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Teaching Children Compassion

When children are treated consistently with compassion, they naturally and instinctively treat others with compassion.  For these kids there is an inseparable association between pain and empathy.  There is clarity that a person in pain needs and deserves empathy. 

However, for the child whose cries have been responded to with logic, lectures, rejection (ignoring), minimizing (it’s not that bad, cheer up), bribes (if you stop crying, I’ll buy you a treat), distractions, anger or punishments, the child will have internalized these associations.  When the child then sees another person in pain, they’ll be unsure whether they should react with empathy, criticism, rejection or ignore them.  As a general rule, children tend to respond to the pain of others in the same ways as their pain has been responded to.

When a child feels unseen, unacknowledged and unsupported in relation to their backlog of past hurts, these hurts weigh heavily on the heart and block the child’s natural feelings of care and empathy for others.  There can be an underlying feeling of “well nobody cares about me when I’m upset”.  This can be a message that plays out all through life creating a major block in intimate relationships where the skills to honestly listen to, understand and empathize with each other’s feelings is essential to the ongoing growth of relationships.

When my son was very young, he used to get quite upset about his friends inability to show empathy towards himself or others when they hurt themselves.  I could see how difficult it was for him to understand this as he lived in a family culture where everybody’s emotions are respected and supported.  He still finds this difficult to come to terms with, but now understands that kids can’t give it unless they consistently receive it.  He is now at the age (10) where he can store up any unresolved feelings until he talks to me or his dad later in the day.  But for younger children, they can’t hold a conscious awareness of the experience very long and need to receive emotional support at the time of the upset.   

My son was sitting in the car outside the supermarket one day as I was packing the shopping into the back of the van.  When I got in, I could see that he’d been making the baby in the car next to us laugh.  He told me that he couldn’t bear it that the baby was crying in the back and the father sat in the front playing on a pocket game totally ignoring the child.  Feeling for the child, my son got the child’s attention and kept him entertained for a few minutes.  He said that when the father turned around to see why the child was laughing, my son quickly turned away and looked “innocent” to avoid the parent’s possible condemnation. 

My son will often say to me, “that’s how they must have been treated as a child, eh mum?” as I’ve always shared this perspective with him, which teaches him to have compassion and understanding and not to just judge somebody as “mean”. 

 

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