Thursday 10th June was National Empathy Day – and after the year we have all experienced, everybody needs a little extra empathy at the moment!
Empathy is our ability to imagine and share someone else’s feelings and perspectives and is divided into three distinct areas; feeling, thinking, acting. It is a key component in building a child’s well-being and resilience. A growing organisation called the ‘Empathy Lab‘ is calling for all children and young people to focus on taking time to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’ to improve their empathetic skills.
The Empathy Lab feels that our young people are growing up in a society with a major empathy deficit; hate crimes are at their highest level since records began and there are increasing concerns about the negative effects of social media, particularly on children and teenagers.
Their approach is to try to build children’s empathy through literacy and high-quality literature. Their strategy builds on new scientific evidence that shows the power of reading to build real-life empathy skills, following their belief that ‘empathy is a beacon of hope in a divided world’.
When Empathy Lab was founded in 2014, it set out to understand whether stories could be used more deliberately to develop young people’s experience of empathy and their ability to put it into action.
“Empathy is a vital skill, and books are the best, and most fun, way to learn it.” – Cressida Cowell, Children’s Laureate
Scientific evidence shows that immersion in literature is an effective way to build our understanding of other people. Raymond Marr, lecturer at York University in Toronto says that ‘the empathy we feel for book characters wires our brains to have the same sensitivity towards real people’ . The key to using literature to help build empathy is to really focus your child on understanding and feeling for the characters. This can be achieved through co-reading, asking them to read aloud or by asking questions about the story looking for empathetic understanding in their answers.
You may like to read this BBC article for more information.
Below are a few book recommendations to help build empathy in your child ranging from picture books to young teen fiction, many of these are available in the school library or I can find a copy for you to borrow of my own.
Mrs Emmett