Can we teach empathy? Yes! But there is no single, easy tactic — or magical lesson plan — that’s going to do the trick. Instead, teaching empathy depends on understanding the basic skills that children need to share emotions, read minds, and offer help.
Teaching empathy? That might sound strange if you think of empathy as an innate, fixed trait — a talent that some people are born with, and others lack. But empathy isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. It isn’t something that unfolds automatically, in every situation. It isn’t even a single ability or skill.
As researchers (Decety and Cowell 2014) have argued, the word “empathy” has become a catch-all term for at least three distinct processes.
First, there is affective empathy, also known as emotion sharing.
This is what happens when we feel an emotional echo of what another individual is feeling (e.g., if I feel scared, it makes you feel scared too).
Next, there is cognitive empathy, also known as perspective taking.
That’s what’s going on when we run a simulation in our heads — consciously imagining, or trying to imagine, what someone else must be feeling, given their circumstances.
Finally, there is empathic concern (which some people call “sympathy“).
We experience empathic concern when we go beyond merely feeling or reasoning about another individual’s emotions. We also care about the individual, and wish to reduce his or her distress.
All three are of these processes are important. And all three of them are shaped by learning!
To see what I mean, consider emotion sharing, aka affective empathy.
It seems very basic and innate. As I explain elsewhere, it appears to exist in newborn babies, and in a variety of non-human animals. But that doesn’t mean that the development of affective empathy isn’t influenced by learning.
Your newborn might — with little or no opportunity to learn — show evidence of affective empathy in certain contexts. If he hears another infant wailing, he’s likely become similarly distressed. The bad mood is emotionally contagious.
Yet this doesn’t mean your newborn is capable to understanding and sharing most of your emotional reactions. Your baby doesn’t yet know how to decipher all your facial expressions. He doesn’t yet understand the range of feelings that you can experience, or the situations that provoke them.
Thus, the development of affective empathy depends, in part, on experience. A child will develop different abilities depending on what kinds of social feedback she receives. Does she get opportunities to observe a range of different emotions in different people? Do her caregivers her help her make sense of the information?
And, in the same way, the development of perspective-taking doesn’t just “happen.” Nor does the development of empathic concern.
To be successful at perspective-taking, a child needs to know something about the other person’s goals, desires, and previous experiences.
To show empathic concern, you need to recognize what the other guy truly needs, and you may also need to feel that the individual is deserving. Cultural forces — including authority figures and the popular media — shape a child’s attitudes about what sorts of individuals deserve our sympathy.
So empathy isn’t something you either have or lack, and it isn’t something that develops automatically, without input from the environment.
Personal experience matters. Culture matters. Parenting matters.
Here are some tips for steering kids in the right direction.
Teaching empathy tip #1: Provide children with the support they need to develop strong self-regulation skills.
Feeling someone else’s pain is unpleasant, so it shouldn’t surprise us if a child’s first impulse is to shrink away. It’s a natural, self-protective reaction.
But to become sympathetic helpers — and not mere bystanders — kids need to learn to control this impulse. And we can help in multiple ways.
First, we can help by practicing “positive parenting” — a sensitive, responsive approach to child-rearing that makes kids feel secure.
Decades of research attest to the benefits of sensitive, responsive parenting. It makes kids feel they can count on us for emotional and physical support, which leads to stronger, more secure social relationships. And what happens when kids feel secure?
Securely-attached children tend to show more empathy toward their peers (Xu et al 2022). They are more likely to take emotional risks — to get involved when they see somebody who needs sympathy and help (Waters et al 1979; Kestenbaum et al 1989; Barnett 1987). They are also more likely to display feelings of guilt when they’ve harmed someone, and feelings of forgiveness when someone else has transgressed (Costa-Martins et al 2021).
For examples of how to practice positive parenting, see this Parenting Science guide.
Second, we can help by teaching kids how to cope constructively with their own, negative emotions.
Babies who seem more naturally prone to sadness and distress often go on to develop enhanced empathic concern for others (Abramson et al 2019; Young et al 1999). But there are complications.
If a child experiences an intense, negative reaction to observing someone else’s distress — and she has trouble regulating this reaction — she might end up turning away from the victim, instead of showing empathic concern. She is too overwhelmed, and tries to escape the situation.
Alternatively, a child who witnesses someone in distress might experience lots of affective empathy, but feel clueless about how to respond. He doesn’t know how to handle his own negative emotions, let alone address someone elses.
So it makes sense to provide kids with “emotion coaching.”
