Empathy
"The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner." [1]
The challenge of teaching empathy to stop bullying [2]
KATE HAMMER - EDUCATION REPORTER
The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Nov. 15 2012, 11:28 AM EST
Last updated Tuesday, Nov. 20 2012, 4:38 PM EST
Empathy is Canadian education’s best weapon against bullying, but it is a flawed tool.
The prevailing wisdom, backed by experts, is that children are less likely to pick on peers if they understand the damage they can do. But kids aren’t born empathetic, they’re more susceptible to impulses, and worse, one experts points out, the lesson meant to tame the bully may have the opposite effect.
“Reading and math is amazingly simple to teach compared to learning how to get along with others,” said Debra Pepler, a York University professor and psychologist. “We expect children to learn this by osmosis and they don’t.”
She said lectures can help, but the real learning happens in more everyday settings, in students’ moment-to-moment interactions with teachers and other adults.
Early intervention and repetition, then, are essential. Empathy can be taught, but people under the age of 26 are especially prone to bully because their brains aren’t wired for impulse control, according to Joanne Cummings, a clinical psychologist at blueballoon health services in Toronto.
“Often kids, their empathy appears to go out the window and that’s because they get so caught up and excited in doing things with friends that they become de-individualized and they have sort of a mob mentality,” she said.
The trick is getting kids to think before they act, she said, which is not the kind of lesson that comes from a one-day seminar.
More alarming is the idea that some bullies are actually egged on by one-off lessons on empathy. Youths who have flawed relationships with their parents can be motivated to pick on the weak, according to Vancouver clinical and developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld.
He believes that children who lack a secure relationship with a dominant adult – usually a parent – will try to dominate their peers. These youths are often motivated by the hurt they cause.
“Saying that something hurts should elicit tenderness,” Dr. Neufeld writes in his book, Hold On To Your Kids. “In the eyes of the bully, however, such unabashed vulnerability becomes like a red flag to a bull, inflaming the urge to attack.”
Parental relationships may be a key problem. Canadian children rank near the bottom relative to their peers in developed countries for how often they have a meal with their parents, and third-last for how often they spend time “just talking” with their parents, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Parents of bullied children can do everything right and still be powerless to make it stop.
“My parents were in talking to my teachers almost every day, but I felt really abandoned at school,” said Kelsey Burton, a 22-year-old student at the University of Waterloo who grew up in Caledonia, Ont
In Grade 7 and 8, she was ostracized by the girls in