Empathic Mentoring, Empathic Parenting
Nurturing and Supporting Empathy in Children
SO FAR IN this book, we’ve delved into your empathic skills, your emotions, your self-care skills, your home environment, and your relationships. We’ve also focused on you as an adult. However, as we learned in Chapter 2, your empathic skills actually developed very early in your childhood, which is also when a large portion of your emotional training occurred. In this chapter, we’ll look at the development of empathy in children—not only to help you work with children (your own or others’) empathically, but also to help you understand how your own development of empathy and emotional awareness may have been supported or impeded in your childhood. Let’s start by observing a game we all played when we were babies but that we may not identify as a specific emotional and empathic teaching tool.
THE EMPATHIC GENIUS OF PEEK-A-BOO
My niece Holly sent me a video of her six-month-old daughter leaping happily in a swinglike contraption (the kind that hangs from a doorway). My grandniece jumped enthusiastically with intense focus, when suddenly Holly said her name, came in close, and said “Peek-a-boo!” My grandniece screamed, loudly! But the scream included a raucous laugh that cycled down in a few seconds to silence and a serious return to her jumping. Holly came toward her again, Peek-a-boo!, instinctually knowing, as good parents do, to wait until her baby’s fright and shock had cycled down into calmness. The game continued onward in this rhythmic way, and mom and baby had a wonderful time. Without much spoken language, and without intentionally trying to create a teaching moment, Holly and her daughter have created a fully emotive and empathic interaction that’s actually helping both of them learn to read each other and develop complex emotional and empathic skills.
Let’s look at this interaction in terms of our six aspects of empathy. Holly uses intentional Emotion Contagion to cycle her daughter through intense but manageable (and fun!) shock and fear. By timing her approaches just right, Holly is helping her daughter learn how to calm herself effectively after an emotion is activated suddenly and intensely. The baby is not simply learning how to play and interact; she’s also learning advanced Emotion Regulation skills in relation to an intense emotion. My grandniece is also learning how to identify and feel her way into, between, and out of specific emotions by reading them in her mom’s face and voice and feeling them in her own body—she’s learning advanced Empathic Accuracy skills in this game. At six months old, my grandniece is too young to be able to perform skillful Perspective Taking, and her Concern for Others hasn’t fully kicked in, because she’s in a developmental stage in which she needs to be very self-focused. She’ll develop those skills, and the related capacity for skillful Perceptive Engagement, between her first and second birthday. However, her warm, rich, and interactive bond with her mom (and dad) is setting the groundwork for her eventual development of all six aspects of empathy.
When we looked at my six aspects of empathy in Chapter 2, I included research on the development of empathy in babies. The current consensus is that the capacity for the most developed aspect of empathy—Perceptive Engagement—arises at around eighteen months in normally developing infants. But this is not true for everyone; not all babies are as lucky as my grandniece.
In their 2010 book, Born for Love, child psychiatrist Bruce Perry and science writer Maia Szalavitz track the development of empathy in infants and children. Perry is a trauma specialist who works with high-risk children whose empathy was impeded by poor parenting, chaos, trauma, or unsupportive early environments, such as large and understaffed orphanages. Using these unfortunate children as examples of how and why empathy development can go awry, Perry and Szalavitz help us understand what babies need to develop empathy (luckily, it’s not hard to provide these things, and games like peek-a-boo are a surprisingly important part of the process). Perry and Szalavitz also provide excellent suggestions for what you can do to support empathy throughout childhood, even in children whose empathy development was disturbed in some way. Certainly, there is an important developmental window that occurs prior to that eighteen-month milestone where babies, like my grandniece, develop skills in Emotion Contagion, Empathic Accuracy, and Emotion Regulation. But these empathic skills can be addressed even into adulthood—just as you’re doing right now in this book.
WHAT BABIES NEED TO DEVELOP EMPATHY
Simply put, to develop empathy, a baby needs warm, nurturing attention from one or two reliable, central caregivers who touch, interact with, and respond attentively to his or her unique emotions and needs. Certainly, many other people should interact with and care for the baby so that he or she can learn to trust and read others, but this central bond is crucial. When babies are raised in orphanages, where the staff rotates, they don’t often develop strong empathic skills. Even if those babies are fed well, kept warm, and protected from abuse, they aren’t able to spend long periods of time connecting with their caregiver—gazing at him or her, learning to smile and smile back, smelling and touching him or her, and learning that whenever they need anything, that trusted caregiver will respond. Babies need to have their emotions mirrored back to them reliably in vocal tone, in touch, and in facial expressions so that they can begin to organize and understand their emotions. They need to interact with specific people whom they can learn very well. As I wrote earlier, empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill that develops in interactions. Babies, especially in their first year, need as much warm, emotive, and intimate human interaction as they can get.
Babies also need to learn how to identify and regulate their emotions, and peek-a-boo is an amazing game for that. But look back and notice how careful my niece Holly’s timing was. She let her daughter know that the game was commencing (Holly called her baby’s name), and then she let her baby’s self-regulation cycles set the pace of the game. If Holly had continued scaring her daughter without waiting for her to calm and self-regulate, this wouldn’t have been a game at all; it would have ended in tears, or it would have taught her daughter that Mom is not a source of fun and comfort as much as she is a creator of emotional pain and confusion. Peek-a-boo looks like a simple game, but like all games, it has intricate rules that Holly learned empathically by interacting with her daughter and paying close attention to her unique emotional rhythms.
Babies are interaction-based organisms, and they need to taste, feel, observe, hear, roll in, and experience the world emotionally, physically, and empathically. Babies’ bodies and brains are growing at a rapid pace, and they’re uploading as much information as they can possibly gather about everything. Babies’ fascination with peek-a-boo games is part of this intensely interactional uploading process—it’s emotional play and empathic learning focused on the exact skills babies need to develop. Babies and young children need to have their facial expressions mirrored back to them, to have their gurgles and cries answered, to have their emotions mirrored and responded to, and to be lovingly interacted with as much as possible. This is how the six aspects of empathy develop normally—they develop in loving, intimate, and richly emotional interactions that are as simple (and as complex) as a good game of peek-a-boo.
At later stages in their development, when babies develop Concern for Others, Perspective Taking, and Perceptive Engagement skills, you can help them work with and increase their empathic skills through imaginal play, reading and stories, and dramatic reenactments of challenging situations that they’ve already experienced (or that they might encounter). These dramatic games start very early. In the game of peek-a-boo, my grandniece is already playing with emotions, learning them, feeling them in her body, regulating them, and sharing them with her mom. Peek-a-boo is an emotive, dramatic, and empathic game that encourages and supports empathy development. And as you can see, these games don’t have to be formal or difficult. With a preverbal baby, you can simply mime emotions as you name them (overemphasizing your emotional expressions is a sure laugh-getter that never gets old, as we see in all successful comedies), or you can intentionally copy an emotion that the baby is feeling and gently wait to see what happens next as you follow the baby’s rhythms. You can also talk about your own emotions: “Ow! I’m mad because I broke that cup, and now I’m sad because it’s broken!” You can also talk about the emotions that you and the baby witness in others: “Look, daddy is silly and happy right now!”
We name everything else for babies—colors, body parts, clothing, family members, toys, pets, dishes, everything—but we don’t tend to name emotions, not reliably. Providing children with rich emotional vocabularies will help them develop rich empathic awareness, and providing babies with as much warm and intimate interaction as possible will help them develop rich, advanced empathic skills. In Chapter 8, I talked about the trouble of naming people’s emotions for them (because it can offend them and make them feel talked down to), but this isn’t true for children. Children need to learn the names of their emotions at many different levels of intensity, and they need to learn what their emotions mean and how to work with each one. Children need your help to develop strong emotional vocabularies and strong Emotion Regulation skills.
