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Teaching Children Compassion
By Genevieve Simperingham www.peaceful-parent.com

When children are overall treated with compassion, they naturally and instinctively treat others with compassion. Like all other qualities we hope our child acquires, we teach mainly through our modeling, children soak in their experiences, how they are responded to from their parent, just becomes the way of it for the child. For the children who experience compassion and empathy from their parents, there is an inseparable association between difficult emotions and empathy.  There is clarity that a person who is hurt needs and deserves empathy. 

However, for the child whose cries have been responded to primarily with reasoning, 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, distraction 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.

It's never too late to increase the quantity of empathy and compassion in your family culture. Responding compassionately to your child's hurts, upsets, anger and disappointments will not only give them what they need to own and work through their problems, it will also set them up to be empathic and compassionate people.