Can you teach empathy?

[AnyDream]

Fantastic question!

Without doing any reading, my intuitive response would be YES - but I suspect it may be (a lot) more difficult for some people to learn than others.

When you think about it, there are a number of aspects to empathy - the ability to interpret and recognise what another person is thinking/feeling - as well as the ability to respond appropriately in a supportive way. So if you break that down, it involves things like - being able to recognise emotional/mental states in another person, being able to relate that to own's own lived (or imagined) experience, as well as lot of communication and social skills (in the responding part).

I've recently been reading about "alexithymia" which is where people are unable to recognise and verbalise their own emotional state - and there's a correlation with having difficulties with interpreting facial expressions in others, and with being able to see/imagine how things look or seem to another person (ie being able to have "theory of mind"). It also comes with a limited ability to imagine abstract things. So, if you had a child with a degree of alexithymia, teaching empathy would involve teaching a whole lot of skills - every thing from naming feeling states, talking about own feelings, looking at facial expressions and matching with appropriate words, as well as appropriate social reactions. A lot of methods, games etc have been developed for teaching these sorts of skills to kids, because of the obvious need for them with conditions like ASD.

[Teeki]

I've never really thought about specifically teaching empathy, but I guess we're doing that with DD.

If DS is playing with something and she snatches it, we ask her to think about how he might feel. We ask how she feels when people take her toys, and say that's how DS feels right now. We ask her how she thinks he feels, if he's crying she says he feels sad, and that's not nice. So we ask her how she might be able to fix that, by giving back his toy and not snatching it.

[Smoke Jaguar]

Alfie Kohn gave me my template for modelling empathy with my kids, and I read it when my son was 6 months old or so.
Teaching my showing it and verbalising the rationale behind actions. I'll read that link now