Storytelling (including reading together) plays an immense role in helping children develop emotional vocabularies, emotional awareness, emotional skills, empathic skills, and, of course, language skills. Storytelling is one of the central ways we communicate emotional information to each other, and it’s a wonderful way for children to intentionally put themselves in the place of others and imagine what another feels, thinks, or might do next. Good stories increase all aspects of empathic skills. Of course, good stories teach Perspective Taking, but they also involve Emotion Contagion, which teaches children how to feel and recognize emotions—and this helps them develop Empathic Accuracy. Working through the emotions in good stories helps children develop Emotion Regulation skills, and becoming involved with the characters helps children develop Concern for Others.
Storytelling and reading together also offer other empathy-building features, especially if children can snuggle into their caregivers as the stories are told and then talk about the story after it ends. Talking about stories is a wonderful way to practice Perceptive Engagement in a safe environment. You can ask, “If you were Harold, and you had a magic crayon, what would you draw here in our house? What would you draw for Gramma? What would you draw for the kitty?” Stories and dramatic play can help children try on different aspects of their empathic skills and discover who they are as empathic beings. Storytelling is intrinsic to every aspect of empathy development; stories are delicious food for humans and their empathic skills.
Reading fiction (and watching drama) has been found to increase empathic skills throughout your life span,50 because dramatic fiction requires that you become an emotionally and empathically invested participant in the stories you read or watch. Good, rich fiction can help you develop all six aspects of your empathy, no matter how old you are. And thankfully, even if your empathy training in childhood was not wonderful, you can still develop your empathy today by intentionally entering the empathic world of fiction.
As you think about fiction as intentional empathy training, consider the quality of fiction you read or watch now. The emotional and empathic training you’ll receive from a slapstick comedy is much different from the emotional and empathic training you’ll receive from a heroic adventure or a quiet story about relationships. As you look at the quality of the fiction you consume, think about it empathically as well as thematically. What kind of emotional and empathic training are you receiving from your fiction, and what are you learning from it? Does your current fiction diet offer you excellent empathic and emotional nutrition? If not, why not?
WHERE DO SCREEN-BASED STORIES FIT IN?
Frankly, for babies and infants, screen-based stories don’t fit in at all. For children under the age of two, television, computer, and tablet viewing, even of baby-directed videos that supposedly help babies develop their intelligence and their vocabularies, is not an empathy-building activity. It’s not even good for language development. Empathy develops in interactions and, as it turns out, so does language. If you think about it empathically, it makes sense—televisions, computers, and tablets can’t help babies develop empathy because screens don’t have any empathic skills. Older children can understand screen-based stories emotively and empathically, but only after they’ve developed empathic skills in interactions with living beings. Empathic development is built on warm interactions, and a screen cannot interact or respond in the way a baby’s developing brain requires; a screen has no way to know whether its viewers are tired, afraid, sad, bored, or asleep. It just drones on.
A television, computer, or tablet can’t mirror emotions, understand them, or help babies regulate them. Screens don’t wait to see if a baby has heard or understood what’s happening before moving to the next idea, the next phrase, or the next scene, and screens don’t care who the baby is as an individual. A screen is not empathic, and it can’t teach young babies empathy. In fact, screen time can actually impede empathy development, because it’s time away from real, warm, interactive intimacy.
Screen entertainment also can’t teach babies and young children interactive language skills. Children can learn vocabulary passively in front of a screen, but they can’t learn how language is used, how it relates them to others, or how to read the undercurrents, nuances, subtexts, and empathic content of language. Screens aren’t interactive, they aren’t empathic, they don’t provide the necessary interactions that support linguistic development, and they don’t care about their viewers in any way. This isn’t to say that all screen-based entertainment and teaching are dangerous for older children; if your older child has strong empathic and emotional skills, then movies, computer games, and shows can be a fun place where he or she can learn about complex dramatized relationships and situations. Screen-based fiction can be a part (I hope a small part) of the dramatic storytelling play that older children adore. But babies don’t have those emotive and empathic skills yet, and they absolutely cannot develop empathic skills in front of a screen.
So if screen-based entertainment is a part of your baby’s life, be aware. I’m not suggesting that we parents who have parked our babies in front of the tube, computer, or tablet so that we could get a blessed hour of work done are bad people, but I am saying that empathic awareness is called for. Of course, this empathic awareness extends to you as a parent: if your empathic abilities will be increased if you get an hour to yourself while your baby sits transfixed in front of a screen, and you can come back after that hour and be the full-bodied interaction partner your baby needs, then more power to you! An hour of screen time here and there isn’t going to harm anyone, and as we all know, television and computers can save a frazzled parent’s sanity. But if the TV or computer is on in front of the baby regularly, and if it’s his or her central interaction partner for more than an hour a day, then red flag warning—this is a problem. Empathy (and language!) is developed in rich, warm, intimate, emotive interactions with living beings. Screen-based entertainment provides none of these things, and it will actually impede empathy development and language development in young babies. Screen time can be a soothing distraction for overwrought babies, but that’s about it.
TEACHING CHILDREN HOW TO SELF-SOOTHE
Screen time can be soothing in its way, but obviously, so can being held, rocked, and loved. However, in order to develop Emotion Regulation skills, babies also need to learn how to soothe themselves. Games can help them learn. My niece Holly’s game of peek-a-boo had an important rhythmical flow to it, and that rhythm was guided by her daughter’s ability to regulate her emotions and return to a calm, grounded state. Holly helped her daughter cycle up into shock, fear, and raucous laughter, and then she waited until the baby calmed herself down before she scared her again. This cycling is crucial to my grandniece’s development of Emotion Regulation skills, because she needs to learn not just how to feel and identify emotions, but also how to ramp up into them, complete their actions, and soothe herself afterward. Self-soothing is absolutely vital for the development of healthy emotional and empathic skills.
In Chapter 5, I gave you three self-soothing skills—Grounding, Rejuvenation, and Resourcing—to help you return to a calm, focused, resourceful state. These skills help you intentionally down-regulate your emotional activation. I’ve also given you ways to activate your emotions safely, with Conscious Complaining, Burning Contracts, and Conscious Questioning. Notice, however, that all of my emotional activation skills are cyclical. There’s a clear beginning, where you set your intentions and get yourself focused; an activation of your emotions; an action component; and a clear ending, where your emotional activation is resolved and you can return to your grounded, focused state. Each of my empathic mindfulness skills helps you learn to work with emotions in the way a healthy developing baby learns emotions.
It’s never too late to learn basic developmental emotional skills that help you feel and activate your emotions, complete their actions, and then downregulate and soothe yourself again. But it’s also never too early to learn these skills, since self-soothing skills are essential to a baby’s social and emotional development. Peek-a-boo teaches many things, but self-soothing is a crucial part of the game, and it’s a crucial part of emotional, empathic, and social development. As you empathically observe the emotional development of your children (or the children you know or work with), take a close look at their self-soothing behaviors—not just in terms of the calming capacities of these behaviors, but also in terms of their fundamental contribution to social, emotional, and empathic development.
Here are some examples of self-soothing behaviors: rocking, self-hugging, reaching for hugs, thumb sucking, pacifier sucking, hair smoothing, hair chewing, making repetitive sounds, scratching, self-talk, toe walking, hand flapping, spinning, humming, devotion to favorite objects (toys, blankets, stuffed animals, etc.), repetitive movements, running, intentional stillness, snuggling, fort building, foot stomping, object stacking or organizing, climbing, sensory seeking, squealing, singing, dancing, or, my old favorite, fidgeting. This list is not exhaustive, but I’m including a lot of different selfsoothing examples so you can identify these types of behaviors in the babies and children you know—and, of course, in yourself.
Self-soothing behaviors are crucial for Emotion Regulation and the eventual development of all other aspects of emotional skills, empathic skills, and social skills. If you can look at them developmentally, you’ll see that most of these behaviors are rhythmical and that many of them appear in connection to specific activities, emotions, or situations—thumb sucking in an unfamiliar environment, dancing in response to joy or anxiety, humming during intense concentration, spinning after returning from a noisy day at preschool, or floor pounding during angry outbursts. Each child is unique, and each self-soothing behavior is a unique expression of emotional skill and awareness. But all children find ways to manage the emotions and situations they encounter with self-soothing behaviors.
