Teaching Empathy
Fri Jan 18, 2008 at 09:41:41 AM PDT
Cross-posted at Fussbucket
How do you teach your child to really care about others? Some use books. Some talk about how a friend feels when another friend does something hurtful. According to this feature in ParentMap magazine, one program that's just starting in ten Seattle schools begins with learning to care for a baby.
The program [called Roots of Empathy] is elegant in its simplicity. Every three weeks during the school year, a baby and parent, recruited from the community, visit the classroom (kindergarten to eighth grade) with a certified Roots of Empathy instructor. The instructor helps the students learn about the baby’s development, celebrate the baby’s milestones, and learn about what it takes to raise a baby.
Over the course of the school year, the students watch "their" baby reach its first milestones. The article says the children in the program become totally engaged when the baby visits, focusing intensely on the infant. Along the way, they develop feelings of protectiveness and love.
That love is key to developing empathy, and to refusing to allow others to be mistreated. "When a child becomes protective of a baby, the next level is the child doesn’t want anyone to hurt that baby," says Wendie Bramwell, a Roots of Empathy instructor at Sacajawea Elementary School in Seattle. "So why is it OK with a classmate?"
The hope is that fostering these kinds of feelings might be a way to stop kids from bullying. According to the article, a recent National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) study found 29 percent of students had been involved in bullying, either doling it out or sucking it up. And most of the time (as much as 85 percent), when bullying occurs, other students are standing around watching. Ouch. A 2004 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that each day, as many as 160,000 children stay home from school because they’re afraid of being bullied. Double ouch.
And if that's not enough of a reason, other research suggests that social and emotional skills contribute to academic success. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago recently completed an analysis of 300 research studies. They found that fully 50 percent of academic success is dependent on social and emotional literacy; the other 50 percent on traditional intelligence, the article says. Simply put: Raise your kid’s social and emotional competence, and you raise his test scores.
"We do know that kids with higher levels of empathy have more satisfying relationships in life and tend to be more successful in the workplace," says Miriam Hirschstein, a Roots of Empathy instructor at Seattle’s John Stanford International School and an educational psychologist at the University of Washington’s Center on Infant Mental Health and Development. "Everything is intertwined. Kids who do well academically are better socially, more empathetic, happier."
"If you foster empathy in a child, you have created a gateway to finding the humanity in another person," says Mary Gordon, founder of Roots of Empathy. "That is the core of human relations — the core of parenting. We are all wired to become competent loving human beings through our key relationships."
What do you think? Do you think the nurturing feelings kids get from caring for a baby can translate into being more considerate of their peers? It's an interesting idea.
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