Teaching Compassion and Empathy to Prevent Bullying
Bullying has become an epidemic and while intervention is necessary, it is action taken after someone has been harmed. We must commit ourselves to programs that prevent assaults by teaching compassion and empathy starting at birth. Compassion and empathy are both a behavior and an attitude where our hearts and minds are open to beliefs that differ from our own. It allows us to put ourselves in another shoes and feel what they are experiencing. Compassion is a presence of being where one holds wisdom, understanding, appreciation, love and respect for all beings in his or her own heart.
These values and a code of ethics must be so deeply ingrained into a child’s mind that even peer pressure or group thinking does not influence her to violate learned and chosen values. Discuss with children how they can respond to peer pressure and stick to what they know is right. It must also be so deeply embedded into one’s consciousness that even when hurt, angry, resentful or stressed, one will not act out her hostility or take it out on others.
Bonding Teaches Kids to Take the High Road
While the typical response to bullying is to get tough and punish, we need to magnify our instinctual tendencies to care for others. We are hardwired to be aggressive as part of the our survival instinct, but there is also a biological basis for human compassion. In fact, brain scans reveal that the same regions of the brain light up with thoughts of violence to another or a mother’s loving gaze upon her children. The pleasure centers of the brain light up when we help others. Research by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello indicate that toddlers as young as 18 months behave altruistically. Therefore we need to nurture and grow a child’s ability to be kinder and more caring.
More than helping children know what not to do, get them excited by elevating another human being and finding pleasure in doing so. However, as a teacher, parent or adult role model, you must walk your talk or all lessons taught will never be learned. Your behavior will show the way. Teach children well by always taking the High Road.
While we have to stop bullies and protect those who are targeted, we will be forever like a dog chasing its tail if we don’t also focus on how to prevent bullying. Prevention is always better than cure and prevents the innocent from being assaulted. While my blogs and my book make suggestions on what can be done to start an anti-bullying campaign and prevent bullying in our schools, what I am presenting here is prevention that begins at a very early age where strong character is woven into the tapestry of a child’s character.
Obviously the immediate bonding between a mother and child is important and begins in the womb. The importance of bonding between a child and his father is finally becoming acknowledged as essential to a child’s development. Absent fathers certainly contribute to a bonding dysfunction. Children learn what they live and if they are not nurtured or loved, they can’t give what they have not first received.
Show and Tell: Role Playing Teaches Compassion
Whenever a child demonstrates mean behavior, it is wise to ask that child how her behavior may have made the other child feel. Asking the assaulted child will make the emotional consequences quite clear. Then ask the child who was aggressive how she is now feel having hurt another child. You may or may not get an honest response, but the question will increase the child’s awareness of the effects of her behavior.
The most important step is often ignored and that is to now ask and show the child what might be a more loving, compassionate response. If a child does not chose the High Road, it is often because no one has taught her how to walk it. Better options will be chosen when they are taught. After suggesting a more caring response, you again ask the aggressor how her more compassionate response makes the targeted child feel. That question is then followed with how it feels to have made another person happy. You want your child to get hooked on the good feelings that come with making another feel good. It is introducing a child to feeling power in a positive way. This is how empathy is learned.
When language skills are not yet fully developed, having children draw their feelings offer them another modality to express their emotions. Another way to have a child experience how another feels is to do role playing because it makes things less abstract and more concrete which helps children understand their behavioral consequences. For example, you can ask your child to play the role of the friend who has been targeted. You then make the negative comments that your child has been expressing to her friend. Experiencing the emotional consequences and being the recipient of one’s own sarcasm quickly increases understanding and awareness. Truth has its own sting.
CAUTION: The purpose of role playing is to teach and learn and not to punish. Especially with a younger child, you want to not come on too strong or become a bully yourself. You do this is small doses and immediately discuss how it feels to hear hurtful words and then focus on constructive alternatives and a positive plan of action to change the dynamics of that child’s relationship. You must practice compassion as you do this exercise and your actions must come from a loving heart. Children can sense the difference and are not fooled.
