Roots of Empathy. Mary Gordon
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to respond appropriately to the feelings and perspectives of others. Expressed this way, it sounds simple enough. Perhaps it is only when we reflect on what happens when empathy is absent that we begin to grasp the profound, complex and fundamental role it plays in the healthy functioning of human relations.
When we think of the Holocaust or South Africa under apartheid we are horrified at the scale of cruelty perpetrated on an entire race of people. We might try to distance ours elves from the injustice by focusing on the fact it was long ago or far away and couldn’t happen here, couldn’t happen now. But think it through. Were the people who participated in these affronts to human rights, or stood by and watched them happen, fundamentally different from us? And if they weren’t, what force was at work that drew them into a situation that we find unconscionable? In both cases, a tremendous amount of propaganda, indoctrination and intimidation went into convincing the dominant population that Jews, that black South Africans, were alien, threatening or something less than human. But we know that while a great many people were either active or passive participants, many others resisted the propaganda and actively involved themselves in helping victims and struggling for change. It is crucial to understand what accounts for the difference in these two kinds of responses. The difference lies in our capacity for empathy, our ability to identify with the feelings and perspectives of others. If we cannot see the other person as human like us, we will not be able to identify with him. If we cannot put ourselves in his place, we will not recognize his experiences and feel what he feels. This failure of empathy at best leads to complicity and apathy; at worst, it leads to cruelty and violence. We could learn a lot from the nine-year-old girl with the Velcro shoe. She stood up to injustice and confronted cruelty and unfairness where she found it.
On a less historical, global scale, the same forces are at work in the bullying that plagues our schools and communities. The victim is singled out on a number of grounds—perhaps because she is smaller, weaker, has poor social skills and few friends, or is a new immigrant, talks differently, has a different skin colour. Whatever the factors, they are used to marginalize the victim, to define her as different and inferior to the dominant group. She then becomes not only the victim of the bully, but also—to a lesser, but still hurtful, degree—the victim of the onlookers. There search on bullying confirms that a strong characteristic of the bully is a lack of empathy. In the case of onlookers, fear of or admiration for the bully outweighs their ability to feel or act on empathy for the victim. The consequences for everyone are severe: a toxic environment is created in which the bullying behaviour is not challenged, and children are not given the skills and confidence to stand up to the bully, to stand up for themselves and to stand up in defence of the victim. When we do not actively work to turn this around, we are failing to give our children the tools to form healthy, respectful relationships. We are failing to show them that bullying is destructive and we are failing to give them a sense of their role as members of a civil society.
An extreme outcome of this failure can be seen in the case of Reena Virk, the fourteen-year-old British Columbia schoolgirl who died following a brutal beating by her peers. There were eight teens, seven of them girls, directly involved in the beating. Other boys and girls watched it happen and only one witness made any attempt to intervene. No one reported the attack until Reena had been missing for four days. One of the girls involved has recently been convicted of second-degree murder in Reena’s death following a third trial. At the trial, evidence was given that Reena was kicked in the head, that attempts were made to set her hair on fire and that she was held under water until she stopped moving. Among the lessons we have to learn from this tragedy is that physical bullying has been “degendered”—it can no longer be seen as the purview of the male throwing his weight around. Just as critical is the fact that most of these young people were fourteen years old. It is obvious that, if we are going to change the conditions that allow such things to happen, we have to work with ch ildren from a much earlier age.
Nature is on our side in creating strong, empathic societies. We are born with the capacity for empathy. An ability to recognize emotions transcends race, culture, nationality, social class and age. Researchers have shown photographs of human faces to people of various ages around the world. Without hesitation, the people can point out which photo shows someone who is afraid, someone who is happy, someone who is worried, someone who is sad. Our feelings, and our expression of them, are universal.2 Show a tribal chieftain in Mali a photo of a little Japanese girl who is frightened, and he will immediately be able to recognize how she is feeling—despite the differences in race, clothing and culture. The emotions, and their expression, are the same. Clearly, our emotions and the need to have them understood by others are so basic that the visible signals of how we are feeling have become essential aspects of humans around the world.
This is our deepest connection with one another. Roots of Empathy stretches children to find points of intersection. In their discussions about being sad, children may give reasons for sadness that are different—“My parents fight a lot” or “Kids make fun of me because I have two moms instead of a mom and a dad”—but there is understanding about the feeling itself, and that shared understanding creates channels of connection and belonging that lead to empathy.
Babies and toddlers will spontaneously respond to the sadness or happiness of their mother or other significant people in their lives. They are attuned to nuances of harmony or discordance. This capacity for empathy grows as the child develops a sense of self, separate from other people. The more aware the child becomes of his own emotions and their effect on him, the more he is capable of recognizing emotional states in people around him and aware of the effects created by different emotions. An eighteen-month-old will respond to the distress of another child by giving him a toy or bringing an adult over to help.3 This is the beginning of developing a moral sense and a capacity for pro-social behaviour. These stages in the development of empathy—awareness of self, understanding of emotions, ability to attribute emotions to others and take the perspective of the other person—are critical for positive socialization.4
From the outset, parents are the single most important influence on how a child’s innate capacity for empathy grows and develops. It is this first relationship that affirms the power and efficacy of human connection: Baby is hungry and starts to cry, Mommy listens and cues into Baby’s hunger, Mommy picks Baby up, comforts him and feeds him. Daddy smiles, sings Baby’s name, lifts her in the air; Baby has an answering smile, gurgles, spreads out her fingers to touch Daddy’s face. Circles of communication, understanding and connection are completed. These and similar circles are repeated throughout the first years of life. The give-and-take of reading cues and responding to cues lays the foundation for the emotional learning that allows empathy to take root and flourish.
Home is where the start is; it is where children become themselves; it is where, before the age of six, their values and attitudes are formed. The roots of empathy, laid down in the home, give children the foundation, the confidence, the strong sense of self to build relationships in the bigger world outside the home. The familiar patterns they have learned form the template for reading and responding to the behaviours and emotional expression of other children and adults. The approach to communication, caring and sorting out problems that is built into the emotional ebb and flow of family life can lead to understanding the benefits of sharing and forming friendships in the sandbox, in the schoolhouse and in the boardroom. What more valuable support can we as a society provide to children and their parents than to ensure that this early social and emotional learning, so critical to successful relationships in life is a part of our childcare and education structures? What would add more to our progress as a global society than to place at least as much value on the development of positive, fully realized human relationships as we place on the acquisition of academic skills? What greater contribution could we make to our sustainable future than to promote a development of the heart that runs parallel to the development of the mind?
Why Empathy Matters
One of the parents of a child in a Roots of Empathy class called the teacher and said, “I don’t know what you are doing in that class, but Cody has completely changed the way he treats his baby brother. He is gentle, protective and very loving.” Cody has taken to heart what he has been learning about empathy and the needs of babies in the context of the classroom and transferred it to his home situation.