Sadly, most of us haven’t been trained to look at these behaviors empathically. Instead, we try to extinguish most self-soothing behaviors in children (and we absolutely don’t allow them in adults). As a direct result of this repressive bodily control, we don’t tend to realize, for instance, that a humming, rocking, self-talking, book-stacking, thumb-sucking child requires a great number of self-soothing behaviors for some reason. Instead, we attempt to shame away and extinguish at least some of these behaviors. Don’t. Do not do this. Self-soothing has a crucial purpose, and taking away a child’s coping mechanisms is simply cruel.
If you have a child who selfsoothes continually, then you have a sensory-aware, emotionally sensitive, socially receptive individual who’s very likely a hyperempath. Your job is to put on your anthropologist’s hat and use your full-bodied Einfühlung capacity to empathically assess this child’s entire environment—socially, emotionally, nutritionally, aesthetically, and ergonomically—to see if there’s any way to make these multiple self-soothing behaviors less necessary for his or her social and emotional survival. Selfsoothing behaviors are crucial for Emotion Regulation, and if a child is self-soothing continually, then he or she needs direct physical support, emotional and empathic understanding, and help with thresholding.
A highly sensitive and sensory-aware child might need a quieter environment, less social interaction, and multiple ways to calm his or her body—through movement, water play, regular baths, tactile play (finger painting, clay work), free play with no rules and no enforced purpose, snuggling time, more time with a calm and trusted adult, or more time with animals. Another thing that can help may seem strange, and that is to have less eye contact with the child. Eye contact is very emotionally intense—it’s a major factor in Emotion Contagion. Although it helps some children develop emotion recognition skills, eye contact is sort of overkill for some hyperempaths (especially autistic ones). Some of us don’t need eye contact to pick up emotions, and eye contact actually creates a kind of emotional overwhelm—it’s too much. I wouldn’t simply stop meeting the eyes of a child before checking in, but if you can say, “I know that eye contact is very intense, so you don’t need to look directly in my eyes. Let’s see if there’s another way for us to be close,” then you can address the unworkable empathic activation in one area while offering workable empathic closeness in another.
If you see children (or adults) who can’t meet your gaze, understand this: You may be in the presence of a hyperempath whose Emotion Contagion skills are immense, but whose Emotion Regulation skills may not have caught up yet. One way to tell is to (respectfully) look for rhythmic selfsoothing behaviors. In adults, they get pretty tiny, because we’re all shamed out of our self-soothing—but if you look, you’ll probably see face touching, hair smoothing, finger drumming, subtle rocking or shaking, lip biting, throat clearing, hand gesturing, or some other repetitive movement. If you know these people well enough, you may also find the powerful self-soothing behavior we talked about in Chapter 6—orthorexia. If you’ve studied books on reading body language, you might mischaracterize self-soothing people as anxious and untrustworthy, or possibly as liars—sigh. But self-soothing behaviors are necessary for everyone, and hyperempaths tend to need a rich and varied assortment of them.
When I’m near someone who employs a lot of self-soothing behaviors, or when I realize that I’m in the presence of a very emotionally sensitive person or animal, I move into intentional emotional hygiene behaviors so that I don’t make matters worse. I set very good boundaries, ground and resource myself, and soften my focus so that I present a calm and emotionally nonneedy presence. I make minimal eye contact, unless the person or animal initiates it, and I subtly get into their rhythm. I have a ton of self-soothing behaviors, so I often rock slightly to empathically signal, “Hi, self-soothing is normal and okay!” And I usually gain a new friend.
Contrast this to the way most of us were taught to behave around hyperempathic people who are trying to self-regulate in whatever way they can. Even if we don’t say anything, we start to feel ungrounded, spiky, distrustful, needy, and pushy. Our very being seems to say, “Hey! Why aren’t you looking at me? I feel lonely and you’re the reason! Why are you so filled with tics? I feel nervous now, and you’re the reason! Stop being such a freak; hold still and look me in the eyes, damn it!” I’ll tell you a little secret: hyperempaths can hear this wordless behavior loud and clear, and it makes their situation worse.
Sadly, children hear these kinds of messages out loud, because it’s completely acceptable to shame a child openly about such behaviors: “Stop fidgeting; do you have worms?” “Look me in the eyes, or I’ll know you’re lying.” “Take that thumb out of your mouth; you’re not a baby anymore.” “Isn’t nine awfully old to still sleep with a teddy bear?” These are examples of informal shaming, but there are formal versions as well. In many kinds of socialization therapies, children with autism, ADHD, and other forms of neurological diversity are actually forced to make eye contact and to extinguish their self-soothing behaviors, or to perform them privately, as if they’re a source of shame. In the autism therapy industry, these behaviors are called stims, which is short for stimulation and which is a pretty creepy way to talk about the self-regulation that these hypersensitive and hyperempathic children are trying to achieve. But adult autistics are reclaiming the word, and the new attitude is: “Love me, love my stims!” I like that. I stim, and I’m proud! Free the stims!
Stims, self-regulating behaviors, and self-soothing behaviors exist for crucial reasons. They have a distinct purpose in the development of Emotion Regulation skills, as well as in the development of emotional and empathic skills. They’re necessary, they’re purposeful, and they’re an intrinsic part of the development of empathy. So respect the stims, my friend. If you see a lot of rhythmic self-regulation behaviors in someone, you’re looking at an emotionally sensitive, sensory-aware, and possibly overwhelmed person. If this person is a child in your home, he or she needs a supportive, soothing, empathic terrarium with thresholds, boundaries, and a series of quiet and wonderful places that are set aside specifically for him or her. These places don’t need to be big—you can build a secret reading fort with two chairs and a blanket, or you can create a magical ocean getaway in a bathtub full of toys and bubbles. You can create a secret den under a tree in the backyard, or you can help the child create a bed menagerie of stuffed animals so that he or she can sleep, safe and warm, in a forest or a jungle filled with animal protectors.
It’s also important to carefully study the physical environment of a sensitive and self-soothing child and to examine everything that comes into contact with his or her body and senses, including clothing, bedding, scents, sounds, lights, and any other sensory inputs. Many of my autistic friends report that when they were little, the sounds of the washing machine next door or the scratchy feeling of tags in their clothing were excruciating, but they didn’t have the verbal language to tell anyone about it. Instead, in response to these sensory assaults, they increased their stims and their self-soothing behaviors. Sadly, many of their parents or caretakers focused on these behaviors instead of on what had made them necessary, and the children were punished, isolated, or exhorted to stop stimming. Very few people even thought to check these children’s environments. Luckily, stories like this have helped many modern-day parents of autistic children become aware of the purpose of stims and address what’s actually going on, rather than just attempting to extinguish these necessary self-soothing behaviors.
If you have a strong self-soother in your home, look at everything from his or her body outward—clothing, sounds, scents, flavors, lights (especially in the bedroom—is it dark enough and quiet enough at night?), social interactions, emotional tone in the home, emotional tone in child care or school, his or her relationships, and the quality of his or her eating and sleep. Find out whether there is anything you can do to help him or her feel more grounded, focused, protected, soothed, and regulated. Our empathic mindfulness skills may also help, so I’m including kid-focused versions of them here.
EMPATHIC MINDFULNESS SKILLS FOR CHILDREN
You can teach children intentional forms of grounding and resourcing when they’re old enough to understand how to inhale deeply and exhale and let go of tension or how to find a place inside their bodies that’s very comfortable and strong right now. You can also help children learn to do some form of Conscious Complaining so that they can unload all of the emotional impressions they gather during the day. In toddlers, you can even create regular Intentional Tantrum games (we’ll explore more about tantrums below) to help them learn to playact, observe, experience, and develop humor about tantrums, which are a very important (though aggravating!) part of children’s development of Emotion Regulation skills.
You can also help children create many different forms of rejuvenation play. For instance, you can help them imagine how they feel when they see their favorite place, pet, friend, or grandparent, and to breathe that feeling inside their bodies, from the top of their heads all the way down to their toes—delicious! Or you can create quiet rejuvenation forts and nooks around your home, where children can be surrounded by wonderful things like art, family photos, or collections of their favorite toys and books.
