Helping Your Child Develop into a Caring Human Being
Living in times when emotional intelligence is highly advertised as necessary skill, with school bulling becoming an epidemy of a threatening scale, is bizarre. As parents and caregivers, we wish a better and kinder future for our children. This is only possible if we teach them compassion from their early years.
Caring about other people, animals, planet Earth sounds natural but comes not that easy. However, as an attitude and a choice, compassion can be learned and improved. Let’s discuss why it is important and what can we do to help our kids develop this skill.
Caring as A Cornerstone for Empathy and Socializing
“Survival of the fittest” wouldn’t be possible without effective communication and cooperation. And those are hardly possible without caring for others’ opinions and interests. Kids who receive these lessons from the first year of life grow into people capable of empathy and fit to build healthy relationships.
When parents pick up a crying kid after unfortunate fall in his first steps and express verbally, physically, and emotionally their understanding and compassion, a child learns to mimic it. Research found the immediate firing of mirror neurons in kids allowing them to replicate everything they see to further ingrain it in their brains (you can order more targeted research on the topic on bestessays.com).
Lots of observations of the young children showed their natural incline to feel sorry for somebody’s pain or sadness. Later in their teen years they might lose some of it due to all the physical and cognitive changes happening at this age. But the firmer the foundation in their capacities to sympathize, the stronger their overall kindness and empathy. Being able to put yourself in someone’s shoes and choose the way to support them is a meta skill contributing to success in many areas. Especially those, connected to communication.
Ways to Help a Child Learn to Care
- Modeling by family examples. There is a saying, that you don’t need to educate kids, we just need to educate ourselves. Indeed, children are very observing and have a good eye for everything new for them. So, they would absorb moods and tricks of all the adult interactions they witness. Mind your way of communication at home and with outside world, articulating expressions of empathy or kindness for your child’s benefits.
- Positive reinforcement. Notice and support your kids in any acts of kindness and care for someone. Repeated positive feedback to compassionate behavior will make them internalize such attitude as a norm. Provide additional explanations for new situations to highlight universality of compassion as a principle, but adaptability to specific case too.
- Creating meaningful opportunities for practicing empathy. Aggression or indifference among teenagers are often symptoms of being unprepared to face difficult or complex life events. As caregivers, we have an opportunity to create age-appropriate learning situations for kids to discover what is a real world like and understand step by step how to endure its challenges and sorrows.
You can arrange volunteering in shelters for animals or helping in soup kitchen. Or find a local nursing home where kids could visit lonely seniors to talk or read to them. When older, kids with such experiences would have a benefit of knowing about people with different living conditions.
- Choosing right books. Most children writers or essay writer try to impart wisdom on their young readers. Among them many tell stories of underprivileged or unfortunate requiring understanding, sympathy, and help. Use such stories to illustrate importance of empathy and ways to care about others.
Books are also great topic starters and training machines for observations. Reading about a hero’s troubles opens way for discussion and deep questions: “what do you think she is feeling?”, “how would you help her in this case?”, “do you see similar stories in school?” etc. Let your child to explain whatever they can helping in naming specific emotions in articulated manner.
- Involving a child in caring about siblings, pets, or elderly relatives. It should not be their key responsibility or hard labor, but rather an opportunity to connect and understand needs of other family members. Teaching your child to be empathetic to provide necessary assistance in caring for others would become a natural part of life.
If you’re only planning to have another baby or adopt a pet, start discussing various details with your kid as early before the event as possible. Use books, toys, and roleplays to explain new dynamics in a family highlighting the positive aspects. Describe to your child various ways he’ll be able to care for a new friend.
Teaching your child to care is one of those skills with the most long-lasting effects. Empathy and compassion influence quality of their relationships in childhood and in adult years, helping with socializing and contact building. On more global picture, every caring child is a member of kinder safer world.
Justin Osborne is a essay writer, he loves to share his thoughts and opinions about education, writing and blogging with other people on different blogs and forums. Currently, he is working as a content marketer at bestessays.com.