This means acknowledging (rather than dismissing) negative feelings, and engaging kids in conversations about the causes and effects of emotions. It also means helping kids find constructive ways to handle their bad moods.
Does it really make a difference?
Studies show that “emotion coaching” can help kids of all ages. But younger children — who struggle with negative emotions — may benefit the most (Johnson et al 2017). So if you have a toddler, it isn’t too early to start thinking about your role as an emotion coach.
In one experiment, parents who were encouraged to increase their coaching efforts produced immediate, positive effects. Preschoolers showed improvements in their ability to handle frustration (Loop and Roskam 2016).
Where to start? See this Parenting Science article about becoming an effective emotion coach.
Teaching empathy tip #2: Understand how feelings of guilt and shame can affect a child’s empathic responses.
Imagine two siblings: a toddler and his older brother.
The toddler is crying. He fell down and hurt his knee. He’s bleeding and seems really distressed.
The older brother — let’s call him Sam — is watching. Does he show empathy? Does he try to help?
It depends.
Suppose, for example, that the toddler was knocked off his feet by an overly-enthusiastic dog.
In this case, Sam will very likely feel empathy, and show it. He’ll behave sympathetically toward his younger sibling.
But what if Sam was responsible for the toddler’s fall?
It might have been an accident. Or maybe the older brother was angry, and momentarily lost his temper. Either way, he played a role in his young brother’s injury.
Now things are more complicated. Sam’s reactions include feelings about himself, about what he’s done, and how his behavior might appear to thers. And these self-conscious feelings can get in the way of an empathic response.
We’re less likely to show empathy if we like the target of blame and shame
When we feel ashamed — or feel targeted by shaming tactics — we may not respond in a constructive or prosocial way (Tangney 1994).
If we accept the shame, we tend to feel helpless. We withdraw or sulk. If we reject the shame directed at us, we tend to feel resentful and angry. We double down. Maybe even lash out.
Decades of research bares this out. Shame doesn’t make us into better people. It doesn’t make us reach out to victims. On the contrary, it can make us respond in ways that seem uncaring, or even aggressive (Miceli and Castelfranchi 2018).
By contrast, we’re more likely to show empathy — and try to make amends — if we feel a sense of guilt
Guilt is different than shame. When we feel guilty, we reflect on our bad choices, and — most especially — we focus on the harm our mistakes have caused to others.
As a result, feelings of guilt inspire us to respond constructively. We don’t feel helpless. We don’t feel resentful and angry. We feel sad for the suffering of others, and we want to make things better (Peng et al 2023).
So if we want our kids to respond to these situations with empathy, we need to avoid feelings of shame. If Sam seems unrepentant or unfeeling, we shouldn’t denounce him as bad. We shouldn’t confront him in a way that makes him feel threatened or humiliated.
Instead, we should call his attention to the consequences of his behavior, talk with him about how his brother is feeling, and help him find ways to make amends.
Teaching empathy tip #3: Seize everyday opportunities to switch on your child’s empathy mode.
From infancy, kids display a capacity for empathy. But — like us — they don’t always use it. So how do you encourage a child to practice empathy? Research suggests we need only ask.
A simple question — asking kids to reflect on what other people are feeling — can make a difference.
For example, in an experiment on more than 400 Dutch school children (ranging in age from 8-13 years), Jellie Sierksma and her colleagues presented kids with a hypothetical situation about a classmate.
Half the students were told to imagine that the classmate was a friend. The other half were told to imagine that the classmate was not a personal friend. And the situation was this:
It’s your classmate’s turn to stay late and clean up the classroom. But she wants to go home as soon as possible because her mother is quite ill. She asks you to help her. Would you do it?
What did kids say? Did they say they would help?
Willingness to help depended on friendship…unless kids had been encouraged to pause and think.
Children expressed less willingness to help when the girl wasn’t depicted as a friend. But the results changed when researchers added an extra step to the procedure — a step that made children stop and reflect.
Instead of immediately asking children if they would help, the experimenters first asked kids to think about the girl, and rate how sad or upset she was likely to be.
After rating emotions, the children showed no bias in favor of the friend. They were equally likely to say they would help the girl, whether she was a friend or not (Sierksma et al 2015). The extra reminder was enough to change children’s judgments.
More recently, researchers demonstrated a related effect among younger children (ages 5 and 6) living in South Korea. When kids were given prizes to distribute (some colorful stickers), they tended to show favoritism — giving a prize to a friend, but not a stranger.
