Believing Not Only In Yourself But In Others, Too

By Featured Guest: Nahjee Grant Leave a comment

People spend a lot of time believing in themselves and that they can achieve anything by doing so. It’s a message of focusing upon one’s dreams and ambitions and making them happen through self-belief, determination, and hard work. There’s little disagreement that such an attitude and environment of positive encouragement has long-term benefits for a child.

One area, however, where we are perhaps lacking, is reminding our children that this sense of belief and encouragement should travel in more than one direction. Beyond focusing and endeavoring to achieve one’s own goals and dreams, children should be encouraged to show the same belief and support for others’ ambitions. This is the focus of today’s article.

The key to helping your kids reach this state of two-way understanding and supportiveness, you have to do everything you can to ensure they learn one key attribute: empathy.

Empathy is an incredible ability that many of us take for granted. Having a sense of empathy means being able to recognize other people’s feelings and understand them by putting yourself into their shoes. It’s not quite the same as knowing what others are thinking, exactly, but it is being able to understand how people are feeling and show compassion.

We may think that empathy is an innate human quality and that children get it just as naturally as they grow and develop. While some level of empathy may be innate, making it strong enough to ensure a child can function well in our society is much more a learned characteristic.

A strong sense of empathy brings several key benefits to children, which help to show why it is an important trait:

● It helps them better form friendships with their peers and working relationships with the key people in their life outside of the family, like teachers.

● It fosters strong ideas of tolerance and acceptance of people around them, allowing them to be part of a more harmonious community.

● It’s good for children’s mental health, reducing their anxieties and boosting their ability to think and reason for themselves.

One of the reasons children on the autism spectrum struggle in life is that they sometimes lack the ability to properly process and understand others’ feelings. They know what feelings are, but not how to appropriately react, and it creates a great deal of hardship in their lives.

Like many things a child learns, they acquire empathy to a great extent from imitation. When they see empathy exemplified by others, they will naturally seek to imitate. It’s not 100 percent of course. There are always examples of children who understand what empathy is and how others are feeling but choose to act in a way far from empathetic.

The fact is that empathy is a gradually developing trait in all of us. The foundations are laid in early childhood when we learn to distinguish between truth and lies, as well as intentional and accidental behavior. Continuing research more and more points to empathy developing as a fundamental attribute, and a foundational part of our learning and growth. It’s inextricably tied to our sensory and motor systems and is therefore not an isolated or easily quantifiable ability.

The nature of empathy means we have to create as nurturing an environment as possible to maximize its output and development in young people. Besides modeling the behavior themselves, parents and teachers can also do the following:

Make Children Aware of Their Feelings

Do you think your child or student could tell you exactly how they are feeling if you asked them? If not, then it could be because they don’t know how to properly identify and verbalize what they’re feeling. Help them do this by identifying specific feelings.

Teach Children to Care

Some families and schools use care-based projects that ask children to look after animals or plants over periods of time. This is effective at home because you can have them do it in the longer term. Looking after another living thing helps children raise their awareness about what that thing needs to live and thrive. They can later project this onto others.

Ask Children Questions

Besides asking children to verbalize their own emotions, find opportunities to ask children about how others might be feeling. For example, you might be out enjoying a family dinner somewhere. Ask your son or daughter about other people in the restaurant, like the servers. “How do you think that server is feeling right now?” It encourages them to normalize the act of considering others’ feelings.

It’s much easier than we imagine to get kids to be positive about themselves. They accompany themselves everywhere they go, every minute of every day. What’s more challenging, and yet equally important, is encouraging them to project that same positivity and supportiveness onto others. It’s that ability that will see them well through a long, fruitful social and professional life in the future.

Nahjee Grant is the Founder of the Cool Smart Kid Learning Center. He’s an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and author of 13 children’s books. Learn more at www.coolsmartkid.com