I catch sight of the Latin phrase esse quam videri while putting some mail that has been mistakenly delivered to our house in my grown daughter’s old bedroom. It is written on a lime-green Post-it note that she stuck to the edge of her bookshelf several years ago. I grab a dictionary and look it up: “To be, rather than to seem.” Later, I send her a text message asking for advice on a delicate matter. She texts back, “You do You,” three single-syllable words that have a specific meaning to her but not to me. I search for “You do You” on the Urban Dictionary website: “The act of doing the things that you normally do. Nothing more, nothing less.” Along with countless other classics students and rap music fans, my daughter walks the talk of empathy, attunement, and compassion, three universal themes that are crucial building blocks to a wise and compassionate worldview.
Even though they are often used interchangeably, each of these themes has a separate and distinctive meaning. Empathy is the capacity to understand what something looks and feels like from another person’s point of view, while attunement describes the experience of feeling seen and understood. Seeing another person’s perspective, understanding how they feel, and responding with wisdom and kindness is compassion. The differences between these themes might seem minor, but in the context of a living, breathing relationship they are meaningful. By way of example, children can empathize with someone (understand the other person’s thoughts and feelings), but if they don’t connect with that person, there’s neither attunement (the other person doesn’t feel seen and understood) nor compassion (they didn’t respond to the other person wisely and with kindness). Kids can connect so deeply with someone who’s suffering that they suffer too (they feel empathy and are attuned to the other person’s experience), yet if they become so enmeshed in the other person’s feelings that they’re unable to see and respond to what’s happening objectively, they’re not able to respond with compassion. When my daughter answered my text, she was letting me know that she saw and understood what I was grappling with (she empathized), I felt seen and understood (we were attuned), and her encouragement to be myself was compassionate.
Understanding and sharing the feelings of another is a prerequisite to attunement and compassion; thus, empathy is the gateway to both. In Conscious Discipline, Becky Bailey explains that children’s capacity to empathize emerges early in childhood and develops progressively through the teenage years. Before the age of six, children recognize that a friend is upset, but their expressions of comfort and sympathy might not be very helpful because they still view the world almost entirely through their own perspectives. Between six and nine, children’s capacity to empathize with friends and family members becomes more reciprocal, even though it remains rather narrow and focused on specific situations that they can relate to. Later, in preadolescence, children begin to generalize and empathize with people living in different times, places, and cultures.
Older children and teens demonstrate interpersonal attunement when they tune in to another person’s inner world with an open mind and the other person feels seen and understood. The term attunement is more often used to refer to how a parent responds to a child, however, than to how a child responds to a parent or friend. It is often paired with the term attachment to describe the emotional relationship between parent and child. An attached, attuned relationship creates a deep and enduring emotional bond that connects children with their parents over time and space. A secure attachment to a parent or other caregiver offers children the psychological safety of a home base from which they can venture out with confidence into a community that’s larger than their nuclear families. How children view the world as adults, and how they steer their way through it, depends on many factors, including genetics, temperament, and IQ. One major predictor of how children will fare as adults is their early life experience. To parents this can feel like an enormous responsibility, even when they intellectually understand that there’s no such thing as a perfect parent and that the ideal parent is just good enough.
Young children grow stronger and more autonomous when they respond to their parents’ small failures appropriately and are able to roll with it when parents are cranky, late, or forgetful. Pediatrician and child analyst Dr. D. W. Winnicott, who coined the phrase “good-enough mother,” explains that the good-enough mother “starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure. Her failure to adapt to every need of the child helps them adapt to external realities.” Even the best-intentioned and most enlightened parent can’t be perfectly in tune with his or her child all of the time. Luckily, perfection isn’t necessary—thus the term good enough. Mistakes are not just OK, they’re to be expected; what’s important is that parents and children repair their mistakes by talking them through.
