Teach your kid this one thing

If you're not teaching your kiddo about empathy, you should stop what your doing and start doing it now!

Doc David

Transcript

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Well, hello friends. Let's talk about parenting and empathy.

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You are listening to Hedge Dream Game. Your answers to life, relationships, and daily living.

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Hello, hello. I am not dead. Can you believe that? I am still alive, much to the chagrin of all of my enemies. I am still here. No, I no excuses. I just didn't want to podcast for a while. And now I thought, eh, I'm gonna podcast some. Actually, it was mostly inspired by um someone who has been trying to schedule an appointment with me for couples counseling, and they said, Oh, I was listening to your podcast, and I thought, oh, so people actually do listen to my podcast occasionally. So I thought I should get on here and uh drop an episode and be more consistent. But that's my that's the thing I always say, be more consistent. And I'm just it just gets difficult to be consistent when life gets busy. Um, and so today I want to talk a little bit about um parenting and kind of what I've seen in the news recently, and kind of some frustrations about what I've seen in the news. So, I mean, unless you're living under a rock, inevitably you're gonna run across stories of kids shooting kids, uh, school shootings happening, kids. I mean, adults are doing this, right? They're they're shooting other adults, but you at some level you think kids shouldn't be doing this, kids should not be assaulting strangers and stealing from them, kids should not be carjacking um strangers and stealing from them and injuring people, kids should not be killing other kids, um, kids should not be just generally violent. Now, back in my day, um, I'm sure there were kids doing it back in back when I was a teenager, and and perhaps we just didn't see it because there was not a 24-7 news cycle. But regardless of whether it was happening back when I was a kid as much or not, I still think it's important to address um what is missing. And again, this is just my opinion, just working for 22 years um with families, with with uh I want to say juvenile delinquents, but working with uh teenagers, working with parents. I had parents in this week that we were kind of working through some challenges with their teenage kid. Um and so there's lots of people will come and tell you, look, you gotta keep all this started happening when prayer was taken out of school. Uh I don't know if you can factually back that up with data. Um, I mean, maybe prayer in school would be helpful. Um, I can't, I haven't really looked on the data of that to see if it's a true if that's a true statement or not. It feels good, right? But I try to stick with facts rather than go with feelings. And so one of the things that I definitely, and again, this I I can't, it's very anecdotal, and again, I haven't looked it up also, but what I see when I interact with parents and when I interact with teenagers, um, is that there's one thing that often is missing in regards to crimes that I see, or in regards to kids that I interact with that do crimes, and and I'll just give my background. For about 22 years, I was working directly with teenagers that were on probation and um and doing family therapy with them in their houses, and so um a lot of what I say today about this topic is based on those 22 years of working with kids in their homes that have been on probation for criminal activity. Um but one of the things that I find to be very fascinating is that there's this general lack of empathy from these kids. Now, now I can easily say, so parents, you should be teaching your kid empathy. Um now, a lot of times people will, how do I do that? What is empathy? Um, because it's super easy to just say, well, you should be teaching your parents or your kids boundaries, you should be teaching them a difference between right and wrong, you should be teaching them about black and white issues related to morality, right? Those are all things that are kind of your standard yes, you should be teaching kids those things. That that's just an expectation. Um, teaching your kid to be empathetic is a bit more challenging. And if you as a parent are not empathetic on your own, um, how are you gonna teach that to your kid? It's gonna be really hard to teach to your kid. So I want to just go so that so that's the whole basis of this episode is like is that you should be teaching your kid empathy from an early age. The earlier the better, because then the earlier they are learning something and seeing you model it, and that's the key, seeing you model empathy, the easier it is going to be for them to be empathetic when they're a teenager. Um, so what is what is empathy? Empathy, um, there's three parts to empathy. Um, and essentially when I talk about empathy, there's sympathy and then there's empathy. And and how I describe it as if you're walking by a big pit and you see someone in this pit, um, and you're like, oh man, that is a bummer that you're in that pit. Hope you do okay, see you later, and then you walk on your way. That's sympathy, right? Feeling feeling bad for somebody and then kind of moving on with your life. Empathy is like, wow, I see you down in this pit. Uh how can I help you? And so you go and you find a ladder, you get down in the pit with them, you help them get out of this pit, and that's either like you know, pulling them up or getting behind them as they're climbing up the ladder to get out of the pit. That's kind of how I describe the difference between uh sympathy and empathy. And so there's three parts to empathy. So let me kind of break this down. The first part um most people can do, um, unless you're obviously an antisocial, you have antisocial personality disorder, your sociopath, or your narcissist, it becomes much more difficult. But there's a there's an empathy that's cognitive empathy empathy. So it's the ability um to some understand someone else's perspective, what they might be thinking or feeling. Um it's it's kind of the cognitive part of empathy, the thinking part of empathy, and it happens on a cognitive level, right? So I'll just be transparent. Like I'm sitting here in my office, and if a parent comes