Conscious Questioning for anxiety is also wonderful for children, because so many little ones become filled with worry—especially when they get into school with all of its incessant task-completion requirements. Helping children write down all of their tasks and all of their worries is a self-soothing act, and it’s a very specific emotional-channeling skill that may help them (naturally) reduce some of the repetitive self-soothing behaviors that spring up when their worries and anxieties feel overwhelming.
Boundary definition is something else you can teach behaviorally from a very early age. You do this by paying attention to the baby’s signals and helping him or her to choose what feels right and good and to avoid what feels uncomfortable and unpleasant. Boundary definition is self-definition; it’s about discovering the self as a distinct organism with distinct wants and needs. Favorite animals, toys, and blankies will often become a part of the baby’s self-image and standpoint; these items may feel like an intrinsic part of self, so make sure that you pay close attention to these clear signals of your baby’s preferences. Also, if there are siblings or if the baby shares space or a central caregiver with others, make sure to spend clear and focused time with the baby so that he or she will feel safely connected to sources of love, recognition, loyalty, and security (we’ll explore more about sibling rivalry below).
Boundaries are managed through the skilled use of anger and shame. These emotions can be difficult for little ones to wield. Intentional Tantrums can help children develop anger skills in safe, consequence-free zones. Stories about the misdeeds of others (where you ask children what they would do to make things right) can also help children learn about the remorse, the behavioral corrections, and the amends that need to be made when people do hurtful things (even if they don’t mean to hurt anyone). You can make a game around any emotion, and you can help children play with, try on, activate, and then resolve emotional activation as they develop better Empathic Accuracy and stronger Emotion Regulation skills (we’ll look at ways to play with emotions below).
As you work with children and their boundaries, keep an eye on how much anger expression you allow. Most of us were raised to squash anger expression in ourselves, and we tend to enforce that behavior with children. This can lead to anger problems for children, so make sure that you make room for anger play and anger talk. In addition, keep a close eye on the way you use shame, because most of us got pretty terrible training with shame, and we tend to apply it from the outside, rather than helping children develop their own healthy forms of shame, remorse, and contrition. Shame is a vital social emotion. Without shame, children can’t learn how to tune into the needs, emotions, or pain of others. I’d say that shame is actually the basis for Concern for Others, because you have to care if you hurt someone, and you have to care enough to want them to feel better. Concern for Others springs from the shame, guilt, remorse, and contrition that help you make amends and change any behaviors that injure or offend others. In Chapter 2, I mentioned a patient of Antonio Damasio’s who was unable to feel shame and how this deficit led to so much chaos that she was eventually unable to live independently. Certainly, too much shame can make you focus on others to the exclusion of all your own needs, but a healthy amount of appropriate shame will help you engage perceptively with others in a way that really takes their needs into consideration. Healthy, authentic, and appropriate shame is a central feature of healthy empathic engagement.
However, many of us don’t have much experience with healthy, authentic shame. Many of us were regularly shamed as children, and we’ve had to do a lot of work to uncouple those shaming messages from our own authentic sense of shame and self-worth (this is an ongoing process, just so you know). Therefore, it can be hard to know how to support healthy shame development in children. Here’s the trick: what you want to do is help children connect to their own appropriate shame and remorse (not yours). In the shame chapter in The Language of Emotions, I wrote:
Appropriate shame is something we should all support in ourselves and others. If we discipline a child and it’s clear that he or she is truly sorry, the discipline needs to end immediately. What you want to see is appropriate shame arising in response to the original affront—and not to your strict discipline. Continuing onward with the shaming after a child has shown remorse is just abusive, and it often leads to a hardening in the child’s soul. . . .
If you’re parenting or working with children, it’s important to help them connect to their authentic shame in healthy ways. A great way to do this is to let them be involved in setting punishments, if any, for their misdeeds. When I suggest this, many parents scoff and imagine that children will choose extra ice cream as a punishment; they won’t take it seriously because they’re all little outlaws. But what I found in parenting, teaching, and sports coaching is that most children are very solemn about their acts of contrition—they feel remorse deeply, and the punishments they create for themselves are often comically medieval. As the parent or authority figure, you can easily lighten their suggested punishments and help children find a way to make amends without (as has been suggested by various little ones I know): Never eating again; paying $2,000 to the police; or giving all of their toys to homeless kids. When children can be involved in deciding upon their acts of contrition, they can connect to their shame in healthy ways (as long as you stop them from inflicting retributive self-flagellation upon their own souls).
Shame is a powerful boundary-setting emotion, but it has to come from within. Otherwise, it will create fundamental problems with setting, maintaining, and respecting boundaries in the self and in others. We’ll look at these problems in relationship to bullies later in this chapter.
One empathic mindfulness skill that I’m really not comfortable using with children is contract burning. As children develop their sense of self and their autonomy as individuals, their behaviors are an intrinsic part of their selfidentification. Especially in a sibling context or a social group, children often self-identify as the quiet or friendly or musical or angry or smart or athletic child. Their behaviors form an intrinsic part of their boundaries, which is why it can be so painful or almost unbearable for a child to hear that you love them but that their behaviors are unacceptable. Many children really can’t understand what the heck you’re talking about, because behavior, identity, self, and me are all intertwined. They’re not separable for some children until the teen years and, sometimes, not even then. As such, I’d be very careful with anything that attempts to strip a child of behavioral self-identifications. It’s far better to play with behaviors and use dramatic, imaginal play and teaching stories to gently help children view their behaviors as choices.
And let’s look empathically at a child’s connection to behavior in terms of identity and attachment as we observe a child’s similar attachment to a favorite stuffed animal or blankie. Nothing about these beloved fetish items is objectively special, and in fact, these items often become hideously disfigured by energetic love and the fact that you cannot wash them without all hell breaking loose. But these fetishes are crucial until the child learns how to manage without them. Behaviors are often the same; they’re intrinsic to the child’s identity and even to his or her sense of survival—until they’re not. As such, I’d say that Burning Contracts is a skill for teens (possibly) and adults (definitely), but not for little ones.
However, there’s one area of identity that directly impedes emotional and empathic functioning, and I do suggest challenging it carefully and empathically: gender roles.
EMPATHIC BOYS AND EMPATHIC GIRLS
In Chapter 2, I wrote about the deeply sexist notion that empathy is a female skill and that males are constitutionally less empathic or less emotive than females. This offensive idea often leads people to treat boys and men as if they’re not empathic. But little boys can play peek-a-boo like nobody’s business! Little boys love stories and cuddling and love and emotional play and silliness and scariness and empathy. Little boys are fully empathic beings. However, gender roles are powerfully enforced and powerfully valenced—as we saw in the experiments I referred to in Chapter 2, where babies were treated completely differently depending on whether they were wearing delicate pink outfits or dynamic blue ones. Gender valencing is a fact of life, and it even influences whether girls will be encouraged to develop their math and science skills in school. Neuroscientist Lise Eliot, who wrote the wonderful book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, notes that there are relatively minor differences between the brains of baby boys and those of baby girls at birth. She goes on to say that the differences that show up later are primarily socially created, in the same way that the brains of people who learned two languages or who learned to play the piano are different from the brains of people who didn’t learn those skills.
As I wrote in Chapter 2, Eliot notes that there are some early differences in verbal abilities (girls are sometimes more verbal than boys, but not always), as well as some difference in activity levels (boys are sometimes more active than girls, but not always). However, these differences are not so large as we’ve been led to believe. In fact, there is more difference between girls in these traits and between boys in these traits than there is between the sexes. However, parents tend to support these gender-linked behaviors very early. For instance, they may respond positively to baby girls’ vocalizations while subtly ignoring their activity levels (and vice versa for boys).