If there is a younger sibling in the family, the older child should be encouraged to nurture the younger child. Older child often feel resentment toward a younger child who has stolen the show and demands so much of mom’s attention, but encouraging your child to share those feelings will help. Make sure you give the older child who feels displaced some very special alone time with mom and dad as it once was before the new sister or brother. This is a great time to show more positive ways to express anger and other negative emotions. If you tolerate your older child taking out his frustrations on a younger sibling, you are giving that child permission to bully. Reward your children for nurturing and helping each other. It’s a good start.
Another way to teach empathy and compassion to prevent bullying is to have a child be responsible for a pet such as a dog or cat. Fish may teach responsibility but lacks tactile gratification and fish don’t beg, cry or give you those big sad eyes which express enough emotions to move boulders. It is just one more way your child can learn compassion by caring for another living being.
Roots of Empathy
We must teach children at an early age to be caring and compassionate. It is about giving children the right message, at the right time for right thinking. Timing is key for if compassion is not learned at an early age, the lessons may never be integrated into a child’s behavior
There is an evidence-based classroom program that has shown a dramatic effect in the reduction of aggression by increasing social/emotional competence and empathy. This proactive parenting skills program begins in early childhood when the impact is greater.
Research suggests that we are biologically predisposed to care for others, especially for our young. When people exhibit behaviors associated with compassion, their bodies produce more oxytocin which is a hormone responsible for compassionate behavior and bonding in our interpersonal relationships. We must capitalize on our innate ability to bond and foster it at an early age.
Roots of Empathy is a program created by Mary Gordon and is well described by David Bornstein in his New York Times article Fighting Bullying with Babies.
Here’s how it works: Roots arranges monthly class visits by a mother and her baby (who must be between two and four months old at the beginning of the school year). Each month, for nine months, a trained instructor guides a classroom using a standard curriculum that involves three 40-minute visits, a pre-visit, a baby visit, and a post-visit. The program runs from kindergarten to seventh grade. During the baby visits, the children sit around the baby and mother (sometimes it’s a father) on a green blanket (which represents new life and nature) and they try to understand the baby’s feelings. The instructor helps by labeling them. It’s a launch pad for them to understand their own feelings and the feelings of others, explains Gordon. It carries over to the rest of class.
During the visits with the baby and discussions that follow the children are exposed to the following ideas and skills (among many others):
- emotional literacy: the ability to describe and understand their own feelings and those of others
- perspective taking: the cognitive aspect of empathy, the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes.
- neuroscience: a focus on how love grows brains
- temperament: the idea that each person is unique, acceptance of different personality styles and traits
- attachment/attunement: children observe the growing bond between parent and baby. They learn all the behaviors that make a secure attachment and how it impacts the baby.
- male nurturance: by having fathers participate, children are exposed to the idea that males can nurture and express feelings too.
The results of this approach are really impressive. A number of studies have demonstrated that Roots of Empathy significantly decreases aggression and increases prosocial behavior.
Programs like this are a good reminder that we do have the capacity for empathy and compassion within each of us. Creating situations and experiences that foster these capacities can go a long way toward creating a compassionate world.
My own commitment to stop bullying began with my development of Wings for Wishes and the creation of an empowering character building program that transforms a child’s potential into unlimited possibilities. I Believe I Can Fly! facilitates healthy life choices and compassion and thus reduces bullying and aggressive behaviors. It is a complete system of thinking that gives a young child the right message at the right time for right thinking. The inspiring book introduces characters such as Ruckus the Rabbit who is loving, caring and compassionate. The daily guided imagery exercises on the CD suggests that your child be loving and compassionate just like Ruckus. The soft, comfy blanket serves as a behavioral trigger to think great, be great and do great things. Kids who feel great take the High Road and elevate others so they feel great as well and together create a caring culture where bullying can no longer exist. Very simply, a loving heart cannot hurt or bully another.
Edie Raether, known as the Bully Buster, is an international keynote speaker and author of Stop Bullying Now Creating Caring Cultures. Giving Children Hope. Visit Edie at www.stopbullyingwithedie.com and www.wingsforwishes.com for her character building program.
http://stopbullyingwithedie.com/anti-bullying-program/
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