However, these children switched to treating both individuals equally with a simple tactic: Before being asked to share, kids were told that the stranger had experienced something upsetting, and they were asked judge how sad this had made the stranger feel (Cha and Song 2024).
Teaching empathy tip #4: Help kids discover what they have in common with other people.
Adults tend to feel greater empathy for an individual when they perceive the individual to be similar to them. They also find it easier to empathize with someone who is familiar.
And research suggests that children have similar biases (e.g., Zahn-Waxler et al 1984; Smith 1988).
As a result, one of the best ways to encourage empathy is to make children conscious of what they have in common with others.
For example, studies suggest that schools boost empathy in students when they foster multiculturalism — an inclusive, warm attitude about cultural diversity (Le et al 2009; Chang and Le 2011).
Teaching empathy tip #5: Don’t shelter your child from discussions about race. Talk openly about racial biases and injustice.
This tip may be especially relevant for white parents. Why? As I explain my article, “6 mistakes that white parents make about race,” many white parents may avoid acknowledging that racial categories exist. Their hope is that by conscientiously avoiding the subject, it will prevent kids from developing racial biases.
But the data don’t support this hope. On the contrary, children absorb racial biases from the popular culture — whether adults talk about it or stay silent. And research suggests that white kids become less biased when parents take a “race conscious” approach — acknowledging and addressing the existence of race and racism (Katz 2003; Vittrup and Holden 2011).
So an important part of teaching empathy is tackling race head-on.
The idea isn’t that you constantly bring up race, or use racial categories to define people. As noted above, we tend to feel less empathy for individuals when we perceive them as different from us. We can counteract this effect by helping kids discover the underlying similarities they share with others.
But racial biases have a way of working themselves into our unconscious minds. We get exposed to stereotypes through the popular culture, and this background information can influence our immediate, intuitive reactions. In many cases, we aren’t even aware that it’s happening. To counteract such biases, we need to stop and think — to pay explicit attention to the ways that our responses have been shaped by racial stereotyping.
For example, researchers have documented a bizarre but alarmingly common racist myth in the United States: People are biased to assume that black individuals feel less pain that white individuals do.
This implicit assumption has been documented in black people as well as white people, and it emerges during childhood: In a study of nearly 160 kids, Rebecca Dore and her colleagues found that children showed a strong and consistent bias by the age of 10 (Dore et al 2014).
The kids — like their adult counterparts — harbor this bias regardless of their other attitudes about race, or their experiences with interracial contact. So good intentions won’t make it go away. To fight this myth, we need to talk about it — openly and explictly.
Teaching empathy tip #6: Understand the importance of perspective-taking, and nurture this form of empathy through practice exercises and group discussion.
When we talk about empathy, we often focus on affective empathy — sharing another individual’s emotions.
This emphasis is understandable. Affective empathy seems like the very bedrock of emotional intimacy. But it comes with a cost.
Sharing another person’s emotions can make us want to back away, especially when we encounter someone in pain or distress. It can also distract us. Instead of paying close attention to the needs of the other person, we become preoccupied with our own emotional plight.
So feeling affective empathy isn’t enough. To be good helpers, we also need something that psychologists call “cognitive empathy” — the ability to imagine another person’s perspective, and accurately identify what that person needs.
The process is more dispassionate and cerebral, and less stressful. It can also lead to more accurate judgments. In brain scan studies, individuals who scored high on cognitive empathy tended to experience less stress reactivity when they witnessed distress in others. Moreover, they were better able to mount a helpful, prosocial response (e.g., Ho et al 2014).
How, then, do we foster cogntive empathy?
Emotion coaching (as mentioned above) is a good start. Kids also benefit from games and activities that require them to think about what other people feel, think, want, and need.
For example, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed and tested a 12-week classroom program called the Kindness Curriculum (Flook et al 2015).
Aimed at preschoolers, it features group lessons in attention to emotions in the self and others; practical brainstorming sessions for helping others; and exercises in showing gratitude. A randomized, controlled study found the program to be effective for teaching empathy and preschool social skills (Flook et al 2015).
The researchers responsible for the Kindness Curriculum are making it available to the public for free. You can sign up for your own copy here.
In addition, too, we can foster cognitive empathy through the power of “story talk” — discussions about the characters that children encounter in books.
Fictional stories and real-life narratives offer excellent opportunities for sharpening a child’s perspective-taking skills.
What do the characters think, believe, want, or feel? And how do we know it? When we actively discuss these questions, kids may learn a lot about the way other people’s minds work (Kucirkova 2019; Dunn et al 2001).
