The Art of Empathy (41 page)

These dramatic shifts may be fine as long as they don't arise alongside increased anxieties, emotional outbursts, sleeping troubles, changes in eating or attention, and other unhealthy shifts in emotional functioning. We all love to put on costumes and pretend to be any number of characters, and if you can help children play with gender identity and individuate (to the extent that they can), you'll help them develop intrapersonal intelligence about who they are and how they feel. This understanding that identity and gender are fluid will also help children develop the interpersonal skills and Perspective Taking abilities they'll need to build a nonvalenced, inclusive, and truly empathic social world that welcomes people of every sexual orientation.

WORKING AND PLAYING WITH EMOTIONS IN CHILDREN

As children are growing, you really can't give them too much information about emotions, because out in the world, they'll receive very poor emotional
training. Helping children name their emotions, identify them, play with them, dramatically express them at many different intensities, and talk about them openly will help children develop comfort and expertise with the basic building blocks of their emotive, cognitive, empathic, and social skills. As you explore the actions that each emotion requires, and as you learn many different emotional vocabulary words, you'll be able to approach emotional issues more empathically, share your new knowledge, and help children understand their emotions more clearly.

Depending on their age, you can help children develop their emotional vocabulary to intentionally encompass nuanced emotional awareness and an understanding that emotions often arise in pairs and clusters. As you look at the “Emotional Vocabulary List” (in the Appendix), you can choose a number of kid-friendly words for each emotion at different intensities, or you can just talk about, for instance, a big sadness, a medium amount of fear, or a tiny hint of anger. Children love to grade and sort things, and they may have excellent ideas for how to talk about clustered emotions, such as the large happiness, medium sadness, and pangs of envy they feel when they watch another child open a huge pile of birthday presents. You can also help children unvalence emotions by connecting their emotional vocabulary to the actions each emotion requires. Often, when we name emotions for children, we include direct teaching about whether the emotion is acceptable: “You're angry, young man; go to your room.” “There's nothing to be afraid of.” “Don't cry, don't cry.” “There's that smile—that's what I want to see!”

If you can strip away the good/bad valencing and present each emotion as a tool, you'll really help children become emotionally intelligent. You can do this before children learn to speak by learning to read and respond to their emotions, and by helping them complete the actions for their emotions (instead of praising or punishing children for feeling emotions). As children develop vocabulary, you can incorporate emotions and their actions when you speak about them: “I think you're feeling some fear; what are you sensing?” “It seems like you're feeling envy; what unfair thing just happened?” “You feel proud of yourself because you did good work!” “You feel sad; what isn't working right now? What can you let go of?” “You're feeling angry. What do you need? What would make things right?” These messages, of course, need to be individualized to each child, but even toddlers can learn how to productively complete the actions their emotions require.

EMOTION PLAY!

You can also create games and dramatic reenactments so that children (boys
and
girls!) can have fun exploring emotions in safe ways. With anger, you can have kids think of mean things to say (or repeat mean things they've heard) and then have them explore a number of different ways to respond and reset their boundaries without violence or verbal abuse. With shame, you can have children think up really naughty things that they have done or might do and then playact a number of ways to make amends. With hatred, you can have kids try the emotions on for size and then describe exactly what it is in the hated thing (or person) that makes it seem so dreadfully foreign and unwanted. With apathy, you can laze around on the floor and talk about why you're so bored, fed up, and uninterested, ho hum! This can lead to some very interesting conversations about the child's true interests.

You can also act out Intentional Tantrums. In this fun and silly way, you can help children see what's going on when tantrums occur. For kids from the age of about thirty months to five years, very few things seem funnier than watching adults have pretend tantrums. It's wonderful for children to see the behavior from the outside and to know that adults understand the situation. Tantrums can be very frightening and isolating, so bringing them into the magical world of play can help children feel more capable and calmer about tantrums.

Children tend to create a lot of games around fear already—peek-a-boo, certainly, but also hide and seek, tag, and games where you sneak up on people and scare the wits out of them. With fear and panic, you can create games in which a potentially dangerous thing might happen, and then help the child make quick decisions about what to do. Remember that in panic specifically, there are only three choices: fight, flee, or freeze. Ask, “Which one is best? Let's try all three and see!”

To play with anxiety, you can create a ridiculously large number of tasks that the child has to get done in a very short period of time and then help him or her problem-solve a creative way out of it (getting help from Rumplestiltskin, magic brooms, flying unicorns, and the like
is
allowed, just so you know). To play with jealousy and envy, you can tell the tale of Cinderella and her sisters. Or you can load up one stuffed animal with toys and games while another animal has only one; then have the child talk about what both stuffed animals might be feeling (and how to make things more just and fair). To play with confusion, you can offer the child competing, wonderful options
or you can replay a situation in which the child couldn't decide between one thing and another, and then slow down the decision-making process so the child can discover what's significant and meaningful to him or her.

With sadness, you can make a game of finding things that the child has grown out of or no longer needs and then find the perfect person to give them to. This not only helps a child feel the rejuvenation aspect of letting go, but it also helps him or her develop Perspective Taking (Who would like this best?), Concern for Others (Would this make someone feel happy and loved?), and Perceptive Engagement in one fell swoop. (The fact that this game also clears clutter out of your home is a bonus!) With grief, you can play a solemn game and create a ceremony for light versions of loss, such as one of the child's stuffed animals moving to the moon. You can create a small grief shrine, and let the child create a sermon about how much the stuffed animal will be missed, all of the wonderful times they've had together, and the child's wishes for the stuffed animal's life on the moon.