Eliot also notes that the old information about girls being less able to read maps or do math and science has been disconfirmed many times, as has the old idea about men being less emotionally capable than women (or having smaller corpora callosa than women). Yet sadly, these incorrect ideas stay in the culture as people repeat them over and over and expect less emotional awareness from men and much less math and science awareness from girls. So the biological truth about boys and girls is ignored, while valenced myths and prejudices mold little brains into gender stereotypes.
There are people who can tell us a great deal about the discrimination that this stereotyping encourages: gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and asexual people live in a liminal space between the genders. Because of this, their social and physical well-being is often at risk. Those of us who challenged gender roles as children might have been looked down upon or taunted as tomboys or sissies, but if we also displayed conformist gender behaviors (or showed romantic interest in the opposite sex), we probably got away with our challenges to the stereotypes. But people who can’t fit into enforced gender roles often experience intolerance, discrimination, and persistent social control attempts—shunning, shaming, bullying, exclusion, isolation, emotional abuse, and often physical violence. Empathically speaking, gender stereotypes are unhealthy for everyone, but they’re actually endangering for people who can’t force themselves into these binary gender caricatures.
Let’s look at the concept of caricature empathically, because it tells us something important—that is, gender roles are imaginal. Gender roles are dramatic personae; they’re performances that are enforced through incessant social and emotional training that starts the moment we’re born (or the moment our parents discover our gender). Gender roles are dramatic roles that we learn in our families, in stories, at school, on television, and everywhere we look—and these roles come complete with costumes, props, and scripted behaviors that fool a lot of people. Those people who thought the same sleeping baby was delicate in pink and dynamic in blue—their Einfühlung capacities were actually fooled by a simple costume change—presto!
Good actors expose gender roles, and they can easily switch genders and convincingly play across and between our make-believe gender divide. This is because they understand all of the social training that’s required to play a gender role. Gender roles are thresholds, fetishes, and personae; they are not empathic destiny. Socially created reality can be challenged; you can create thresholds around gender discrimination and individuate from it. It’s difficult, because gender valencing is a powerful fetish that many people can’t even imagine living without. However, as you work with children, see if you can avoid gender valencing as much as possible in the area of emotions and empathy. If you can intentionally make room for talkative, emotionally aware males and active, scientifically aware females—and everyone in between—you’ll create a more empathic civilization, one person at a time. Babies arrive in this world with a full complement of emotional, empathic, intellectual, and linguistic possibilities—so many options are available to them. To the extent that you can, help babies develop all of these human characteristics, and not just the ones that fit into those stifling pink and blue costumes.
Of course, we live in the real world, where gender roles are vigorously and profoundly valenced, and we all know that stepping outside those lines is socially dangerous. My suggestion is that you create a valence-aware empathic sanctuary at home for your little ones and teach them gender roles as a part of dramatic play and as an act of intentional personae creation. If your daughter is a rough-and-tumble individual, let her know that many people will want to change her. Talk about ways to deal with those social control attempts or even ways for her to pretend to be a conformist in unsafe environments. If your son is an artistic or sensitive individual, help him understand the hazards and work around them with the help of dramatic thresholding, playacting, and intentional personae construction. But know that peer pressure exerts powerful social control on children and that your child’s friends and schoolmates are learning to valence gender by copying, embodying, and enforcing the endless valencing messages they get from every direction. So your athletic girl may come home from a play date and suddenly become fascinated with princess lore and makeup. Or your artistic boy may turn away from his painting, singing, or dancing and ask to join the football team.
These dramatic shifts may be fine as long as they don’t arise alongside increased anxieties, emotional outbursts, sleeping troubles, changes in eating or attention, and other unhealthy shifts in emotional functioning. We all love to put on costumes and pretend to be any number of characters, and if you can help children play with gender identity and individuate (to the extent that they can), you’ll help them develop intrapersonal intelligence about who they are and how they feel. This understanding that identity and gender are fluid will also help children develop the interpersonal skills and Perspective Taking abilities they’ll need to build a nonvalenced, inclusive, and truly empathic social world that welcomes people of every sexual orientation.
WORKING AND PLAYING WITH EMOTIONS IN CHILDREN
As children are growing, you really can’t give them too much information about emotions, because out in the world, they’ll receive very poor emotional training. Helping children name their emotions, identify them, play with them, dramatically express them at many different intensities, and talk about them openly will help children develop comfort and expertise with the basic building blocks of their emotive, cognitive, empathic, and social skills. As you explore the actions that each emotion requires, and as you learn many different emotional vocabulary words, you’ll be able to approach emotional issues more empathically, share your new knowledge, and help children understand their emotions more clearly.
Depending on their age, you can help children develop their emotional vocabulary to intentionally encompass nuanced emotional awareness and an understanding that emotions often arise in pairs and clusters. As you look at the “Emotional Vocabulary List” (in the Appendix), you can choose a number of kid-friendly words for each emotion at different intensities, or you can just talk about, for instance, a big sadness, a medium amount of fear, or a tiny hint of anger. Children love to grade and sort things, and they may have excellent ideas for how to talk about clustered emotions, such as the large happiness, medium sadness, and pangs of envy they feel when they watch another child open a huge pile of birthday presents. You can also help children unvalence emotions by connecting their emotional vocabulary to the actions each emotion requires. Often, when we name emotions for children, we include direct teaching about whether the emotion is acceptable: “You’re angry, young man; go to your room.” “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” “Don’t cry, don’t cry.” “There’s that smile—that’s what I want to see!”
If you can strip away the good/bad valencing and present each emotion as a tool, you’ll really help children become emotionally intelligent. You can do this before children learn to speak by learning to read and respond to their emotions, and by helping them complete the actions for their emotions (instead of praising or punishing children for feeling emotions). As children develop vocabulary, you can incorporate emotions and their actions when you speak about them: “I think you’re feeling some fear; what are you sensing?” “It seems like you’re feeling envy; what unfair thing just happened?” “You feel proud of yourself because you did good work!” “You feel sad; what isn’t working right now? What can you let go of?” “You’re feeling angry. What do you need? What would make things right?” These messages, of course, need to be individualized to each child, but even toddlers can learn how to productively complete the actions their emotions require.
You can also create games and dramatic reenactments so that children (boys and girls!) can have fun exploring emotions in safe ways. With anger, you can have kids think of mean things to say (or repeat mean things they’ve heard) and then have them explore a number of different ways to respond and reset their boundaries without violence or verbal abuse. With shame, you can have children think up really naughty things that they have done or might do and then playact a number of ways to make amends. With hatred, you can have kids try the emotions on for size and then describe exactly what it is in the hated thing (or person) that makes it seem so dreadfully foreign and unwanted. With apathy, you can laze around on the floor and talk about why you’re so bored, fed up, and uninterested, ho hum! This can lead to some very interesting conversations about the child’s true interests.
You can also act out Intentional Tantrums. In this fun and silly way, you can help children see what’s going on when tantrums occur. For kids from the age of about thirty months to five years, very few things seem funnier than watching adults have pretend tantrums. It’s wonderful for children to see the behavior from the outside and to know that adults understand the situation. Tantrums can be very frightening and isolating, so bringing them into the magical world of play can help children feel more capable and calmer about tantrums.
Children tend to create a lot of games around fear already—peek-a-boo, certainly, but also hide and seek, tag, and games where you sneak up on people and scare the wits out of them. With fear and panic, you can create games in which a potentially dangerous thing might happen, and then help the child make quick decisions about what to do. Remember that in panic specifically, there are only three choices: fight, flee, or freeze. Ask, “Which one is best? Let’s try all three and see!”
To play with anxiety, you can create a ridiculously large number of tasks that the child has to get done in a very short period of time and then help him or her problem-solve a creative way out of it (getting help from Rumplestiltskin, magic brooms, flying unicorns, and the like is allowed, just so you know). To play with jealousy and envy, you can tell the tale of Cinderella and her sisters. Or you can load up one stuffed animal with toys and games while another animal has only one; then have the child talk about what both stuffed animals might be feeling (and how to make things more just and fair). To play with confusion, you can offer the child competing, wonderful options or you can replay a situation in which the child couldn’t decide between one thing and another, and then slow down the decision-making process so the child can discover what’s significant and meaningful to him or her.
