Roots of Empathy. Mary Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ have a problem, often, their response is to act, to do something. It is still a facet of our culture that boys are not often encouraged to talk about their feelings and consequently lack the vocabulary to express emotion. Nurturing an ease in reading and expressing emotion in boys is particularly important. It is still true that parents talk more to girls than they do to boys, and that girls usually have a larger emotional vocabulary than boys. Our experience has found that boys who have gone through the Roots of Empathy program have a vocabulary of feeling words as large as that of the girls, and are more likely to talk about problems and emotions than the boys who have not had this experience. This is possible through the great care t a ken to make the classroom a safe place of trust.

      Beyond having the language to discuss emotions, children need to know their feelings are accepted and valued by the adults around them. When you respect children’s feelings, they learn to respect the feelings of others. When our babies are frightened, we cuddle and comfort and reassure them. The message the baby gets is that his fear is acknowledged and responded to. When older children are frightened—especially if those children are boys—we tend to dismiss their fears and sometimes impart a sense of shame or imply weakness. In contrast to the loving acknowledgment they received as babies, they are now getting an entirely different message: their emotions are not acceptable and it is better to suppress them. Every time we don’t see or hear or respond to a child’s emotional expression, we are depriving that child of emotional oxygen. By the time most of us are adults, we are not willing to admit to fear, even to ourselves. We will make ourselves ill rather than become vulnerable emotionally by acknowledging feelings that we define as weak.

      We even shroud our positive emotions. Why do we consider it inappropriate for an adult to show unbridled joy when we so prize its spontaneous, unguarded expression in children? If we cannot show fear or sadness, and can’t display our happiness, what is left for us to feel? No wonder so many adults explode in anger or collapse with depression. But we see these effects in children, too. With rapidly escalating rates of childhood depression, it is more critical than ever that we give our children the tools to express their emotions in a safe and healthy way and that we, as adults, give our children the strongest sense of their right to be heard and understood. It is equally critical that we teach them to do the same for others. A remarkable instance of healthy emotional expression emerged from a Grade 7 classroom discussion of “transitional objects,” the soothing blanket or toy that helps a baby go to sleep. The instructor was amazed as Grade 7 boys talked of special toys from babyhood that they still had in their rooms at home. Delighted at the ease of the unfolding conversation, she said later, “It was surprising they felt so comfort a ble sharing this because they do have a certain image to protect!”

      Knowledge may influence decision-making, but it is emotion that truly changes behaviour. How many people know they should be eating better and exercising more? They’ve heard the message from their doctors, seen the warnings on television, and yet they continue to eat junk food and spend long hours on the couch. They have the knowledge, but their emotions are not engaged. When a person does change his eating or activity level, it is usually because of some emotional event: the fear generated by a heart attack or the desire to be more physically at tractive to the opposite sex after a divorce. Children exert a strong emotional pull in influencing social change and people will do many things out of love for their children that they would not do for other reasons. Think of wearing seat belts or bicycle helmets, quitting smoking or refusing to drink and drive. It is no accident that children appear so often in advertising, whether the product is cereal or cars. Emotion, not information, makes the difference. We tend to undervalue the role of emotion in our lives and see being emotional as a fault.

      Empathy also has an important role to play in fostering interdependence. Interdependence is critical at all levels of our lives—at work, at home, in our community relationships. The idea that independence represents strength and interdependence is a weak distant cousin is deeply flawed. Studies of cultures that place a high value on independence show that the success of the individual is prized more than collaborative achievements. By contrast, in cultures where there is an interdependence of roles and responsibilities among extended family and within the community, where children have a contribution to make to the subsistence of their family, a high value is placed on altruistic behaviour and working for the common good.⁵ A recent tragic incident in To ronto involved the death of a five-year-old boy who fell from a high-rise balcony. It was ten o’clock at night and his mother had just left her son in the care of two older siblings (nine and eleven years old) to go to work. Amid the gasps of outrage about a mother who would leave such a young child without adequate supervision there were some compassionate voices asking, “Where was her support system? Why was she put in the position of having to leave her children so she could put food on the table?” For this woman, a recent immigrant who had lost both her husband and her mother and who had no support network to rely on, the cost of struggling alone was tragically high.⁶ A caring society, in which empathy was a core value, would have had answers for her. There would have been people who felt it their duty as members of the community to intervene compassionately when her children needed supervision or help. There is great strength in the closeness of the connections we build through interdependence, and this is ultimately the strength of a community. A community of completely independent people is not a community at all.

       A Child Is a Person

      Our approach to children is not working, and the consequences for all of us are huge. It is clear that inaccurate and inadequate information about the needs of children continues to undermine our efforts. To oversimplify, despite all the new knowledge we have about children’s cognitive and emotional development, a theory of childhood that remains all too pervasive in our society is that children are in many ways less than fully human. This theory sees children’s emotions, for example, as being unimportant. A baby cries, and the parents a re warned, “He’s just spoiled. Leave him to cry.” A little seven-year-old boy is frightened by a barking dog and someone is sure to say, “Big boys don’t cry. There’s nothing to be scared of.” We are a child-illiterate society. We have begun to have legislation that recognizes the unique needs of disabled citizens but have not yet to plan for the unique needs of our youngest citizens. Children are seen as nuisances and are unwanted in many public buildings, public spaces and some apartment buildings.

      We replace an understanding of real, individual children with cliché s. That all children lead lives of happy innocence, without worry or responsibility, is a common cliché that can have tragic consequences. By failing to see that a child’s range and depth of emotion can be as complex as our own, we allow ourselves to ignore the signs of stress or depression in the troubled children around us. In Roots of Empathy classrooms we have ample evidence that even when children do not have well-developed intellectual abilities, their range of emotional expression can be rich and fully developed. We may tell ourselves that the child who is crying is not really distressed and cannot have a good reason for his tears, or that the child who is imitating the violence she experiences at home by fighting with her classmates is just misbehaving and deserves punishment. But if we do, we are throwing a blanket over a child’s emotions and there will be a price to pay.

      There are still adults who subscribe to the theory that children are naturally cruel and self-centred. That belief ignores the many examples of children who demonstrate a thoughtfulness and kindness that often surpasses that of adults. In a Roots of Empathy class that included a nine-year-old boy in a wheelchair who drooled uncontrollably, we saw how brilliantly children can advocate for the human rights of a classmate. Children in this class explained to the other children in the school how their friend felt when others made fun of him. All name-calling stopped. I believe also that adults must always take responsibility and must always intervene when bullying occurs, not just to protect the victims but to give the bullies and the onlookers the support they need to act differently. That belief is supported by a substantial body of research, indicating that a bullying environment takes stronger hold when adults do not intervene to protect the victims and deal with the bullying behaviour.⁷

      Children know this. In a Grade 5/6 class, the instructor introduced СКАЧАТЬ