Dr. Mark Epstein, author of several books on meditation and psychotherapy, draws a connection between good-enough parenting and good-enough meditation in The Trauma of Everyday Life: “The steady application of the meditative posture, like the steadiness of an attuned parent, allows something inherent in the mind’s potential to emerge, and it emerges naturally if left alone properly in a good enough way.” The meditative posture that Epstein is referring to is an example of internal attunement (as opposed to interpersonal attunement). As with the spotlight of attention and the floodlight of attention, it would be a misunderstanding to consider internal and interpersonal attunement as entirely separate from one another, even though it’s helpful to present them that way. Just as the floodlight of attention includes the spotlight, interpersonal attunement includes internal attunement; when parents are fully present with their children, they’re attuned not only to their child’s internal experiences but also to their own. Interpersonal and internal attunement happen all the time, both inside and outside of family relationships. When team members play together in a basketball game, they are attuned to one another and to themselves, as are actors when they’re improvising a comedy sketch.
Describing mindfulness as “paying attention with kindness to me, other people, and the world” allows young children to practice differentiating between self and other even when they’re in a developmental window that’s described as egocentric. The next two games, Your Own Bubble and Pass the Cup, also help young children differentiate between self and other in a developmentally appropriate way.
your own bubble
We imagine a bubble around us so we can become aware of where our bodies are in relation to other people and things.
LIFE SKILLS Focusing, Caring, Connecting |
TARGET AGES Young Children |
1. Talking points: Can you describe a bubble for me?
2. I’m going to make an imaginary bubble around my body.
Mark your bubble by drawing an imaginary circle around your body with your pointer finger. Then, reach out and explore the edges of your bubble with the palms of your hands by moving them up, down, and around in a circle. Finally, pretend to decorate your bubble and describe how you’re decorating it to the children.
3. Now you’re going to create your own bubble. Can you show me where it is and describe it to me?
Pretend to test the edges of the children’s bubbles with the palms of your hands.
4. As we play more mindful games together, I’ll keep reminding you to check your bubble.
TIPS
1. To help young children develop self-control, ask them to see how close they can get the palms of their hands to your palms without touching. Then ask children to see how close they can get their shoulders to your shoulders without touching, and then their elbows to your elbows. Remind children to be careful not to burst their imaginary bubbles (or yours).
Like Balloon Arms, Tick-Tock, Zip-Up, and Your Own Bubble, the next game, Pass the Cup, is a playful way for young children to build concentration and develop awareness of how their bodies move through space. While encouraging teamwork and coordination, Pass the Cup also builds young children’s awareness of their bodies as they relate to other people (arms, legs, hands, elbows) and things (tables, chairs, cups of water), as well as awareness of the quality of their movements (sluggish, quick, fluid, jerky). To prepare, fill a small, unbreakable cup with water to about one inch from the rim.
Using teamwork and paying attention to what’s happening around us, we pass a cup filled with water without spilling a drop. First we pass it with our eyes open and then with our eyes closed.
LIFE SKILLS Focusing, Caring, Connecting |
TARGET AGES Young Children |
LEADING THE GAME
1. We’re going to pass this cup to one another without spilling any water. What do we have to pay attention to so that the water does not spill? (Looking at the cup and one another, feeling with our hands, moving our arms slowly.)
2. Are you ready? Let’s try it.
Help children silently pass the cup of water back and forth between them two or three times (or around the circle).
3. Now let’s see if we can pass the cup with our eyes closed. What types of things will we need to pay attention to if we can’t talk or see? (The sound of clothing rustling, the feeling of the person sitting next to us moving, the feeling of the cup in our hands.) Help children silently pass the cup with their eyes closed.
TIPS
1. If playing with very young children, pass a closed water bottle first to practice. When children are ready, graduate to passing an open cup.
2. Fill the cup high enough that it’s challenging for children to not spill the water, but not too high that they can’t be successful at the game.
3. If playing with a group, sit in a circle. After the first round, change the direction you pass the cup.
In the next set of activities, children apply the life skills and themes that they’ve learned through introspective games to their conversations with friends and family.
hello game
We take turns saying, “Hello” to one another and noticing the color of each other’s eyes to help us focus and practice making eye contact.
LIFE SKILLS Focusing, Caring, Connecting |
TARGET AGES All Ages |
LEADING THE GAME
1. When we look into someone’s eyes, we sometimes feel strong feelings—we might feel shy, embarrassed, excited, or happy. And we might feel different every time we do it.
