My Body Belongs to Me: A Parent's Guide: How to Talk to Young Children about Personal Boundaries, Respect, and Consent by Elizabeth Schroeder EdD MSW

Author:Elizabeth Schroeder EdD MSW [Schroeder EdD MSW, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rockridge Press
Published: 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Instilling Empathy

You’ve likely heard or said at some point, “I can sympathize with that.” Have you ever heard or told someone, “I can empathize with that?” What’s the difference between the two? And what does empathy have to do with respecting body boundaries?

If you sympathize with someone, it means you recognize they’re upset or struggling, and you feel bad for them. Perhaps they had a loss in their family, or fell and are in pain. You don’t have to experience loss or have fallen yourself to understand these are negative experiences.

If you feel empathy, it’s because you’ve had a similar experience to theirs. You may not have lost your grandfather like they did; you may have lost your best friend. So you know the experience of grief. You do not know their unique grief, and they don’t know yours, but you can be in a shared space with the other person, knowing how hard grief is. In that case, you are empathizing with each other.

Why is knowing the difference important? Empathy is key to helping children understand respect; respect is vital to helping them respect others’ body boundaries.

At first, children will not want to hurt others because they fear repercussions. For example:

Parent: You made your sibling cry, don’t you feel bad about that?

Child: [thinking to self, “NO, I don’t feel bad, they just spilled their juice all over my stuff, so I pushed them,” says sheepishly instead] Yeah . . .

Avoid telling your child how they should feel, and instead connect with something they’ve experienced and how it actually made them feel. If they can empathize with the experience of feeling sad, hurt, unsafe, or any other negative emotions, they will be able to connect that to not wanting to cause those emotions. When children learn empathy, they will respect others’ body boundaries, not because they’re afraid of getting into trouble but because they’ve come to recognize that it’s the right thing to do. Going back to the Golden Rule, they’ll be able to think, “I know what this bad feeling is like, and I don’t want to make someone else feel that way.”

Practical Guidelines

You can’t teach someone to be empathetic, but you can work to instill a sense of empathy in them. Here are a few ways you can do that:

Point out examples of people being respectful (or disrespectful!) toward others. Real-life examples, especially those that connect to their day-to-day lives, help provide clarity. For example, if a relative were not feeling well and you decided to take some food to their home, explain to your child why you do that, and how it makes you feel to do nice things for others. You’re connecting your actions to a feeling. If it feels good to do nice things for others, it doesn’t feel good to disrespect or hurt them.

Praise them when they’ve done something nice for others. Developmentally, kids are pretty self-centered, and that’s normal. A vital task of parenthood is helping your child think about others in addition to themselves.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.