Teaching children sharing and caring
Parents can foster the inherently sympathetic nature in young ones
Parents and teachers might wonder how to teach children caring towards others — more so when the world feels full of disagreement, conflict, and aggression.
We know that children start to pay attention to the emotions of others from an early age. They actively take into account others' emotions when making decisions about how to respond to them.
Does this mean children feel sympathy from an early age? And can parents teach them to be sympathetic?
What is sympathy?
A feeling of concern for another person, or sympathy, is based on a comprehension of the situation and emotional state of another.
Sympathy is different from empathy, which is more of an “emotional contagion”. If you feel like crying when you see someone else cry, you are experiencing empathy.
Sympathy involves some distance, which might allow individuals to engage in prosocial behaviours, such as helping or sharing.
We start to show concern for others from very early on. For example, babies show basic signs of concern for others in their distressed responses to another infant’s cry, although in the case of babies, it might also be possible that they do not fully understand the self as a separate entity from others. So, it might be a case of emotional contagion.
Either way, these are early forms of how we show concern. Later, these advance into more sophisticated sympathy experiences. Rather than just crying for the other crying baby, children begin to think about ways to alleviate the baby’s distress.
What makes kids share
We conducted a study to see how children shared. In our study, 160 4- and 8-year-old children received six equally attractive stickers. They were then given the chance to share those stickers with a hypothetical child in a picture.
The pictures depicted children in four different conditions, including “needy” and “not needy”.
We found children tended to share more stickers with a needy recipient. We also found 8-year-old children shared on average 70 per cent of their stickers with the needy recipient (versus 47 per cent with the neutral recipient). The 4-yearolds shared only 45 per cent of their stickers in the needy condition (versus 33 per cent in the neutral condition).
What makes 8-year-olds share more than two-thirds of their own stickers with the needy recipient, while 4-yearolds share only about half?
Sharing thoughtfully
The answer to this question can be found in children’s growing abilities to put themselves in others' shoes.
Children could show emotional empathy early on, but as they develop “perspective-taking ability,” they tend to show higher levels of sympathy. Perspective-taking ability means knowing that others can have desire, knowledge and emotion that are different from their own.
For example, a child who wants to play cricket would understand that his friend has a different desire — perhaps to play football.
Or that another friend who is smiling in front of his parents is, in fact, hiding disappointment because he did not get the birthday gift he really wanted.
In this regard, a recent review study found children with higher ability to take another person’s point of view showed more prosocial behaviours, such as comforting, helping and sharing.
Furthermore, when they compared preschool-aged children versus children aged 6 and above, they found that this relationship became stronger as children got older.
As children are increasingly able to use contextual information, they become more selective about when and how to help others.
Enhancing sympathy in children
Sympathy binds individuals together and increases cooperation among members of society.
In a long-term study conducted with 175 children, we found that when children showed high levels of sympathy at age 7, they were better accepted by peers and shared more with others up to age 9.
So, one of the things that we can do to facilitate sympathy in young children according to developmental research is to use inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning implies that parents and teachers emphasise the consequences of a child’s behaviour during a social interaction.
For example, when a child grabs a toy from his friend, the caregiver could ask the child, “How would you feel if your friend took away a toy from you?”
This can encourage children to reflect on how their own actions may affect others’ thoughts and feelings. This can facilitate sympathy.
Researcher Brad Farrant studied 72 children between ages 4 and 6.
The study found that children showed more actions of helping and caring when mothers encouraged their children to see things from another child’s perspective.
For example, if a child was “picked on” by another child, mothers who encouraged perspective-taking would guide their child to try and work out why the other child was picking on the child.
Telling a child he should help and share with others could be one way of teaching him how to be a good member of a society.
However, thoughtfully engaging in conversations with the child about others’ needs, feelings, and desires could go one step further – it could help children develop sympathy.