2. Let’s try it together now. I’m going to say, “Hello” to you and tell you what color your eyes are, and then you’ll have a turn. “Hello, Sara. Your eyes look brown.”
3. Now you try.
4. How did it feel?
5. Let’s try it again.
TIPS
1. Play the Hello Game around the dinner table: “Good evening, Amy. Your eyes look hazel.” Or do it first thing in the morning: “Good morning . . .”
2. The wording of the prompt “Your eyes look” as opposed to “Your eyes are” is deliberate; it allows children to practice observing without analyzing or jumping to a conclusion. As a practical matter, it’s common for children to disagree about eye color, and the phrasing of this question eliminates that problem, too.
3. Don’t be surprised if young children feel shy at first and cover their eyes, especially if they’re playing with new friends or with adults they don’t know well. When this happens, describe what you see: “Hello, Alex. Your eyes are covered with your hands!”
The prompt for the Hello Game can be changed in countless ways to develop children’s awareness of what’s happening within and around them and to make the game more interesting for older children. For instance, by asking kids to send one another a friendly wish or to name something or someone they’re thankful for, the prompt becomes an expression of the themes of kindness or appreciation. When children ask a question and listen to their friend’s response without an agenda, they practice other themes like keeping an open mind and attunement. Here are a few additional Hello Game prompts to experiment with:
• Name one thing you are seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, or touching right now.
• Do you have a friendly wish for yourself? For your friends? For the planet?
• Are you thinking about the past, present, or future right now?
• Is your body language telegraphing what you’re thinking and feeling right now to your partner?
• Take a look at your partner’s body language and guess what she’s thinking and feeling.
• If you could choose a sensory superpower, what would it be? How would you use it to help the world?
Listening with awareness can be difficult, if not impossible, when projections or biases cloud kids’ or their parents’ perspectives. The next game, Reflecting Back, offers several tried-and-true guidelines to help older children, teens, and parents stay on track.
We use these guidelines to help us speak and listen in a helpful and compassionate way.
LIFE SKILLS Focusing, Caring, Connecting |
TARGET AGES Older Children, Teens |
GUIDELINES FOR REFLECTING BACK
1. We remember that nonverbal cues (tone of voice, gesture, intensity, facial expression) speak volumes and that our body language can send someone a message that we don’t intend to send.
2. We listen without imposing our agenda.
3. We notice our biases and internal reactions to what’s being said and do our best not to dwell on them.
4. We remind ourselves that it’s natural to silently rehearse what we’re about to say before we say it and to think about what we said after we’ve said it. We try not to do either of those things, though, and we do our best to stay in the present.
5. We remind ourselves that silence is a meaningful part of conversation.
6. We remind ourselves that guessing what might be going on in someone else’s experience, or comparing our own experiences to theirs, tends not to be as helpful as asking questions.
7. We give ourselves a break when we drift off into our own thoughts or unintentionally direct the conversation toward our own agenda. We remember that the moment we recognize we’ve been distracted or that the conversation has gotten offtrack is a moment of mindful awareness and an opportunity to begin again.
TIPS
1. “Nonjudgmental awareness” is an important theme in mindfulness training that is sometimes misunderstood by children and adults. In relational games that emphasize Caring and Connecting, like the ones in this chapter, we ask kids and parents to suspend judgment and listen to what’s being said with an open mind and without jumping to conclusions. This instruction is not a suggestion that they let go of judgments entirely when they practice mindfulness, however. Through games that emphasize Focusing, for example, children learn that wisely choosing where to direct their attention in the moment requires judgment, and through games that emphasize Seeing children learn that it takes judgment to navigate the world with wisdom and compassion.
Even with the best intentions, kids can hurt a friend’s feelings by blurting something out before they think it through. Pretty much everyone has made this misstep and felt lousy about it later. The sequence of questions in the next game can prevent this from happening and is an example of how I teach children discernment. I learned these questions from Joanie Martin, the retired director of the elementary school at the Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica, California. When my kids were in the elementary school, she had posted these three questions in the school’s entry hall to remind children to speak to one another respectfully.
