Roots of Empathy. Mary Gordon
Читать онлайн книгу.
eyelid and eyebrow. This boyfriend was also her pimp and was attempting to get her addicted to crack so that she would sell herself more willingly. She explained that she didn’t want to come to the program because the other teen mothers would tell her to leave him, and she said to me, “He’s really sorry, he’s never going to do it again, and he loves me.” This moment was etched in my mind because I could see her little baby girl growing up to repeat the pattern of her mother’s life. This young teen had been physically abused by her mother and sexually abused by her mother’s various boyfriends. She had received little or no positive nurturing from her alcohol-addicted mother and was now craving affection and attention in any way she could get it, even at the risk of violence to herself and her child. The challenge was to prevent her little daughter from following in her mother’s footsteps; the challenge was to find a way out of repeating the cycle of addiction, violence, low literacy and poor parenting that was being passed on from one generation to the next.
Just as empathy lay at the heart of the parenting programs, it was also clearly the foundation of a program that could reach children and offer them not just a window on nurturing, responsive parenting, but an entire spectrum of social and emotional learning. It was clear to me that there was not enough room in the school curriculum to give these essential aspects of empathic human development the attention they deserved. More than that, I daily witnessed how learning was compromised as children’s energies were depleted through the challenges of becoming part of the social group in the classroom or through coping with social aggression in the schoolyard. I visualized an approach that would strengthen the ability of children to build a solid sense of self-worth and caring relationships with others, a concrete program that would help them cre ate an image of themselves as people who could make a difference in the world.
In 1996, Maytree Foundation3 funded the conceptual development and implementation of a pilot Roots of Empathy program. The pilot was launched in kindergarten classrooms. An enthusiastic principal and a nucleus of compassionate teachers, familiar with the successes being experienced by children and parents in the parenting programs, opened their doors and worked with me through the evolution of the first year. There was a clear logic to parenting programs for parents—they have an immediate need and a strong interest in interacting with and learning about their children’s development. But what were the features about learning to be a parent that would catch the imagination of children and enrich their experience of the world? For them, the years when they would be responsible for a baby seemed far away. What would make it real for them? In the original parenting programs, the learning for preschoolers was solidly experiential—activities were designed to allow them to see and touch and feel, to connect the concrete with the concept. As I started to apply the principles of experience-based learning to building concepts of responsive parenting in programs for school-aged children, it was clear that the concrete “learning tools” had to be the relationship between a parent and baby. I engaged and trained the people I knew to be the most knowledgeable about and committed to the value of the parent–child relationship. They were the parenting workers I had worked with for many years and they stood with me through the first year as I built, lesson by lesson, the themes that became the Roots of Empathy program.
Once I had the idea to bring a real baby and parent into the classroom, giving children the opportunity to observe the baby’s development and the interaction between the baby and the parents over a school year, I could see the enormous scope for revealing how this relationship becomes the venue for developing social and emotional competence. Thinking through the dynamics of interaction in such a program, I realized that the learning would flow from the baby, that the baby would be the teacher. Over the years, I had witnessed countless times the impact a baby makes on the people around him. In the realms of emotional response and trust, a baby has no “agenda.” He comes predisposed to love and expect the best from everyone in his sphere; he has no inhibitions or wiles to disguise how he is feeling and what he needs. He is a pure representation of what it is to be human and how to interact empathically with other humans. He is where the roots of empathy begin. In the early parenting programs that were part of the public school system in Toronto, we often had visits fro m older children in the regular classrooms who were having a rough day or acting out in class. They were permitted to visit us because it had a calming effect for them. The calming effect was the baby. There were always babies in the centre to create a flow of warmth and receptivity for each child—the frustrations and chaos of feelings that were too prickly to address head-on could be talked about through interacting with the baby.
Roots of Empathy is a program with many layers. It offers an experiential insight into competent parenting: understanding how a baby communicates, learning issues of infant safety and infant development. But it takes the learning that occurs with the baby in the classroom and builds it into a broader exploration of how humans understand and value themselves and each other. This vision was born of my conviction that babies were the perfect way to explore all that is valuable in the human experience, all that is critical in building healthy relationships, all that is indispensable in creating strong communities and a civil society. This program could teach a literacy of feeling. Through observation of the baby’s emotions, children could learn about their own emotions and the emotions of others, learn to take the perspective of another, understand the power for resolving conflict that lies in being able to see a situation and the world from another person’s viewpoint. I was convinced that the transformative potential of such a program was enormous. I had no doubt that it had the power to increase the emotional competence, the collaborative skills and the parenting capacity of a whole generation, child by child, classroom by classroom, community by community.
Many initiatives have been tried in schools to give children exposure to the role of being a parent. Children are given a plastic doll to care for, or eggs that they have to carry with them and look after. The aim of such programs is to recreate orimitate aspects of the parenting experience. What Roots of Empathy does is give children the experience directly, including interaction with a real baby in that baby’s first year of life. Our program goes deeper still—as I cannot say too often—in that it fosters the development of empathy in the students, and this is a core component of successful parenting.
All babies are powerful teachers. One of our instructors said that her first meeting with the Grade 7/8 class to which she was assigned was very intimidating and the class was quite unruly. She was nervous about the family visit, especially because one of the boys, who was coping with behavioural challenges, had said he would tell the baby that he was ugly and stupid. As soon as the mother and baby walked through the door, though, the students were mesmerized and participated positively and enthusiastically. In fact, the boy who had spoken so negatively at the earlier session was, at the end of the class, the first one to head over to the baby and ask if he could hold him. And the mother who brought her baby to that first class could hardly wait to come back the following month to show how he had grown and the new skills he had learned.
Choosing a Roots of Empathy Baby
When we work with a community interested in bringing a Roots of Empathy program to their local school, those included in the planning are not just school board staff and parents; public health nurses, youth workers or volunteers from local service organizations often play a role. These are the people who are involved in and know the community; they know which family has just welcomed a new arrival. Our advice on recruiting a Roots of Empathy family is geared towards ensuring the richest experience for the students. This means finding parents who are enthusiastic about what Roots of Empathy offers to children, are willing to share with them the important first year of their baby’s life, and can commit to a regular schedule of classroom visits. We look for families who live in the school neighbourhood, and who represent its diversity. We are not looking for “super babies” or “Gucci moms.” Borrowing from Bruno Bettelheim, I say, “We are looking for the ‘good-enough parent.’”4
Roots of Empathy babies are between two and four months old at the beginning of the program. Bringing the baby into the classroom as early in his life as possible allows for a greater range of infant development stages over the year and optimizes the learning opportunities for the students. Our emphasis on bringing a baby from the school’s neighbourhood has the added benefit of connecting a new family with the school. This helps to strengthen the sense of community between families