For a long time now the focus of therapeutic approaches to fostering and adoption has been on developing empathy. Parents are told to develop empathy towards the child and to focus on enabling the child to feel empathy themselves. Some have suggested that this is the key to therapeutic parenting. However, new ways of thinking suggest that we might be focusing on the wrong feeling.
What is Empathy?
Empathy is the ability to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within the other person’s frame of reference. It’s being able to imagine ourselves in their shoes and experience a situation as another person might experience it.
When and How Do We Develop Empathy?
It is believed that we do not really begin to develop empathy until somewhere between the age of 4 and 7. Younger children often do things that suggest that they have empathy when in fact they are merely copying behaviours they have seen in others or doing what they know will get get rewarded – “aren’t you a good boy for giving your brother a hug when he was crying”.
Before we can develop an understanding of someone else, we have to understand that we are a separate being ourselves, and that other people have their own thoughts, feelings, experiences etc. This is called developing a theory of mind and usually happens around the age of four. This might explain why younger children you know are so ego-centric – they literally believe they are the only ones that matter!
Empathy is a learned process. We first develop a good knowledge of our own thoughts and emotions and then the understanding that other people may think and feel similarly to us. When a child falls over and experiences pain, he can draw on that experience at a later date to understand how his friend may feel when he also falls over. Empathy is mostly developed through learning from the role models around us.
How Is The Development of Empathy Impacts By Trauma?
You can’t develop thoughts about other people’s well-being if your focus is solely on your own survival. Many young people who have experienced trauma from a very young age struggle to understand their own thoughts and emotions, let alone someone else’s. They are developmentally stuck at a younger emotional age to their chronological years.
For young people who are born into families were there is an absence of love and care, empathy is not likely to be role modelled. In some cases children are encouraged to cause pain to other people – “hit him before he hits you” – or taught that emotions are to be avoided rather than understood – “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry for”.
Why Might Empathy Not Be As Important As Previously Suggested?
It was previously thought that if a child had the ability to empathise then they were able to be emotionally healthy. However this is contradicted by the fact that adults experiencing psychopathology are often able to show empathy. There are many cases in which people diagnosed as ‘psychopaths’ or ‘sociopaths’ (those terms are no longer used) have showed high levels of empathy. Part of the appeal of their violent crimes was being able to understand how their victims would likely think and feel.
What Does this Mean for Fostering and Adoption?
Empathy is still a really important ability to support our children to develop. However, it could be argued that the level of focus on empathy within therapeutic parenting has been to the detriment of other qualities.
Alongside empathy, we must also focus on compassion. If we don’t, we risk the child will develop an ability to understand how a person feels but not care enough for that person to use empathy wisely. Anyone living or working around traumatised children for longer enough will have encountered young people who use their ability to empathise in ways that are often cruel. As a way to protect themselves from their own shame they will intentionally say and do things that they know will cause emotional pain for others.
Similarly, empathy alone is not enough for the parent. I can completely empathise with the reasons behind my children’s poor behaviour. However without the ability to show compassion I simply might not care what those reasons are. I might see their past as an excuse to how they are behaving now, particularly when their negative use of empathy touches my own sense of shame. This is unhelpful.
It is acting from a position of empathy, compassion and the many other ways in which we show love that, when used together, offer our children the best hope. It is to simplistic to suggest that any one quality holds the answer alone.
With love, compassion and a lot of empathy for how hard fostering and adopting can be,
Fi
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