in and they're talking about their um special needs child. I have two I have two children with Down syndrome, and so if they're talking about the difficulties of raising a special needs child, I can I can empathize with them. I have a cognitive empathy because I've experienced that with my own kids. Um, you don't have to have special needs kids to have a cognitive empathy with somebody. Um, I have clients come in that talk about dementia and the struggles with dementia that they have with their own parents. My parents don't have dementia, um, but I can understand cognitively what that's like and the pain that comes from that. I don't have to have experienced it myself. I can make an educated guess based on my own knowledge and my own past experiences. Um, and so I put myself or you, like with this cognitive empathy, you put yourself in the other person's shoes. Um, and so that's something to teach your kids, right? And how do you do that with a five-year-old? You have really good, age-appropriate conversations with them about whatever you're hoping they can be empathetic towards, right? So now a second part is called emotive empathy. So, emotive empathy is feeling with someone. Um, you feel the pain that they feel. So it goes beyond the cognitive. Um, it's not a part or above the cognitive, it's just another piece of empathy. You stand shoulder to shoulder, and that's like with my uh with my example earlier about you see someone in a pit, that's like you getting down in the pit with them, and you think, man, this sucks to be down in this pit. I want to try to help you get out of it. You experience people having an emotion. So when you see, there's this thing called um mirror neurons, and so when you see someone sad, you feel sad as well, and those neurons are firing at the time, and it allows you to experience the same sadness and to feel empathy. Um, there are lots of times when someone's in my office talking to me about a difficult thing that they've been going through or struggling with, and I see the emotions start to rise in their eyes, and inevitably I can't help it, like emotions like like my eyes start to get misty because I'm feeling this this pain that they're feeling, or I'm feeling the sadness, or this struggle that they're feeling. Um we experience it firsthand with them. So that would be the emotive empathy. Um, it happens automatically, and it's uh often it's not a choice that you like, oh, today I'm gonna experience this emotive empathy with somebody. It just kind of happens as someone is talking. Often where it happens is in movies, right? And so you watch a movie, and the and the kind of the joke in my family is if there's an emotional thing happening in a movie, everyone starts to look at each other to see, oh, are your eyes getting misty? Um and we we there's a little teasing that goes on because it's a movie, it's not even a real thing that's that's taking a place, but there is emotive empathy that's happening when you watch um a very dramatic or powerful movie, and that happens in life too, with with relationships. There's emotive empathy. Um, and again, that's something to have a good conversation with your kid about, right? Hey, Johnny, were you sad when you saw this thing? Well, yeah, I was kind of sad. What and it and then you bring up feeling words. Now, it's gonna be super difficult if you as an adult are not really in touch with that um empathy, emotive empathy side of yourself, or even the cognitive empathy side of yourself. And if you're not, if you recognize, like, oof, I don't feel I don't feel a lot of emotion about difficult things, you should go talk to someone like me. And it doesn't mean you're gonna be in years-long therapy, but it could mean you maybe have something in your life that you need to work through that's kind of stopping emotion from from happening. And again, I'm not talking like breaking down crying every moment, but I'm talking the ability to identify with someone else when they're struggling through something in life. So the third part is empathic action. It's the doing part of empathy. It goes beyond simply um just understanding others. And in my example earlier, it's like you have this ladder that you put into the pit, and you're down there with the person, you're you you see cognitively that they're in a bad place, you emotively um have empathy, and then you take that and then you help them out of this pit. That would be the the action. Um, it could come during it could be direct help, asking a person how you can help, sitting in silence with them, not doing anything. Um, that becomes very difficult for some people, the sitting in silence, because people often think, I just gotta say something. They feel uncomfortable, and so they they put some they put their foot in their mouth, and they sometimes will say, I know how you feel. Please do not say that. If you're trying to be empathetic with someone, don't say I know how you feel. That is one of the worst things that you could say to somebody, and it's super cringy when a person says that. So these three things, the cognitive empathy, emotive empathy, and empathic empathy, are what you should be teaching your kids at a young age on how to uh be towards others. I think one of the things that I see um a lot of times happening when I and again, I just read news reports or hear news reports and hear about these kids committing heinous crimes to on strangers, um, on fellows on fellow kids. I truly believe they would not be doing that if they had empathy for others. If they were able to view people as people and view people as, hey, this person has struggles just like I have struggles. It's that lack of empathy that I think is really missing and creating a um a horrendous cycle of violence for people in our lives in our current society. So um that is the thing that I encourage you to do. If you have questions about it, feel free to email me. Um go to my website, docdavid.net, and then you can contact me there and ask me questions or give me um future podcast topics. So thanks for listening. I appreciate it. Um, and it is a beautiful day outside right now, and hopefully, wherever you're at, you're enjoying a beautiful day. Again, if you have questions, feel free to reach out, and um hopefully I'm gonna be more consistent. It's spring consistent, it's spring now, right? I'm out of hibernation. Have a great day.