With sadness, you can make a game of finding things that the child has grown out of or no longer needs and then find the perfect person to give them to. This not only helps a child feel the rejuvenation aspect of letting go, but it also helps him or her develop Perspective Taking (Who would like this best?), Concern for Others (Would this make someone feel happy and loved?), and Perceptive Engagement in one fell swoop. (The fact that this game also clears clutter out of your home is a bonus!) With grief, you can play a solemn game and create a ceremony for light versions of loss, such as one of the child’s stuffed animals moving to the moon. You can create a small grief shrine, and let the child create a sermon about how much the stuffed animal will be missed, all of the wonderful times they’ve had together, and the child’s wishes for the stuffed animal’s life on the moon.
Most children play pretty well already with happiness, but joy and elation can sometimes be a little intense and too activating. I like to help children ramp up into joy and run around—yay, yeeha!—and then completely relax, perhaps by laying down and pretending to sleep. Joy can be very tricky to down-regulate, especially since it’s valenced so massively as the best possible emotion in the universe. Therefore, it’s a good idea to intentionally teach children how to ground and calm themselves when joy is present.
Contentment can also be a tricky emotion, because children are doing such a huge amount of work in the development of their sense of self. Some kids ratchet up into a kind of megalomania of absurd contentment (we’ll look at that in the section on bullying later in this chapter), while others are plagued with self-doubts and can’t seem to feel much contentment at all. Parenting and teaching styles can interfere with the development of healthy contentment and self-confidence—certainly parents who shame their children can really throw a wrench into this emotional area, but so can parents who overpraise and reward their children for everything. The trick with contentment is to help a child associate it with real actions that are truly commendable and that they themselves feel proud and content about. So a good contentment game might be creating tasks that the child can complete, and then checking in to see if he or she feels satisfied about it. You can find out a great deal about a child’s self-concept when you can play with contentment in this way.
TANTRUMS, PHOBIAS, RIVALRIES, AND BULLYING
In most instances, you and your children will be able to figure out what’s happening when an emotion arises, and you’ll be able to create a number of games to explore the emotion together. However, four specific emotional situations are a little bit tricky, starting with a crucial emotional and empathic developmental phase better known as tantrums.
TANTRUMS
Tantrums—loud and annoying though they are—are an intrinsic part of the process of developing Emotion Regulation skills (though it sure doesn’t look like it!). If you observe tantrums empathically, however, you’ll be able to identify the rhythmical aspect of this important developmental process. Tantrums are a way for children to dramatically cycle between anger (and rage) and sadness (and self-pity) when they confront challenges to their needs, their desires, and their sense of self. Tantrums are not games; rather, they are a form of emotive and dramatic play that occurs as children learn how to work with their emotions. The way you respond to a tantrum will help—or hinder—children in their development of emotional skills and empathic awareness.
In a clever 2011 study,51 psychologist James Green and fellow researchers at the University of Connecticut gathered audio recordings of numerous reallife tantrums in toddlers. (Tantrums are most prevalent from the ages of one to four, but they can occur at later ages, especially in response to emotional upheavals, loss, or trauma.) Green’s team found that there’s a very predictable cycle of vocalizations connected to anger (screaming and yelling) and sadness (whining, crying, and whimpering). When challenged, most young children will move between sadness and anger as they ramp up into a tantrum. These distinct emotional cycles are pretty easy to identify (angry yelling sounds very different from sad whining), and Green found something surprising as he listened to how parents dealt with each emotion. In general, nothing helped during the angry phase except calmly setting boundaries for the child. Questioning, arguing, yelling back, pleading, threatening, and joking all made the anger portion of the tantrum much worse; however, making short, boundary-setting declarative statements helped. When parents set boundaries, the child could often reach the sadness phase of the cycle and let go, at which time, he or she could be consoled and soothed.
During a tantrum, I like to name the emotion for the child, without any shame attached. If we’re in public, I get the child away from the shaming stares of others (no one needs to hear a tantrum; they’re extremely activating if you don’t understand what’s happening, and the screams could emotionally trigger everyone in the vicinity). So I’ll say calmly, without trying to fix anything, “You’re very angry about taking a nap right now.” “Kelly has the truck right now, and you’re angry.” “You’re very angry because you can’t have candy, so we’re leaving the store right now until you can calm down.” Notice that I also talk about the temporal aspect of the tantrum with the words right now. Intense activations of anger and rage can’t last—they’re exhausting, and it can help a child to know that this feeling isn’t going to last forever. It’s also important to understand that this behavior isn’t intentional and won’t be helped by shaming—you’ll actually just make it worse if you try to shame a child out of a tantrum. Tantrums are unintentional, and you need to model calm boundary setting to let the child know that even at its very worst, anger is just an emotion, and it’s all going to be fine. No shame.
Tantrums can become intentional if you handle them badly or if you acquiesce and give the child whatever he or she is screaming about. However, at their core, tantrums are part of an important developmental process. If you can reframe tantrums in your own mind, you can help a child safely ride through these intense emotional storms.
When the rage storm (screaming and yelling) passes and the child moves to the release of sadness (whining, crying, or whimpering), he or she will be able to let go and down-regulate. At this point, the intense activation will cycle down, and the child will be able to focus more clearly on what happened. You can then talk about the tantrum and name the emotions, “Wow, you felt really angry because (something), and then you felt sad. What do you need now?” Sometimes cuddling and reassurance are all a child needs, because a tantrum can be really terrifying and embarrassing for a child. It’s important not to punish or isolate children who are having tantrums, because it teaches them that when an intense emotion arises, they’re unacceptable and unwanted; they’re on their own. That’s not a way to help children develop emotional and empathic skills. Children need help to understand and work with their intense emotions. Depending on their language skills, you may be able to talk with them about what happened so that they’ll have ideas and options for the next time a tantrum cycle starts to arise.
When a child has a lot of tantrums, it can really help to make Intentional Tantrums a part of his or her imaginative play. Children love to see adults having play tantrums, and they love to stomp around and pretend to have tantrums themselves, because it helps them feel less alone in their emotional lives, less annoying, and less of a burden. Some deeply emotive children just need more time and practice before they can develop Emotion Regulation skills, and dramatic play is a wonderful, safe, empathy-building practice. However, if children are regularly tantrum-prone—and it’s not because you bribed them with whatever they wanted and created a monster—you may be looking at a form of self-soothing behavior and not a tantrum, per se.
Sometimes what looks like a tantrum can actually be a sign of emotional or sensory dysregulation. It’s important to empathically observe what triggers the tantrums and what’s going on in the child’s environment. Are the tantrums a response to an anger-evoking situation in which the child’s needs or sense of self are being challenged or thwarted? Or are the tantrums occurring in response to sensory overload or fatigue? Underdeveloped Emotion Regulation skills are normal in younger children, and tantrums have a specific purpose in helping them build these skills, but sometimes tantrums are a sign of hypersensitivity and hyperempathy. This is especially true for autistic and hyperactive children, who may be so overwhelmed by sensory overload that they either lose their Emotion Regulation skills, or they ramp into intense emotions as a way to fill their bodies with extreme activation that may temporarily shut out the sensory bombardment they’re experiencing. If you have a child who has regular tantrums, don’t punish for the tantrums; look for the triggers. If you also see rhythmic self-soothing or self-injuring behaviors during the tantrums, please reach out for the help of a developmental psychologist who can help you create a supportive environment for your hypersensitive and hyperempathic child.
SHYNESS AND PHOBIAS
Each child is born with a unique emotional style, and some children are naturally bold, while others are naturally more reticent. Shyness in and of itself isn’t a problem, unless it’s connected to a great deal of fear or anxiety. These two emotions are very activating, and they can easily get stuck in a feedback loop if a child does not have effective self-soothing skills. Also, shyness, fear, and anxiety are all seen as signs of weakness, and a shy child may shut down and refuse to ask for help for fear of being further shamed. If you can unvalence the situation for the child, you can help him or her address the fears (“What are you sensing?”) or complete the specific tasks that the anxiety is trying to address. Remember to recruit the magic of list-making for anxiety; this anxiety-specific action will address the exact issues that evoked the anxiety in the first place. Playacting and dramatically preplaying anxiety-producing situations are also wonderful activities, because they treat the anxieties as valid, and they give children safe, consequence-free opportunities to develop multiple responses to anxiety-producing situations.
