The Art of Empathy (38 page)

THE EMPATHIC GENIUS OF PEEK-A-BOO

My niece Holly sent me a video of her six-month-old daughter leaping happily in a swinglike contraption (the kind that hangs from a doorway). My grandniece jumped enthusiastically with intense focus, when suddenly Holly said her name, came in close, and said “Peek-a-boo!” My grandniece screamed, loudly! But the scream included a raucous laugh that cycled down in a few seconds to silence and a serious return to her jumping. Holly came toward her again,
Peek-a-boo!,
instinctually knowing, as good parents do, to wait until her baby's fright and shock had cycled down into calmness. The game continued onward in this rhythmic way, and mom and baby had a
wonderful time. Without much spoken language, and without intentionally trying to create a teaching moment, Holly and her daughter have created a fully emotive and empathic interaction that's actually helping both of them learn to read each other and develop complex emotional and empathic skills.

Let's look at this interaction in terms of our six aspects of empathy. Holly uses intentional Emotion Contagion to cycle her daughter through intense but manageable (and fun!) shock and fear. By timing her approaches just right, Holly is helping her daughter learn how to calm herself effectively after an emotion is activated suddenly and intensely. The baby is not simply learning how to play and interact; she's also learning advanced Emotion Regulation skills in relation to an intense emotion. My grandniece is also learning how to identify and feel her way into, between, and out of specific emotions by reading them in her mom's face and voice and feeling them in her own body—she's learning advanced Empathic Accuracy skills in this game. At six months old, my grandniece is too young to be able to perform skillful Perspective Taking, and her Concern for Others hasn't fully kicked in, because she's in a developmental stage in which she needs to be very self-focused. She'll develop those skills, and the related capacity for skillful Perceptive Engagement, between her first and second birthday. However, her warm, rich, and interactive bond with her mom (and dad) is setting the groundwork for her eventual development of all six aspects of empathy.

When we looked at my six aspects of empathy in
Chapter 2
, I included research on the development of empathy in babies. The current consensus is that the capacity for the most developed aspect of empathy—Perceptive Engagement—arises at around eighteen months in normally developing infants. But this is not true for everyone; not all babies are as lucky as my grandniece.

In their 2010 book,
Born for Love,
child psychiatrist Bruce Perry and science writer Maia Szalavitz track the development of empathy in infants and children. Perry is a trauma specialist who works with high-risk children whose empathy was impeded by poor parenting, chaos, trauma, or unsupportive early environments, such as large and understaffed orphanages. Using these unfortunate children as examples of how and why empathy development can go awry, Perry and Szalavitz help us understand what babies need to develop empathy (luckily, it's not hard to provide these things, and games like peek-a-boo are a surprisingly important part of the process). Perry and Szalavitz also provide excellent suggestions for what you can do to support empathy throughout childhood, even in children whose
empathy development was disturbed in some way. Certainly, there is an important developmental window that occurs prior to that eighteen-month milestone where babies, like my grandniece, develop skills in Emotion Contagion, Empathic Accuracy, and Emotion Regulation. But these empathic skills can be addressed even into adulthood—just as you're doing right now in this book.

WHAT BABIES NEED TO DEVELOP EMPATHY

Simply put, to develop empathy, a baby needs warm, nurturing attention from one or two reliable, central caregivers who touch, interact with, and respond attentively to his or her unique emotions and needs. Certainly, many other people should interact with and care for the baby so that he or she can learn to trust and read others, but this central bond is crucial. When babies are raised in orphanages, where the staff rotates, they don't often develop strong empathic skills. Even if those babies are fed well, kept warm, and protected from abuse, they aren't able to spend long periods of time connecting with their caregiver—gazing at him or her, learning to smile and smile back, smelling and touching him or her, and learning that whenever they need anything, that trusted caregiver will respond. Babies need to have their emotions mirrored back to them reliably in vocal tone, in touch, and in facial expressions so that they can begin to organize and understand their emotions. They need to interact with specific people whom they can learn very well. As I wrote earlier, empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill that develops in interactions. Babies, especially in their first year, need as much warm, emotive, and intimate human interaction as they can get.

