Roots of Empathy. Mary Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ years, mediated by parenting, that set the child on a trajectory for either success or failure. A child’s confidence, her concept of self, her readiness to launch herself into fearless learning and healthy relationships is dependent on and intricately bound up in the quality of nurturing she receives from a loving adult.

      Building on these insights, I spent the next twenty-five years working with parents and their preschool children creating and refining programs that sustain and enrich the potential of the parent-child relationship. (The story of the Parenting and Family Literacy Centres which I developed to house these programs is told in Appendix A) The programs were based on a premise of respect and empathy for parents and a belief that they want to do their best for their children. Parents were supported in discovering the ways that little children learn: through love and encouragement, emotional connection, authentic conversations and meaningful play. The power of parenting to positively affect children’s success is well documented. The “Early Years Study” prepared for the Ontario government by Dr. Fraser Mustard and the Honourable Margaret Norrie McCain makes a powerful statement about this connection: “It is clear that the early years from conception to age six have the most important influence of any time in the life cycle on brain development and subsequent learning, behaviour and health. The effects of early experience, particularly during the first three years, on the wiring and sculpting of the brain’s billions of neurons, last a lifetime.”²

      While I remain involved in training professionals in the parenting field, I no longer run these programs. I do, however, take every opportunity to visit them and introduce them to others interested in starting up parenting initiatives. The programs remain vibrant, encouraging parents to be their children’s teachers and cheerleaders, creating the architecture for lifelong learning.

      I like to express the scientific reality behind parenting programs in three words: love grows brains. The three requirements for optimal brain development are good nutrition, good nurturance and good stimulation. A new born’s brain has billions of neurons, but the pathways connecting those neurons are largely undeveloped. It is the experiences that a baby has in the first months and years that will “wire” the brain and prep a re him for future learning. It is vital that the baby’s needs are met in the context of a healthy and loving parent–child relationship.

       The First Roots of Empathy Program

      My years of working with young parents, many of them scarcely beyond childhood themselves, led me to wonder if one is ever too young to learn what makes a good parent, to realize what a baby needs to get a good start in life. It was a teen mother who jolted me into the transformative moment that crystallized my thinking about the need to break the intergenerational transmission of violence and negative patterns of parenting. Amy hadn’t shown up to the Monday parenting program, so I went to visit her on my way home. She had been beaten yet again by her boyfriend, who had smashed her in the eye resulting in stitches across the eyelid and eyebrow. This boyfriend was also her pimp and was attempting to get her addicted to crack so that she would sell herself more willingly. She explained that she didn’t want to come to the program because the other teen mothers would tell her to leave him, and she said to me, “He’s really sorry, he’s never going to do it again, and he loves me.” This moment was etched in my mind because I could see her little baby girl growing up to repeat the pattern of her mother’s life. This young teen had been physically abused by her mother and sexually abused by her mother’s various boyfriends. She had received little or no positive nurturing from her alcohol-addicted mother and was now craving affection and attention in any way she could get it, even at the risk of violence to herself and her child. The challenge was to prevent her little daughter from following in her mother’s footsteps; the challenge was to find a way out of repeating the cycle of addiction, violence, low literacy and poor parenting that was being passed on from one generation to the next.

      Just as empathy lay at the heart of the parenting programs, it was also clearly the foundation of a program that could reach children and offer them not just a window on nurturing, responsive parenting, but an entire spectrum of social and emotional learning. It was clear to me that there was not enough room in the school curriculum to give these essential aspects of empathic human development the attention they deserved. More than that, I daily witnessed how learning was compromised as children’s energies were depleted through the challenges of becoming part of the social group in the classroom or through coping with social aggression in the schoolyard. I visualized an approach that would strengthen the ability of children to build a solid sense of self-worth and caring relationships with others, a concrete program that would help them cre ate an image of themselves as people who could make a difference in the world.

      In 1996, Maytree Foundation³ funded the conceptual development and implementation of a pilot Roots of Empathy program. The pilot was launched in kindergarten classrooms. An enthusiastic principal and a nucleus of compassionate teachers, familiar with the successes being experienced by children and parents in the parenting programs, opened their doors and worked with me through the evolution of the first year. There was a clear logic to parenting programs for parents—they have an immediate need and a strong interest in interacting with and learning about their children’s development. But what were the features about learning to be a parent that would catch the imagination of children and enrich their experience of the world? For them, the years when they would be responsible for a baby seemed far away. What would make it real for them? In the original parenting programs, the learning for preschoolers was solidly experiential—activities were designed to allow them to see and touch and feel, to connect the concrete with the concept. As I started to apply the principles of experience-based learning to building concepts of responsive parenting in programs for school-aged children, it was clear that the concrete “learning tools” had to be the relationship between a parent and baby. I engaged and trained the people I knew to be the most knowledgeable about and committed to the value of the parent–child relationship. They were the parenting workers I had worked with for many years and they stood with me through the first year as I built, lesson by lesson, the themes that became the Roots of Empathy program.

      Once I had the idea to bring a real baby and parent into the classroom, giving children the opportunity to observe the baby’s development and the interaction between the baby and the parents over a school year, I could see the enormous scope for revealing how this relationship becomes the venue for developing social and emotional competence. Thinking through the dynamics of interaction in such a program, I realized that the learning would flow from the baby, that the baby would be the teacher. Over the years, I had witnessed countless times the impact a baby makes on the people around him. In the realms of emotional response and trust, a baby has no “agenda.” He comes predisposed to love and expect the best from everyone in his sphere; he has no inhibitions or wiles to disguise how he is feeling and what he needs. He is a pure representation of what it is to be human and how to interact empathically with other humans. He is where the roots of empathy begin. In the early parenting programs that were part of the public school system in Toronto, we often had visits fro m older children in the regular classrooms who were having a rough day or acting out in class. They were permitted to visit us because it had a calming effect for them. The calming effect was the baby. There were always babies in the centre to create a flow of warmth and receptivity for each child—the frustrations and chaos of feelings that were too prickly to address head-on could be talked about through interacting with the baby.

      Roots of Empathy is a program with many layers. It offers an experiential insight into competent parenting: understanding how a baby communicates, learning issues of infant safety and infant development. But it takes the learning that occurs with the baby in the classroom and builds it into a broader exploration of how humans understand and value themselves and each other. This vision was born of my conviction that babies were the perfect way to explore all that is valuable in the human experience, all that is critical in building healthy relationships, all that is indispensable in creating strong communities and a civil society. This program could teach a literacy of feeling. Through observation of the baby’s emotions, children could learn СКАЧАТЬ