For instance, in an experimental study of 110 elementary school kids (7-year-olds), researchers assigned half the children to read and discuss the emotional experiences of fictional characters. The other half read the same stories, but didn’t discuss them. Instead, they were asked to illustrate the stories with drawings.
What happened? After two months, the children in the discussion group showed an advantage. They made greater advances in emotion comprehension, theory of mind, and empathy, and their positive outcomes “remained stable for 6 months” (Ornaghi et al 2014).
Teaching empathy tip #7: Foster empathy in adolescents through compassion training.
Practice exercises and discussion can help kids develop strong perspective-taking skills. But what about those feelings of personal distress? How do we keep affective empathy from overwhelming us?
Research suggests that certain meditation practices — mindfulness meditation and compassion meditation — may be helpful.
In experiments testing the effects of meditation training, participants “visualize their own past suffering, and relate to it with feelings of warmth and care” (Klimecki et al 2014).
To maintain this focus, meditators repeat phrases like “may I be sheltered by compassion,” “may I be safe,” and ” may I be free from this suffering.” Then participants repeat the exercise, but with other individuals as the targets for compassion.
They start by imagining a close loved one, and then extend their compassionate wishes to a series of others — a neutral person, an difficult person, and humanity in general (Leiberg et al 2011; Klimecki et al 2014).
How does compassion therapy impact the brain? Behavior?
In studies on adults, a single day of such “compassion meditation” training was enough to make a difference.
For example, when exposed to videos of people suffering, meditation trainees showed less activity in parts of the brain associated with “second-hand” pain and distress. Yet brain regions linked with reward, love, and affiliation remained active (Klimecki et al 2014).
And compared with members of a control group — people who spent the day honing memory skills — meditators were more likely help a stranger during the course of a game (Lieberg et al 2011).
Similar meditator training techniques have been used successfully with adolescents (Reddy et al 2013), and while we need more quality research to determine the question, it’s possible that younger kids might benefit as well (Perkins et al 2022).
Teaching empathy tip #8: Help young children improve their ability to read facial expressions, body language, and other nonverbal cues.
It’s hard to show empathy if you can’t read the signs.
Some children — preschoolers in particular — are at a disadvantage because they misinterpret facial expressions. If you show them photographs of people modeling different emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust), these kids misidentify what they see. And their difficulties can cause social problems (Parker 2013).
Is there anything we can do about this? Yes. For more information, see these evidence-based tips on how to help children decipher non-verbal cues of emotion.
Teaching empathy tip #9: Show kids how to “make a face” while they are trying to imagine how someone else feels.
Suppose I tell you to make a sad face. Or a happy face. Or an angry scowl. It’s just play acting, right? Not exactly.
Experiments show that simply “going through the motions” of making a facial expression can make us experience the associated emotion.
When researchers have asked people to imitate certain facial expressions, they have detected changes in brain activity that are characteristic of the corresponding emotions. People also experience emotion-appropriate changes in heart rate, skin conductance, and body temperature (Decety and Jackson 2004).
So it seems likely that we can boost our empathic powers by imitating the facial expressions of people we want to empathize with.
Pretty cool, right? And it’s not a new idea. As neuroscientists Jean Decety and Philip L. Jackson point out, this method was suggested by Edgar Allen Poe in his short story the Purloined Letter.
Teaching empathy tip #10: Help children develop a sense of morality that depends on internal self-control, not on external rewards and punishments.
Kids are capable of being spontaneously helpful and sympathetic. But, as I explain elsewhere, experimental studies have shown that kids can become less likely to help others if they are given material rewards for doing so.
Other research — which I detail here — indicates that a punitive approach to discipline encourages children to tell lies. And (as we’ve discussed above) personal criticism and shaming tactics tend to backfire.
So how should we nurture a child’s sense of morality?
We want kids to regulate themselves from the inside. And studies suggest that kids are more likely to develop an internal sense of right and wrong if their parents use inductive discipline — an approach that emphasizes rational explanations and moral consequences, not arbitrary rules and heavy-handed punishments.
For instance, kids are more likely to internalize moral principles when their parents talk to them about how acts of wrong-doing affect other people (Hoffman and Saltzein 1967).
For more information, see this article about authoritative parenting, parental style that features an inductive approach to discipline. In addition, see these evidence-based tips for fostering self-control and handling disruptive, aggressive behavior.
Teaching empathy tip #11: Educate kids about the “hot-cold empathy gap.”
