The online “community and a workplace for women who write,” SheWrites, recently featured an interview with Maia Szalavitz, co-author of Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered. The interview offers some good starting points for discussions about the importance of empathy in parenting and teaching, such as how social media and the internet can be both a positive or a negative influence on empathy:
“[T]hese technologies can be either positive or negative forces, depending on how they are used. If a 7th grader is the only one in his school who loves math and he finds online friends who share his interest—that’s a positive and in the past, he would have been much more isolated. On the other hand, if a 2-year-old is spending all her time in front of a screen, this is seriously problematic because that’s time she’s not spending learning empathy.”
Or the importance of helping children to know themselves—including their feelings—as well as possible, and how fiction can help us all to be more empathic:
“As they get older, helping them identify their own feelings is important—they can’t understand the feelings of others if they don’t first understand their own. Also, being explicit about perspective-taking when you are doing things like reading to them (which itself helps teach perspective-taking): ask how they think characters feel and what they would do in that situation.”
Read more about empathy and Maia Szalavitz on her blog Born to Love.
A similar perspective from comes from psychologist and book publisher James Webb, who, in a 1997 presentation to the annual SENG conference, called for parents and teachers to add the three C’s of courage, creativity, and caring to the traditional three R’s of education:
“We must try our best to give our children the knowledge to know the questions and the freedom to ask the questions, the caring to want to pursue the answers, the flexibility to create new answers when the old ones no longer work, the stamina to pursue the answers, the humanness to care about the outcome, and the courage to act with integrity.
“What I am proposing is idealistic, but I think that parents and educators of gifted children need to be idealistic. I hope that you will think more about creativity, courage, and caring—along with motivation and ability—but more so that you will be inspired to share your idealism with others.” [emphases added]
In her article “A Morally Defensible Mission for Schools in the 21 Century,” philosopher and education author Nel Noddings asks educators to have the courage to place caring at the heart and base of pedagogy (“Caring in Education” is another good introduction to Noddings’ work):
“When I suggest that a morally defensible mission for education necessarily focuses on matters of human caring, people sometimes agree but fear the loss of an intellectual mission for the schools. There are at least two powerful responses to this fear. First, anyone who supposes that the current drive for uniformity in standards, curriculum, and testing represents an intellectual agenda needs to reflect on the matter. Indeed, many thoughtful educators insist that such moves are truly anti-intellectual, discouraging critical thinking, creativity, and novelty. Further, in their emphasis on equality, they may lead to even grosser levels of mediocrity. Second, and more important from the perspective adopted here, a curriculum centered on themes of care can be as richly intellectual as we and our students want to make it. Those of us advocating genuine reform–better, transformation–will surely be accused of anti-intellectualism, just as John Dewey was in the middle of this century. But the accusation is false, and we should have the courage to face it down.”
What do you think?
- What are the roles of empathy and caring in education and parenting?
- How do we help our children to be more empathetic and caring?
- For children who are by nature highly empathetic, how do we help them to manage their feelings so as not to be overwhelmed by them?