We ask ourselves three questions to check that something we are about to say is helpful and kind: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?
LIFE SKILLS Reframing, Caring, Connecting | TARGET AGES All ages |
LEADING THE DISCUSSION
1. Talking points: Sometimes we can hurt someone’s feelings even if we don’t mean to. How can we know if something we’re about to say is respectful? What can we do if we accidentally hurt someone’s feelings?
2. Asking these three questions before we say something is one way to avoid hurting someone’s feelings: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?
Give examples of things you might say, and ask children to help you figure out whether they are kind and respectful by asking the three questions together.
3. Talking points: When should we ask these questions? Do you ever get a feeling that what you’re about to say might not be respectful?
Share your personal experiences, and ask children to share theirs.
4. Try asking yourself the three questions next time you get that feeling and tell me what happens.
TIPS
1. Have older children ask a fourth question: Is it the right time?
2. Remind children that they don’t need to ask these questions every time they speak, only if they catch themselves feeling that what they’re about to say may not be helpful.
3. Use Three Gates to talk about helpful speech, and use Is It Helpful? to talk about helpful actions.
4. The check-ins after relational games like the Hello Game, Reflecting Back, and Three Gates are opportunities to ask children and teens to compare how they feel after they speak and act in a warm-hearted way with how they feel after they act or speak in a way that’s angry or unkind. Through check-ins like these, and after playing games like Friendly Wishes, Mind-Body Connection, and Mind, Body, Go! kids can see that their minds and bodies are connected.
Children have an opportunity to reflect on the themes empathy and compassion when they read Not a Box, a clever picture book by Antoinette Portis. Before leading the game, make a mental note of how the book is structured: an unidentified narrative voice asks questions on the tan pages, and a bunny answers them on the red pages.
not a box
We pay close attention to the words and pictures in the book Not a Box by Antoinette Portis, to understand what the characters are thinking and how they are feeling.
LIFE SKILLS Reframing, Caring, Connecting |
TARGET AGES Young Children, Older Children |
LEADING THE DISCUSSION
1. Let’s read a story together.
Read the first tan page, where the voice asks the bunny why he’s sitting in a box.
2. Who do you think is asking the question?
Listen to children’s responses, then turn to the red page and read, “It’s not a box.”
3. What is it? How do you think the bunny feels? How do you think the person who’s asking the bunny questions feels?
Listen to children’s responses and continue reading the questions on the tan pages and the bunny’s answers. On each page ask questions like: “What is the box? How is the bunny feeling? What does the bunny want? What does the person asking questions want? How does the person asking questions feel?”
Stop after reading, “It’s NOT, NOT, NOT a box.”
4. How does the bunny feel now? What does he want? What does the person asking questions want? How do they both feel?
Listen to children’s thoughts before turning to the tan page to read the adult’s response, “Well, what is it then?”
5. What is it?
Listen to children’s responses before turning the page, where there are no words, only a picture of the bunny sitting on the box and thinking.
6. What is the bunny doing?
After listening to children’s responses, turn the page to finish the book.
7. Talking points: Can you tell a story about a time that you didn’t see something the same way someone else saw it? Can you tell a story about a time you were misunderstood? Can you tell a story about a time that a misunderstanding corrected itself?
The phrase “I wonder” is a gentle and effective way to open up a conversation about what it might be like to be in someone else’s position. For example, ask a child, “I wonder how your friend is feeling right now” or ask a teenager, “I wonder if there’s another way to look at how this happened.” Don’t forget to view these conversations through a developmental lens. Because children in preschool and early elementary school are still seeing what’s happening around them largely through their own perspectives, conversations with young children about caring are most useful if they’re placed in the context of the child’s own experience. An example of placing something in the context of a child’s personal experience is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Even when kids are developmentally able to feel and express empathy in a helpful way, it can be hard for them to do so when their own emotions are unwieldy. Strong, difficult emotions are frequently triggered by what kids think they want, even though they often don’t know what they want. (Adults run into the same problem.) For instance, older children and teens might think they want something specific from a friend (an invitation to partner on a project, for instance) when what they actually want is for the friend to hold them in mind and, in doing so, to deepen their connection. The longer kids dwell on the strong negative emotions that come in the wake of not getting what they think they want, the more their perspectives narrow and the less they are able to see what’s happening from the other person’s point of view. As a result, it becomes more likely that what they don’t want will actually come to pass. Through games that highlight Quieting, Focusing, Seeing, Reframing, Caring, and Connecting, kids learn to notice when they’re doing this and shift their perspective to see what’s happening from another person’s vantage point. Through this wider lens they can come to understand that all of us are interdependent and that everything changes.
