Teaching empathy to youngsters, or maybe not

Learn by Cooing: Empathy Lessons From Little Tykes – WSJ.com

And I was inspired to read that article and to write this post by a friend at Newsvine.

A new trend from our northern neighbors is sweeping trendy parts of America, notably our Great Northwest. It does seem counter-intuitive, though — our Great Northwest is known these days not so much for where the pure and intelligent hippies went but rather for the precision with which it adapted and rolled out trends which have served to shape our society — Microsoft and grunge arent entirely disconnected movements, which can be easily seen (or heard) by listening to most ClearChannel “rock” over the past 10 years, which has taken the Teen Spirit and run it through as many digital filters it could find. Even though fans of the form find it distasteful, American pop music has gone directly from Alice in Chains to Nickelback, and nobody is winning in that regard.

So now we have Empathy Babies, who come to us from “Roots of Empathy,” a product of a Newfoundland kindergarten teacher. The idea was to use the natural and innocent reactions of babies to impress upon older children the valuable concept of empathy. Empathy, here, seems a strange victim of today’s hyper-commercial nanny state. But only at first. Empathy is defined as the ability to recognize and directly feel, or associate with, the feelings of another person. Empathy, as many of learned somewhere between The Hardy Boys and Julius Caesar, is distinct from sympathy, which is the acknowledgement or understanding of another person’s feelings.

In each, the fllter, or set of information, is usually the same. But for empathy to arise in an individual, that individual must, even for a very short time, identify with the feelings of another person. After reading both the WSJ article and the Roots of Empathy website, I’m not sure that the people in charge of this program actually understand the difference between empathy and sympathy. It seems that the reactions they are looking for, in the target crowd of youngsters, are compassion, understanding and sympathy.

Empathy is a tough one. It’s a lofty goal, but one not easily molded from the abstract into something that teachers or students can definitively recognize. The Wikipedia entry on Empathy includes this list of similar emotions and, helpfully, describes the evidence we see in our person of interest:

Sympathy is, “I’m sorry for your sadness, I wish to help.”
Pity is, “Things are bad for you, you seem as though you need help.”
Emotional Contagion is, “You feel sad and now I feel sad.”
Empathy is, “I feel your sadness.”
Apathy is, “I don’t care how you feel. “
Telepathy is, “I read your sadness without you expressing it to me in any normal way.”

It is a stretch for even many adults, I’ve found, to feel true empathy for another person. But it’s not uncommon to see evidence of sympathy or compassion. On the other hand, perhaps what I’m really saying is that the evidence — the outward behavior — which seems to indicate sympathy — is more accessible from the cognitive standpoint as well as from the behavioral standpoint. So when we “teach” sympathy, are we really teaching sympathy or are we teaching how to behave sympathetically.

I suppose the hook regarding these Empathy Babies is that children, whose behavior and expressions of emotion are believed to be more direct, more “pure,” than those of adults. In this way, it makes sense, if we can agree that youngsters in school are able to behave consistent with sympathy in a more honest way than they will manage as they age, to target this younger group for emotional education. Lets step away from this analysis for a moment.

According to the article, the goal of the Empathy Babies program is:

…that children — typically from kindergarten to eighth grade — can learn by observing the emotional connection between the babies and their parents, who volunteer for the program and who are with them in the classroom. It’s part of a wave of programs aimed at boosting the “emotional literacy” of youngsters in schools by getting them to recognize and talk about their feelings rather than act out aggressively.

Emotional literacy, whether it draws out empathy or sympathy, is absolutely an important goal in our efforts to raise our children in a productive environment, a healthy environment, and a safe environment. The context, too, is obvious, and I’m introduced to a new euphemism. In this case, bullying is referred to as, “proactive aggression.” Interesting bit of language control there — these educators are perhaps trying to wrestle away the (non-existent, by the way) word “proactive” from the positive side of business communications and into the negative end of schooltime social dynamics. I’m not sure that I’d ever want to refer to a bully as being “proactive,” though. Maybe it’s my business-brain, conditioned through years of nonsensical performance reviews and financial goals. But I dont think so. I think of bullying as more of a reaction — thereby eliminating it from the context of “proaction,” which I will stop using for reasons of Common Sense. To bully is to react to a perceived slight. Bullies, we’ve been taught, are famously insecure and have relatively low self-esteem. Yes, they are aggressive, but only because they find a target who personifies the source of the bully’s insecurities.

But enough of that. These kinds of language inaccuracies — using language imprecisely, you will find, is one of my favorite targets of self-perceived intellectuals — run through the article and the program’s literature, but in such a way as to retain some respectable degree of consistency. We are, then trying to teach our children that other children (especially more helpless ones) have real feelings, which can be explained, understood, and responded to, in a positive way. This is very good information for children to have beaten into the little minds. I’m just not sure how much this actually accomplishes. Here is an event taken from one of the group’s “experiments” (which apparently dont need to conform to any particular “adult”-sized ethical boundaries):

Mary Gordon, the 60-year-old founder of Roots of Empathy, has experienced this unruliness firsthand. A few years ago, Ms. Gordon, a former kindergarten teacher from Newfoundland, led a visit of an empathy class at a Toronto school for Adrienne Clarkson, then the governor general of Canada, and her husband, the novelist John Ralston Saul. The visitors were to see an exercise showing how the baby reacted to novelty.

