures of Thinking...”)

In other words, you cannot directly teach empathy to children, it must be modeled and a part of your family’s culture. It must be how your family “does things.”


How do I do that?

Shifting the culture of your family sounds incredibly hard and kind of highbrow, doesn’t it? Instead, focus on the word modeling. It’s a bit like dieting. Small, consistent daily steps yield big results.

• Talk to your child about others’ feelings. “It hurts people’s feelings when they’re called names. See how she has tears in her eyes? She’s sad.”
• Read stories aloud to your children. Picture books are fabulous models for empathy. Ask: “How do you think the character felt when that happened?” and “How would you have felt if that had happened to you?”
• Validate your child’s emotions, even when they are difficult. “I can see that you’re angry about . . . it’s okay to feel mad. When you are done being angry, we can do …”
• Use “I” messages. “I don’t like it when you take toys away from me. It makes me mad.”
• Empathize with your child. “I understand why you’re feeling left out. Your brother and his friend want to play by themselves. You can play with me.”
• Make suggestions for how your child can show empathy to others. “Sofia’s dog passed away. She’s so sad. Let’s send her a card to let her know we’re thinking about her.”
• Reconsider the phrase, “I’m sorry.” While important, apologizing does not teach empathy. Help your child recognize the other person’s feelings or perspective. Identifying the cause-and-effect relationship between your child’s actions and their effect is more impactful.
• Remember that the spotlight is always on you. Pay attention to your own interactions with other people. How do you speak to them? How do you respond in frustrating situations? When you fall short, model selfreflection about the situation and what you will do differently next time. Demonstrating how you learn from your mistakes will have a significant impact on your child’s resiliency.

Modeling empathy is about how you talk to your child about their own emotions and the emotions of others. It requires awareness. Small shifts in how you communicate with your child will yield big results.