Babies also need to learn how to identify and regulate their emotions, and peek-a-boo is an amazing game for that. But look back and notice how careful my niece Holly's timing was. She let her daughter know that the game was commencing (Holly called her baby's name), and then she let her baby's self-regulation cycles set the pace of the game. If Holly had continued scaring her daughter without waiting for her to calm and self-regulate, this wouldn't have been a game at all; it would have ended in tears, or it would have taught her daughter that Mom is not a source of fun and comfort as much as she is a creator of emotional pain and confusion. Peek-a-boo looks like a simple game, but like all games, it has intricate rules that Holly learned empathically by interacting with her daughter and paying close attention to her unique emotional rhythms.

Babies are interaction-based organisms, and they need to taste, feel, observe, hear, roll in, and experience the world emotionally, physically, and empathically. Babies' bodies and brains are growing at a rapid pace, and they're uploading as much information as they can possibly gather about everything. Babies' fascination with peek-a-boo games is part of this intensely interactional uploading process—it's emotional play and empathic learning focused on the exact skills babies need to develop. Babies and young children need to have their facial expressions mirrored back to them, to have their gurgles and cries answered, to have their emotions mirrored and responded to, and to be lovingly interacted with as much as possible. This is how the six aspects of empathy develop normally—they develop in loving, intimate, and richly emotional interactions that are as simple (and as complex) as a good game of peek-a-boo.

At later stages in their development, when babies develop Concern for Others, Perspective Taking, and Perceptive Engagement skills, you can help them work with and increase their empathic skills through imaginal play, reading and stories, and dramatic reenactments of challenging situations that they've already experienced (or that they might encounter). These dramatic games start very early. In the game of peek-a-boo, my grandniece is already playing with emotions, learning them, feeling them in her body, regulating them, and sharing them with her mom. Peek-a-boo is an emotive, dramatic, and empathic game that encourages and supports empathy development. And as you can see, these games don't have to be formal or difficult. With a preverbal baby, you can simply mime emotions as you name them (overemphasizing your emotional expressions is a sure laugh-getter that never gets old, as we see in all successful comedies), or you can intentionally copy an emotion that the baby is feeling and gently wait to see what happens next as you follow the baby's rhythms. You can also talk about your own emotions: “Ow! I'm mad because I broke that cup, and now I'm sad because it's broken!” You can also talk about the emotions that you and the baby witness in others: “Look, daddy is silly and happy right now!”

We name everything else for babies—colors, body parts, clothing, family members, toys, pets, dishes, everything—but we don't tend to name emotions, not reliably. Providing children with rich emotional vocabularies will help them develop rich empathic awareness, and providing babies with as much warm and intimate interaction as possible will help them develop rich, advanced empathic skills. In
Chapter 8
, I talked about the trouble of naming people's
emotions for them (because it can offend them and make them feel talked down to), but this isn't true for children. Children need to learn the names of their emotions at many different levels of intensity, and they need to learn what their emotions mean and how to work with each one. Children need your help to develop strong emotional vocabularies and strong Emotion Regulation skills.

Storytelling (including reading together) plays an immense role in helping children develop emotional vocabularies, emotional awareness, emotional skills, empathic skills, and, of course, language skills. Storytelling is one of the central ways we communicate emotional information to each other, and it's a wonderful way for children to intentionally put themselves in the place of others and imagine what another feels, thinks, or might do next. Good stories increase all aspects of empathic skills. Of course, good stories teach Perspective Taking, but they also involve Emotion Contagion, which teaches children how to feel and recognize emotions—and this helps them develop Empathic Accuracy. Working through the emotions in good stories helps children develop Emotion Regulation skills, and becoming involved with the characters helps children develop Concern for Others.

Storytelling and reading together also offer other empathy-building features, especially if children can snuggle into their caregivers as the stories are told and then talk about the story after it ends. Talking about stories is a wonderful way to practice Perceptive Engagement in a safe environment. You can ask, “If you were Harold, and you had a magic crayon, what would you draw here in our house? What would you draw for Gramma? What would you draw for the kitty?” Stories and dramatic play can help children try on different aspects of their empathic skills and discover who they are as empathic beings. Storytelling is intrinsic to every aspect of empathy development; stories are delicious food for humans and their empathic skills.

