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Teaching teenagers—especially girls—to think about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes (including our own) can be one of the hardest jobs we face as parents, since once the ‘tude starts, girls live intensely within any given moment. Their sights are set only on their own perceptions and needs, in addition to a frightening, totally illogical sense of invincibility that scares the crap out of us.
Search around the web, and you'll find real exercises moms and daughters can do together to help foster their daughter’s sense of empathy and even moms can learn something in the process. BrightHubEducation.com’s article Empathy: Teaching Your Teenager to Care About Others by Lotus Snow, tells us that when teens identify or feel that another person is similar to them, they are more likely to feel empathy for that individual. So one way to teach teens to develop their empathic skills would be to help them discover what they have in common with other individuals. Moreover, in this age of “cyber-ism" where the line between the real and the imaginary is blurred, and where there is seldom a set of direct consequences for their actions, the more we can humanize a victim's distress, the better our teen will be able to respond with empathy.
The article suggests getting your teen to figuratively turn a mirror into a window, with the mirror symbolizing self-centeredness and the window representing a sense of empathy—where she can look beyond her own needs and put herself in another person’s position. Some questions to ask her that may lead to meaningful discussions include:
- Just how much do you know about another person anyway?
- Were you there with this person throughout their entire childhood?
- Do you know much about the neighborhood that person grew up in or what their family is really like?
Then have her put the shoe on the other foot. Apart from your daughter’s clothing, ask her what may others may notice about her on the surface that just might give them a clue about who she really is. How might others perceive her based on her own behavior, habits, way of speaking, etc.?
In her post Grow a Child's Empathy in 3 Easy Ways, Dr. Marilyn Price-Mitchell lists a wealth of ways to get your daughter involved in community services and offers links to wonderful programs, helping her not only see the plight of others less fortunate, but also realizing we are all in this together no matter what our age or income.
Stories with paradigm shifts abound, showing how we may see one person on the surface but are clueless as to what that person has experienced, suffered or is even gifted at, for that matter. And nothing helps you explain something this complex like a movie that centers around it. Flipped is a simple but touching tale of a young boy who moves into a new neighborhood directly across the street from a very outgoing girl his own age. He instantly dislikes her, finds her annoying, and judges her. In the meantime, the boy’s father becomes almost instantly critical of her entire family since they don’t keep up their front yard—something he believes speaks to their character. The boy hears his dad assume all sorts of things about the family over many a family dinner, even though the two neighboring families had never truly interacted. The story is told first from the standpoint of the boy and then the girl’s narrative is aired throughout the story, telling how she sees everything that is going on between them from her own perspective and family dynamic. I highly suggest watching this very meaningful movie with your children and even discussing it afterward.
Indeed, movie scripts can take some of life’s most poignant moments and boil them down to a few scenes that have the potential to move our hearts in directions we never thought possible. One of my favorite movies depicting the mother-daughter dance, Spanglish, deals with an immigrant housekeeper mother and her American-born daughter, 12-year old Christina, who is tempted by a new life she experiences outside her Los Angeles barrio when she is invited to spend a summer in Malibu with her mother’s employer’s family. She is overwhelmed by the beauty and luxury in which she is suddenly immersed, juxtaposed to watching her mother cleaning her employer’s house in the background. The daughter begins to see her single mother as “less than” and out-of-step with the rest of the world as she experiences entirely new vistas of her own, causing more and more conflict between them. At the end of the movie, Christina’s narration fast-forwards to her high school-aged self as she speaks aloud the words from a personal statement she has written to accompany her college applications. She writes that back when she and her mother clashed the most, her mother found herself asking her a very basic question of her at such a young age. “‘Is what you want for yourself...to become someone very different than me?’"
The daughter goes on to finish her letter. “I have been overwhelmed by your encouragement to apply to your university and your list of scholarships available to me. Though, as I hope this essay shows, your acceptance, while it would thrill me, will not define me. My identity rests firmly and happily on one fact: I am my mother's daughter.”
Consciously making the decision to help your children develop a sense of empathy is an exercise that may well serve them for a lifetime, helping them navigate a number of life's obstacles as well as place their own experiences in perspective.
