Roots of Empathy. Mary Gordon
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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