Reading fiction (and watching drama) has been found to increase empathic skills throughout your life span,
⁵⁰
because dramatic fiction requires that you become an emotionally and empathically invested participant in the stories you read or watch. Good, rich fiction can help you develop all six aspects of your empathy, no matter how old you are. And thankfully, even if your empathy training in childhood was not wonderful, you can still develop your empathy today by intentionally entering the empathic world of fiction.

As you think about fiction as intentional empathy training, consider the quality of fiction you read or watch now. The emotional and empathic training you'll receive from a slapstick comedy is much different from the emotional and empathic
training you'll receive from a heroic adventure or a quiet story about relationships. As you look at the quality of the fiction you consume, think about it empathically as well as thematically. What kind of emotional and empathic training are you receiving from your fiction, and what are you learning from it? Does your current fiction diet offer you excellent empathic and emotional nutrition? If not, why not?

WHERE DO SCREEN-BASED STORIES FIT IN?

Frankly, for babies and infants, screen-based stories don't fit in at all. For children under the age of two, television, computer, and tablet viewing, even of baby-directed videos that supposedly help babies develop their intelligence and their vocabularies, is not an empathy-building activity. It's not even good for language development. Empathy develops in interactions and, as it turns out, so does language. If you think about it empathically, it makes sense—televisions, computers, and tablets can't help babies develop empathy because screens don't have any empathic skills. Older children can understand screen-based stories emotively and empathically, but only after they've developed empathic skills in interactions with living beings. Empathic development is built on warm interactions, and a screen cannot interact or respond in the way a baby's developing brain requires; a screen has no way to know whether its viewers are tired, afraid, sad, bored, or asleep. It just drones on.

A television, computer, or tablet can't mirror emotions, understand them, or help babies regulate them. Screens don't wait to see if a baby has heard or understood what's happening before moving to the next idea, the next phrase, or the next scene, and screens don't care who the baby is as an individual. A screen is not empathic, and it can't teach young babies empathy. In fact, screen time can actually impede empathy development, because it's time away from real, warm, interactive intimacy.

Screen entertainment also can't teach babies and young children interactive language skills. Children can learn vocabulary passively in front of a screen, but they can't learn how language is used, how it relates them to others, or how to read the undercurrents, nuances, subtexts, and empathic content of language. Screens aren't interactive, they aren't empathic, they don't provide the necessary interactions that support linguistic development, and they don't care about their viewers in any way. This isn't to say that all screen-based entertainment and teaching are dangerous for older children;
if your older child has strong empathic and emotional skills, then movies, computer games, and shows can be a fun place where he or she can learn about complex dramatized relationships and situations. Screen-based fiction can be a part (I hope a small part) of the dramatic storytelling play that older children adore. But babies don't have those emotive and empathic skills yet, and they absolutely cannot develop empathic skills in front of a screen.

So if screen-based entertainment is a part of your baby's life, be aware. I'm not suggesting that we parents who have parked our babies in front of the tube, computer, or tablet so that we could get a blessed hour of work done are bad people, but I am saying that empathic awareness is called for. Of course, this empathic awareness extends to you as a parent: if your empathic abilities will be increased if you get an hour to yourself while your baby sits transfixed in front of a screen, and you can come back after that hour and be the full-bodied interaction partner your baby needs, then more power to you! An hour of screen time here and there isn't going to harm anyone, and as we all know, television and computers can save a frazzled parent's sanity. But if the TV or computer is on in front of the baby regularly, and if it's his or her central interaction partner for more than an hour a day, then red flag warning—this is a problem. Empathy (and language!) is developed in rich, warm, intimate, emotive interactions with living beings. Screen-based entertainment provides none of these things, and it will actually impede empathy development and language development in young babies. Screen time can be a soothing distraction for overwrought babies, but that's about it.