You can also use playacting around phobias, with the caveat that if the fear ramps up too high, you might just overwhelm the child for no good reason. With a phobia, there’s a visceral reaction that tells a child to avoid something as if it were toxic. So you have to respect that powerful instinct. However, you can help the child learn to find internal places of calm, strength, and resourcefulness, even when the phobic item is nearby (our empathic skill of resourcing is very healing for phobic people).
Playing rhythmic games with phobias is also very helpful. Let’s talk about something specific, like fear of the dark. You can help a child walk a little way into a dark room with you; then you both run away—run!—and hug each other and laugh when you’re safely away. Then, when the child has down-regulated, you can approach the room again and go just a tiny bit further, then run! This game is ancient and primal—it helps young animals learn to deal with frightening things, and it can help children understand that everyone is afraid of something.
Many online videos show baby animals learning how to approach scary objects. One of the most hilarious is called Kitten vs. a Scary Thing,52 which YouTube user Ignoramusky actually scored with horror film music. Your child will fall down laughing as he or she watches the brave little kitten approach, reapproach, and run away from a very scary thing (A tennis ball? Auugh! ). But as you watch this brave kitten, notice his rhythmic game: It’s a careful approach—a ramping up into intense fear, a quick retreat, and a calming phase. And the kitten repeats the cycle over and over and over again. Eventually, that kitten will be able to look at a tennis ball and feel, “Oh, that thing, ho-hum.” But he has to interact with it intensely and learn to play with his emotional reactions before he can get to that calm place.
As you work with a shy or phobic child, look at Richard Davidson’s six dimensions of emotional style from Chapter 3 and see if there are any dimensions that can be addressed with support from you or with a change in the child’s environment. Specifically, look at the child’s overall Resilience, as well as his or her Attention, Sensitivity to Context, and Self-awareness. A shy and phobic child may be a highly sensitive and hyperfocused being who needs many self-soothing, resourcing, and boundary-setting skills. And, of course, kitten videos.
In older children with phobias and anxieties, you can offer support by closely observing their school situation (Could there be so much homework that their anxieties are hyperactivated?), their social world at home (is your home a safe empathic terrarium?), and among their friends, where arguments or run-ins with bullies (see below) could be triggering anxiety, phobias, or social withdrawal.
SIBLING AND PEER RIVALRY
As children develop emotionally, they also develop awareness of their social position in relation to people and things that compete for the attention, resources, love, and recognition of their parents and loved ones. As you know, we’re in the sphere of jealousy and envy here, and these emotions arise to make sure that we’re securely connected to sources of love and loyalty (in the case of jealousy) and to sources of recognition, security, and resources (in the case of envy). Children can ramp themselves up into jealousy and envy very quickly—partly because their Emotion Regulation skills are still developing, but also because their social position is actually very precarious.
Children don’t have a long life full of relationships to look back on when threats to their relationships arise. They have one or two central caregivers, and one family. So their jealousy will be hyperfocused in that sphere. Threats to these central love relationships can be heartrending, and children have to learn how to keep themselves securely attached to the only source of love they know, which means that jealousy will be absolutely necessary. If there are threats to these intimate bonds, you want to see jealousy arising in a child; you want to know that the child’s emotions are working properly and that he or she has developed healthy attachment.
Most people try to shame jealousy (and envy) out of children, which, if you understand the purpose of these emotions, is a sick, backward thing to do. Forcefully repressing jealousy in a child can turn a normal, healthy emotion into a twisted and dark thing—and that’s not a loving or empathic action. If you support love, loyalty, and attachment, you need to support jealousy and help children learn how to work with it. You can do that very simply—by noting the emotion and talking about what the child needs and wants and what would help him or her feel loved. That’s it. No shame, no fuss—you just respond to the emotion and help the child complete its action.
Of course, sometimes the child will ask for the moon, but jealousy and envy have an inner core of fairness and justice in them, and you can talk about what would work for everybody so that you can help the child open up the experience of jealousy to encompass the love needs of others.
Envy is another crucial emotion in the lives of children, who don’t yet have lists of accomplishments that could help them feel an internal source of recognition or self-worth when threats arise. Children don’t own anything, they don’t control any resources, and they’re completely at the mercy of their caregivers and families for every possible form of security. You bet they need their envy—it’s the emotion that helps them begin to have a sense of their value, their worth, and their sense of individuality—of what I want, what I need, and what’s fair. Working with envy is just as easy as working with jealousy if you understand what’s occurring in the development of the child’s basic sense of self-worth.
Envy itself will help you here. Envy is a surprisingly honorable emotion if you address it respectfully and ask what would be fair for everyone. Yes, as with jealousy, sometimes children will demand the moon and the stars when they’re learning how to work with envy, but you can help them think about how everyone needs to feel recognized, secure, and resourced. You can help children develop a larger and more nuanced understanding of how their needs relate to everybody else’s. I would ask you to protect children from too much self-sacrifice here: definitely help them state and advocate for their specific needs, but also help them ground those needs in relationship to what is available for everyone else. Caring about others is a necessity, but healthy jealousy and envy will support children in balancing their needs with the needs of others.
You’ll find that jealousy and envy are some of the most beautiful emotions there are, if you can approach them empathically and engage with them respectfully. They tell us how crucial love, security, recognition, and loyalty are to our very survival. They’re powerful emotions because they exist to protect powerful needs.
BULLYING
Bullying is a huge issue in schools, online, and in the workplace. It’s a situation in which people feel free to pick on, harass, isolate, shame, and intimidate others. Bullying can start quite early—it’s been observed in children as young as three years old (these children were often exposed to a lot of aggressive behavior, including violent movies and TV shows). Luckily, many bullying-prevention programs (NoBully.com is one of the most empathically grounded) have sprung up to address the problem of bullying, which involves poor Emotion Regulation skills, inadequate Concern for Others, and insufficient Perspective Taking abilities. Thankfully, bullying is no longer seen as something to tolerate. So if you have (or work with) children, let them know that bullying isn’t okay and that they should report bullying as soon as it happens.
This new movement to openly identify bullying is certainly protective for victims, but it’s also protective for the bully. A bully might look strong on the outside, but when someone is lashing out and hurting people intentionally, there’s serious trouble going on in their boundary-setting abilities. A lot of problematic emotions are involved in bullying—certainly, you can see the anger dysfunction, but there’s also a surprising emotional condition that occurs in bullying. In many cases of bullying, contentment has gone completely off the rails.
We can clearly see that abusers and bullies have problems with anger and shame. Their anger gets unleashed constantly, without any moderation from healthy shame, which means they don’t have healthy brakes on their anger. Subsequently, they behave in dishonorable and dishonoring ways. But strangely, many bullies score high on tests of self-esteem, which means their contentment is in high gear, even though their behavior is the exact opposite of worthwhile or commendable. In the bullies I’ve observed, shame becomes unhinged somehow, and it no longer works to help the person manage his or her honor or boundaries. The rules of healthy behavior and Concern for Others get erased, and the person finds a way to feel twisted contentment that doesn’t actually track to anything real. The contentment inside a bully seems to be saying, “Yeah, your anger is so righteous! You don’t ever need to feel ashamed of anything you do, so yay for you and screw everyone else!” It’s a hellish, inflated, unhinged form of contentment.
Yet if you look at the way bullies work, you’ll notice that they primarily force shame onto others and attempt to break down the self-image and boundaries of their victims. Bullies might crow about the glories of anger, but they don’t actually make any room for healthy anger or natural contentment to exist in others. So even though they seem to be very comfortable with anger and wildly full of contentment (and essentially shameless), bullies spend an awful lot of time disabling the contentment, the anger, and the boundaries of their targets with huge helpings of toxic shame. This tells me that their anger posturing, their seeming lack of shame, and their artificially inflated contentment are all a show. No one who is good with anger, shame, or contentment would ever try to disable these emotions in others. Nope. Bullies aren’t fooling me.