Most children play pretty well already with happiness, but joy and elation can sometimes be a little intense and too activating. I like to help children ramp up into joy and run around—
yay, yeeha!
—and then completely relax, perhaps by laying down and pretending to sleep. Joy can be very tricky to down-regulate, especially since it's valenced so massively as the best possible emotion in the universe. Therefore, it's a good idea to intentionally teach children how to ground and calm themselves when joy is present.

Contentment can also be a tricky emotion, because children are doing such a huge amount of work in the development of their sense of self. Some kids ratchet up into a kind of megalomania of absurd contentment (we'll look at that in the section on bullying later in this chapter), while others are plagued with self-doubts and can't seem to feel much contentment at all. Parenting and teaching styles can interfere with the development of healthy contentment and self-confidence—certainly parents who shame their children can really throw a wrench into this emotional area, but so can parents who overpraise and reward their children for everything. The trick with contentment is to help a child associate it with real actions that are truly commendable and that they themselves feel proud and content about. So a good contentment game might be creating tasks that the child can complete, and then checking in to see if he or she feels satisfied about it. You can find out a great deal about a child's self-concept when you can play with contentment in this way.

TANTRUMS, PHOBIAS, RIVALRIES, AND BULLYING

In most instances, you and your children will be able to figure out what's happening when an emotion arises, and you'll be able to create a number of games to explore the emotion together. However, four specific emotional situations are a little bit tricky, starting with a crucial emotional and empathic developmental phase better known as
tantrums.

TANTRUMS

Tantrums—loud and annoying though they are—are an intrinsic part of the process of developing Emotion Regulation skills (though it sure doesn't look like it!). If you observe tantrums empathically, however, you'll be able to identify the rhythmical aspect of this important developmental process. Tantrums are a way for children to dramatically cycle between anger (and rage) and sadness (and self-pity) when they confront challenges to their needs, their desires, and their sense of self. Tantrums are not games; rather, they are a form of emotive and dramatic play that occurs as children learn how to work with their emotions. The way you respond to a tantrum will help—or hinder—children in their development of emotional skills and empathic awareness.

In a clever 2011 study,
⁵¹
psychologist James Green and fellow researchers at the University of Connecticut gathered audio recordings of numerous reallife tantrums in toddlers. (Tantrums are most prevalent from the ages of one to four, but they can occur at later ages, especially in response to emotional upheavals, loss, or trauma.) Green's team found that there's a very predictable cycle of vocalizations connected to anger (screaming and yelling) and sadness (whining, crying, and whimpering). When challenged, most young children will move between sadness and anger as they ramp up into a tantrum. These distinct emotional cycles are pretty easy to identify (angry yelling sounds very different from sad whining), and Green found something surprising as he listened to how parents dealt with each emotion. In general, nothing helped during the angry phase except calmly setting boundaries for the child. Questioning, arguing, yelling back, pleading, threatening, and joking all made the anger portion of the tantrum much worse; however, making short, boundary-setting declarative statements helped. When parents set boundaries, the child could often reach the sadness phase of the cycle and let go, at which time, he or she could be consoled and soothed.

During a tantrum, I like to name the emotion for the child, without any shame attached. If we're in public, I get the child away from the shaming
stares of others (no one needs to hear a tantrum; they're extremely activating if you don't understand what's happening, and the screams could emotionally trigger everyone in the vicinity). So I'll say calmly, without trying to fix anything, “You're very angry about taking a nap right now.” “Kelly has the truck right now, and you're angry.” “You're very angry because you can't have candy, so we're leaving the store right now until you can calm down.” Notice that I also talk about the temporal aspect of the tantrum with the words
right now.
Intense activations of anger and rage can't last—they're exhausting, and it can help a child to know that this feeling isn't going to last forever. It's also important to understand that this behavior isn't intentional and won't be helped by shaming—you'll actually just make it worse if you try to shame a child out of a tantrum. Tantrums are unintentional, and you need to model calm boundary setting to let the child know that even at its very worst, anger is just an emotion, and it's all going to be fine. No shame.

Tantrums
can
become intentional if you handle them badly or if you acquiesce and give the child whatever he or she is screaming about. However, at their core, tantrums are part of an important developmental process. If you can reframe tantrums in your own mind, you can help a child safely ride through these intense emotional storms.

When the rage storm (screaming and yelling) passes and the child moves to the release of sadness (whining, crying, or whimpering), he or she will be able to let go and down-regulate. At this point, the intense activation will cycle down, and the child will be able to focus more clearly on what happened. You can then talk about the tantrum and name the emotions, “Wow, you felt really angry because (something), and then you felt sad. What do you need now?” Sometimes cuddling and reassurance are all a child needs, because a tantrum can be really terrifying and embarrassing for a child. It's important not to punish or isolate children who are having tantrums, because it teaches them that when an intense emotion arises, they're unacceptable and unwanted; they're on their own. That's not a way to help children develop emotional and empathic skills. Children need help to understand and work with their intense emotions. Depending on their language skills, you may be able to talk with them about what happened so that they'll have ideas and options for the next time a tantrum cycle starts to arise.

When a child has a lot of tantrums, it can really help to make Intentional Tantrums a part of his or her imaginative play. Children love to see adults having play tantrums, and they love to stomp around and pretend to have
tantrums themselves, because it helps them feel less alone in their emotional lives, less annoying, and less of a burden. Some deeply emotive children just need more time and practice before they can develop Emotion Regulation skills, and dramatic play is a wonderful, safe, empathy-building practice. However, if children are regularly tantrum-prone—and it's not because you bribed them with whatever they wanted and created a monster—you may be looking at a form of self-soothing behavior and not a tantrum, per se.