After the empathy baby’s mother put a spoonful of spinach in her daughter’s mouth, the infant arched back, gave her mother a look and sprayed everything green within a 2-foot radius in front of her, says Ms. Gordon.

The class’s conclusion: The baby’s first reaction was to withdraw from new experiences rather than embrace them.

Honestly, thats not my first reaction, nor would it be my conclusion. My conclusion would have something to do with the well-known (among empathetic parents everywhere) immaturity of our children’s tastebuds, especially as they relate to vegetables (see the section called “Food Neophobia”). Because, honestly, the idea of a new toy or a new game or a new face very often inspires positive reactions from infants. So, while these children may be learning how to initiate the process of feeling empathy, or sympathy, what-have-you, we might need to do a better job with the big picture of Emotional Literacy.

Another good example of how this article made me feel just the slightest bit uneasy:

The 8-year-old says the class has helped teach him how to understand how his baby brother is feeling. “When his face is pale white, I know he’s happy, and when it’s bright red, I know he’s mad,” he says.

I think it might be a better idea for that 8-year-old to learn about the symptoms of hypoxia, which can indicate a seizure, severe anemia or, as I learned first hand when Seven (our seven-year-old) went pale after a dose of infant’s cough syrup, vasovagal syncope.

Further descriptions of what happens to these elementary-aged children after being exposed to drooling, crapping, screaming infants seems to point to a more behavioral-based reaction model, which is consistent with the idea that children at this age are amazingly able to absorb information coming at them from all directions. They are too young to start having to filter out any of the bad stuff. And so, exposure at this age to the bad stuff — the kinds of emotions deserving of a little empathy, after all, while it’s not necessarily a bad thing and might quite possibly be rather productive, I have doubts as to how focused their learning is on the empathetic values of human relationships. It’s more likely, I think that these kids are reacting using the language that they have been introduced to by their eager, trend-setting educators.

But, of course, the Course does provide evidence:

In studies involving more than 2,000 children over the past seven years, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver found a drop in aggressive behavior among students who were in classrooms with empathy babies, while there were typically increases in aggressive acts among comparison groups that didn’t take the course. In one study, researchers found 88% of those children who displayed “proactive aggression” — another term for bullying — showed less aggressive behavior after taking a Roots of Empathy course.

Not exactly overwhelming evidence, and I’d like to see more long-term studies, including a peek into how these students who were exposed to empathy babies self-identify using words like compassion and empathy once they grow up into functioning adults, whose lack of even sympathy is apparent on a daily basis to many who pay attention. It’s easy, even during these chaotic days of youth, to control a child’s cognitive environment in such a way as to focus their words and behavior in certain ways. And having a school environment with fewer bullies is welcome news to children and teachers alike. But I’d be curious to know about any long-lasting effects, especially since I’m sitting here not much trusting the behavioral-cognitive connection that these educators infer from their charges.

But what is clear is that the program is expanding. I know that Seven, in the first grade, has been exposed to information about bullies. His school hall walls are lined with reminders and catchy phrases to be on the lookout for bullies everywhere, and I pray that he and his brother have better experiences than I did at that age. I’m just not sure that having them study infants is really the best way to accomplish this.

I’m reminded of a dog-eared copy of some parenting magazine I was reading at my doctor’s office recently. Parenting magazines are certainly not on the cutting edge of social change — as we dads know all too well, they can barely muster a mention of a paternally-driven young man, despite the evidence — but sometimes these trusty volumes can show us what we already know. This particular magazine had as its cover focus the idea of putting our children into volunteering efforts. And that idea immediately struck a chord with me.

Taking a child to a retirement home for an afternoon of reading, or sharing their pets, or donating a birthday present to a child in need — at the hospital or holiday drive alike — reinforces unstaged contact with truly sympathetic situations. We did this recently — it wasnt our idea, at first, but one of Seven’s friends had, as her birthday party wish, a request for all gifts to be sent to the local hospital instead of brought to her party. A few months later, Seven found himself doing an overnight at the ER (another story for another time) — perfectly okay, healthwise, just a little maternal panic. And while I was enjoying the opportunity to cuddle up with him in the afternoon on the hospital bed watching Scooby-Doo movies, a nurse’s aid from the pediatrics unit paid a visit to us. It happened to be Seven’s birthday this time, and she brought him a gift.

And thats when I realized that the gifts that we had at one time donated to the hospital were now, in a way, making themselves come full-circle.

And so Seven got to see first-hand what it meant to need a gift like that in that setting, and that, more than all of the time he’d spent watching his younger brother grow up, spit up, mess up, and generally be a baby, was a unique teaching opportunity for the lessons of true empathy. So while I’ll still be on the lookout for trendier substitutes, might I recommend a donation or two, or a trip or three to your local hospital or retirement home or soup kitchen. They are old enough, even so young, to take part, to lend a hand, and to learn a lesson.

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