Many people think that the cure for bullying is to use shame, punishment, and social shunning to bring the bully back into line, but this is precisely the wrong tack to use with a person who already has a severely disabling problem with shame (and a deeply problematic connection to anger and contentment). A chastised bully might publicly apologize and show contrition, but applying more shame to a person with a severe shame dysfunction will backfire. In some cases, it will essentially harden and weaponize the bully. Remember the party scene in Chapter 3 (where our friend shockingly insulted us in front of others)? A person who attacks others already has very poor boundaries. If you attack back, you can easily injure and enrage him or her. That’s not smart.
An excellent approach with bullies is to model healthy anger and shame and to allow your own anger to strengthen you so that you can display vulnerability. I know this sounds wildly and dangerously counterintuitive, but it’s one of the few ways to help a bully come in off the ledge of severe emotional and behavioral dysfunction. Bullies are nearly always survivors of abuse or neglect (or both), and more abuse just cements them in their behaviors. It also solidifies their worldview, which is that other people can’t be trusted and aren’t worth caring about. Showing vulnerability to a bully—in a healthy, anger-supported way that isn’t self-abandoning on your part—is one of the bravest and most revolutionary things you can do, and bullies will notice it. What they do next is individual, but one way to bring bullies back into the realm of functional human relationships is (surprise!) to model functional human relationships for them and to engage with them as if they matter.
Of course, if the bully has power over you or has found a gang (gangs of bullies can goad each other into shocking displays of mindless cruelty), then you’ll need support. Just remember that bullying is not a show of strength; it’s actually a display of severe boundary impairment, and it’s something to be very careful around.
People have a lot of bully-lore about fighting back, but bullies expect a fight, and they’re ready for it. They’re stuck in a feedback loop with anger, and if you engage clumsily, you’ll make things worse. Bullies need to learn how to feel shame properly. As we all know, shame can’t come from the outside; it has to be authentic to the individual. Empathy training in a safe space, mediation, and active engagement in reparations (see NoBully.com for ideas) can help bullies reenter the community and become truly commendable human beings again. Certainly, their misdeeds and abuses need to be stopped, but bullying is a sign of emotional dysfunction and an empathy deficit; bullies need to be retrained in how to function socially, emotionally, and empathically.
When I look at bullies, I see a hall of mirrors that reaches back to antiquity to show us just how little understanding we have of emotions—especially of anger. Yes, a bully needs to take responsibility for what he or she has done, but considering the emotional training we all receive, I’m not surprised by bullying and social violence at all. It’s just one more example of the very poor Emotion Regulation skills most people have. If you can look at it that way—as a skills issue—it’s easier to view a bully as a person in need, rather than as a fiend or a monster.
Something that can really help bullies is to engage them in a form of aggression that includes rules, boundaries, and honor. Aikido and other marital arts, fencing, kickboxing—even some video game communities—can help teach people how to channel aggression in safe, rhythmic, and strongly thresholded ways. The problem isn’t that anger exists or that bullies express anger; it’s that the bully has no respect for boundaries and no honorable practice for anger. If you can address the actual emotional dysfunction that’s occurring, you can help bullies restore their shame to its rightful position, learn how to manage their anger honorably, and learn how to feel healthy contentment once again. I speak to you as a severely bullied child who became a bully extraordinaire—there is healing for victims, and there is hope for bullies.
CREATING A SOLID GROUND FOR EMPATHY IN CHILDREN
We know that there are specific things that help children develop healthy empathy: close ties with emotionally and physically responsive central caregivers, intimate interactions with living beings, dramatic and emotive play that helps children cycle into and out of emotions, the development of multiple self-soothing skills, learning lots and lots of stories, and having many opportunities for healthy social interactions. All of these will help children learn intrapersonal and interpersonal empathic skills. But beyond that, you really have to pay attention to who the child is as an individual.
In interviewing empathic people for this book, I’ve asked: “What made you feel comfortable when you were a kid? What helped you regulate your arousal? What helped you understand people and emotions? If you could go back and add something supportive to your young life, what would it be?” I got a lot of answers, but only a few were shared among my many interviewees. The only universal needs were having animal friends, having physical freedom, and having numerous outlets for physical activity. Often, these needs for freedom and movement were met at the same time, through a bike, roller skates, stilts, a skateboard, a scooter, or some other form of transportation that enabled the child to travel freely. And some children connected all three of these needs by spending most of their time with a beloved horse.
But the rest of the answers from my interviewees were contradictory. Some empathic children flourished in school, and some (like me) were unrelievedly miserable in the crowded, noisy, stillness-enforcing environment of public school. Some sensitive children loved to be in dance recitals and musical groups, while others absolutely hated being forced to perform in public. Some children loved camping and nature, while others preferred reading books indoors for hours on end. Some delighted in building things (and taking things apart), while others preferred creating intricate drawings or building fictional worlds. Some loved amusement parks and parties, while others were overstimulated and overwhelmed by these exact same things. Some took to water and swimming like otters, while others could take it or leave it. Beyond the need for physical freedom, activity, and animal friends, I didn’t find any other shared empathic requirements. Everyone is unique.
However, I did ask specifically about artistic expression and soon realized how strange my own upbringing had been, because I got a lot of blank looks. Most people didn’t grow up with music in their homes, with art supplies in more than one room, and with a backyard where extensive fort building and moat digging regularly occurred. This is a problem, because artistic expression and physical expression are specific healing activities for highly receptive hyperempaths. They are also specific emotional-awareness activities for people whose empathic skills are currently low. In Chapter 6, when we observed your home, I asked you to look for your own artistic expression, and I referred to the often sad and neglected art supplies in the back of the closet. If you’re not doing your art because you don’t have the time, that’s different from not doing your art because you’ve never been shown how to make the time. This is something you can learn with the help of children.
IF YOU CAN WALK, YOU CAN DANCE, IF YOU CAN TALK, YOU CAN SING, AND IF YOU CAN CLAP, YOU CAN DRUM
You may have seen some form of this Zimbabwean saying. I heard it on the first day of an African drumming class, and it really helped relax all of us students; it took the specter of perfectionism out of the experience so that we could all have fun. And we did. Art is fun, it’s natural, and it’s a part of being human. Art is also an important part of empathy development, because it helps people develop stronger Emotion Contagion, Empathic Accuracy, Emotion Regulation, and Perspective Taking skills in safe, consequence-free zones of discovery. Art can help you try on emotions and attitudes, feel things intensely, and work through deep emotions and difficult situations with the help of whichever medium calls to you. Art is an empathic skill-building tool for people of all ages.
Art is also available everywhere to everyone; it doesn’t have to be professionalized or taught by experts. Art can be anything that helps you express yourself emotively in safe and tangible ways. With children, you can create simple art stations at home or outdoors—water tables, sand tables, paint easels, or clay areas—where you and your children can do art together in such a way that both of you get your quiet time while still being together. If you can sit quietly with a child and draw in coloring books or build free-form structures or paint—whatever calls to you—you can model yet another selfsoothing behavior for your child. Art, drama, literature, music, and creating things are specific empathy-building activities that you can provide for children and for yourself.
SUPPORTING EMPATHIC DEVELOPMENT FOR EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE
Your capacity for empathy develops throughout your lifetime. As such, there isn’t an age when—boom—you either have empathy or you don’t. Empathy is a malleable and fluid set of skills that you can share with babies and children, with teens and adults, and with elders. In this chapter, I provided lots of ideas for working with emotions and empathy with kids, but games and stories, art and fun, dramatic play and emotive interactions are not confined to childhood. In fact, they shouldn’t be. Empathy belongs to all of us, and these deceptively simple games can support empathic awareness at any age. The development of empathy is a lifetime adventure.