The reflections on the themes interdependence and everything changes in the earlier section on Seeing served as reminders to older children and teens that what’s happening right now is the result of countless factors. Some of the factors are knowable, and some of them are not. As a result, kids can do their research, consider everything they learn with an open mind, and still not have enough information to see and understand another person’s situation or point of view. The wordless book Zoom by Istvan Banyai demonstrates how easy it is for kids to be mistaken about something or someone if they see only a small part of a much larger picture.
friendly and patient observer
By looking at the pictures in the book Zoom by Istvan Banyai, we see that it’s easy to jump to the wrong conclusion when we don’t have enough information.
LIFE SKILLS Reframing, Caring, Connecting | TARGET AGES All Ages |
LEADING THE GAME
1. There are no words in this book, only pictures. Let’s take a look.
2. The first page of the book is a picture of reddish-orange shapes that are pointed and have dots on them. There are dots in the space surrounding the shapes, too.
3. What do you think these pointy shapes are? What do you think the dots around the shapes are?
Listen to children’s responses.
4. Are you sure?
Turn the page to reveal a rooster with dots in the space around it.
5. It looks like it’s a rooster. But the dots are still there—what do you think they are?
Listen to children’s responses.
6. Are you sure?
Turn the page to reveal the rooster standing on something, with two children watching him from a window.
7. Do you think the children are inside or outside? How about the rooster? Is it inside or outside? The dots are still in the picture—what do you think they are?
Listen to children’s responses.
8. Are you sure?
Continue turning pages and asking questions in this pattern until it’s revealed that all of the images so far—the rooster, the children, and the farm—are toys. The dots have disappeared from the image without an explanation.
9. What is it after all? What happened to the dots?
Listen to children’s responses.
10. Are you sure?
Keep paging through the book and asking questions in this pattern until you reach the end.
11. Talking points: Tell a story about a time when you or someone else jumped to a conclusion without much information. Was your conclusion correct? Why do you think it was or wasn’t correct?
To make seeing the big picture even more difficult, what kids and parents see, think, and hear is influenced by what’s happened in their own lives. Parents project their hopes, fears, biases, and values onto their kids’ experiences, and kids project their hopes, fears, biases, and values right back onto their parents’ experiences. This interconnected, always changing web of perceptions and projections means that no one can ever know or feel the entirety of another person’s experience. But if parents and their kids try to look at what’s happening from the other person’s perspective and with an open mind, they can come pretty close. This practical understanding of the themes an open mind, interdependence, everything changes, and clarity leads to acceptance, another theme that’s central to a wise and compassionate worldview.
That we don’t know and can’t control every factor that informs other people’s actions is relatively easy to accept. It’s often more difficult to accept that we don’t know and can’t control all the factors that inform our own actions, either. This is as true for our kids as it is for us. There will always be seemingly perfect parents who look like they have it more together than we do. From the outside they seem to pack the perfect lunches, plan the perfect birthday parties, and organize the perfect cultural adventures. Acceptance gives us the space to step back, drop our preconceived notions of the ideal parent, and look at the big picture with an open mind. When we do, we recognize that everyone is limited in what he or she can do, including the seemingly perfect parents, and including us. This obvious fact of life can be remarkably elusive, and accepting it can be hard to do. Many of us find acceptance to be easier when we remind ourselves that being comfortable in our own skin is a far better form of modeling than trying to twist ourselves into metaphorical pretzels to be like somebody else. The motto of the good-enough parent might well be the one I saw written on the lime-green Post-it that my daughter stuck to the edge of her bookshelf years ago: esse qualm videri, “to be, rather than to seem.”