Everybody knows that empathy is influenced by past experience. If you’ve never suffered, it’s hard to imagine what another person’s suffering feels like.
But even past experience isn’t enough to ensure empathy. Why? Because we forget.
Researchers call it the “hot-cold empathy gap,” and it appears to be a universal shortcoming of the human mind.
When we’re secure, calm, and comfortable, it’s easy to be “cool-headed.” But we also have trouble remembering what it feels like to be in the grip of a “hot” psychological state. We can’t recall, with full force, what it’s like to feel pain. Or hunger. Or exhaustion. Or fear. Or anger. Or loss. Or despair.
This forgetting may be protective. It can help us recover from distressing experiences.
But it can also undermine our ability to make smart decisions. If you don’t remember how unpleasant something is, you are less likely to prevent it from happening again!
And it can interfere with our ability to empathize with others.
So it’s important to teach kid about the existence of the hot-cold empathy gap, and the way it can bias our judgments. Before you decide that somebody is being unreasonable, ask yourself: Have you forgotten what it feels like to be in his or her situation?
Read more about the hot-cold empathy gap in this Parenting Science article.
Teaching empathy tip #12: Consider musical training and cooperative music activities. Kids in the habit of making music tend to show higher levels of empathy!
A number of studies have reported the links. Individuals with musical training are better at identifying emotions in the human voice. And children who receive music training tend to develop higher empathic abilities (Wu and Lu 2021).
Can we assume that music training causes these improvements? No. We need more experimental research to be sure. But it’s clear that music conveys and elicits emotion, and so it seems plausible that music training might make students more attentive to some of the emotions embedded in vocal cues.
Another possibility is that music students develop greater empathy because their training gives them a lot of practice in taking turns, and predicting what others (their fellow musicians) will do next (Hawkins and Farrant 2022). Maybe these experiences help kids hone skills that transfer to other, social contexts — like engaging in verbal conversation.
Teaching empathy tip #13: Provide kids with opportunities to truly “tune in” to the thoughts and intentions of others — by engaging with them in cooperative, face-to-face tasks.
As I note in my article about brain-to-brain synchrony, something happens when we look at each other and work together in a cooperative task. We don’t just coordinate our actions, we also show signs of activating the same parts of our brains. In effect, we mirror each other’s brain patterns…and when brain patterns are in sync, we generally end up understanding each other better.
Teaching empathy tip #14: Talk with children about the rationalizations that people use to justify callous or cruel acts.
Research has demonstrated that average, well-adjusted people can be persuaded to harm others—even torture them—as long as they are provided with the right rationale.
In a famous series of experiments developed by Stanley Milgram of Yale University, subjects were told that they were participating in a “learning experiment” that required them to administer painful electric shocks to another person (Milgram 1963).
The “experiment” was a fake, a ruse made convincing with plausible props and an actor who pretended to be in pain after the study participants pressed a button. But the participants were fooled and—urged on by an authoritative man in a white lab coat—they dutifully administered shocks to the screaming “victim.”
In fact, almost 65% of participants continued to press the button even after the “victim” had appeared to fall unconscious (Milgram 1963).
These people weren’t psychopaths. They were ordinary people exposed to social pressure from a plausible authority figure. With the right rationalizations, otherwise decent people can disengage their moral responses. And it’s not just an adult phenomenon. Children can do it, too.
If we’re really serious about teaching empathy, I think it’s important for kids to learn about Milgram’s research and about the kinds of rationalizations that people use to excuse callous or cruel behavior. One of the most common is the tendency to view people from out-groups as less human, or less deserving of respect and compassion.
To learn more, check out this Parenting Science article on mechanisms of moral disengagement.
More reading
How does empathy begin? Babies show evidence of affective empathy very early in life. And by the toddler years, many young children also show evidence of sympathy towards others. They’ll even lend a helping hand to strangers in trouble. You can read more about it in these articles:
Looking for other ways to boost your child’s social savvy? I offer these research-inspired social skills activities for children and teenagers.
And for more information about the science of empathy, check out this collection of Parenting Science articles.
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Images for “Teaching empathy”:
title image of brother holding toddler sister by monkeybusinessimages / istock
image of multi-racial family by Jovanmandic /istock
image of father talking with his kids on the grass by imtmphoto /istock
image of kids playing superhero by Rawpixel / istock
image of siblings taking a silly selfie by ajijchan / istock
image of mother and toddler talking on couch by digitalskillet / istock
Content of “Teaching empathy” last modified 6/2024. Portions of the text are derived from earlier versions of the same article, written by the same author.