I just LOVE this article by Genevieve of The Way of the Peaceful Parent. It is worth reading and re-reading, imo. An excerpt: --- --- --- Children tend to receive a lot of appeals to empathize with the person whose line they’ve crossed. “Look how sad your brother is”, “how would you like it if somebody grabbed your toy”, “now you’ve made me very very sad” displayed with an exaggeration of sadness, “children won’t want to play with you when you do that”, “that’s not how friends act”, “that wasn’t a nice thing to do, was it”, “now Granny’s not happy about what you did, she’s angry that you broke her vase, poor Granny, go and say sorry now”. Children mostly learn that they’ve crossed a line through the feedback of others. The image comes to mind of travelling in another country, there’s a lot of strict cultural rules about what’s okay and not okay and we only learn that we’ve been inappropriate when we get the feedback – how scary! We’d truly hope they had compassion for our lack of prior immersion into their culture and see our clunsiness as lack of awareness rather than lack of care or respect. Children learn about empathy mostly through the direct experience of being empathized with and feeling how that helps them feel better. Which leads to the understanding that empathy helps *people* feel better.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 08:24:23 +0000
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