The NVC Academy, the world’s first online school for Nonviolent Communication, is offering empathy related courses and resources in its NVC Multimedia library during the month of October.
Tomorrow, join relationship expert Kelly Bryson for a FREE teleourse entitled The Future of Love. Reimagine your perception of love so you can feel love more deeply, let love in and actually be love. Take this introductory session to determine if the full 6-week course is a good fit for you.
This is encouraging….
At a public school in Toronto, 25 third- and fourth-graders circle a green blanket and focus intently on a 10-month-old baby with serious brown eyes. Baby Stephana, as they call her, crawls toward the center of the blanket, then turns to glance at her mother. “When she looks back to her mom, we know she’s checking in to see if everything’s cool,” explains one boy, who is learning how to understand and respond to the emotions of the baby — and to those of his classmates — in a program called Roots of Empathy (ROE).
From Maia Szalavitz at Time Magazine:
Increasingly, neuroscientists, psychologists and educators believe that bullying and other kinds of violence can indeed be reduced by encouraging empathy at an early age. Over the past decade, research in empathy — the ability to put ourselves in another person’s shoes — has suggested that it is key, if not the key, to all human social interaction and morality.
Without empathy, we would have no cohesive society, no trust and no reason not to murder, cheat, steal or lie. At best, we would act only out of self-interest; at worst, we would be a collection of sociopaths.
From Virginia Prescott of New Hampshire Public Radio:
Nine high school students were indicted Monday on felony charges in the suicide case of a 15-year-old Massachusetts freshman. Phoebe Prince and her family had moved to the country from Ireland last year. The young teen hanged herself in January after relentless bullying from peers.
More than 40 states have anti-bullying laws requiring schools to adopt preventive policies against bullying, but the indictment of students is unprecedented. It got us thinking about an earlier conversation we had about the growing movement to teach empathy in the classroom. The Boston Globe reported that about 10 percent of schools have added social and emotional lessons to their curricula.
So what does an empathy curriculum look like? We asked Dr. Marc Brackett these questions last spring. He’s co-developer of the RULER Approach of emotional literacy and the deputy director of the Health, Emotion, and Behavior Labratory at Yale. Also with us was frequent Word of Mouth Contributor and mother-of-two Sarah Baker.
From the Life and Style section of The Hindu:
Children learn very early in life to put themselves in others’ shoes. But to get that going, they must share a positive and caring relationship with parents and caretakers
Empathy, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and recognise and respond to what that person is feeling, is an essential ingredient of a civilised society. Manifestations of empathy often show up early in life, as when a toddler brings a favourite toy or blanket to another child who is injured or in distress. Some experts maintain that infants display empathy when they whimper or cry upon hearing another baby cry.
Lacking empathy, people act only out of self-interest, without regard for the well-being or feelings of others. The absence of empathy fosters antisocial behaviour, cold-blooded murder, genocide.
Children may enter the world with different capacities for empathy, a result of neural connections in the brain. The capacity for empathy may be partly or wholly lacking in disorders like autism and schizophrenia, in which the mind is focused inward.
The Tehran Times in Iran, the leading daily newspaper in Iran posted this article on their website, in English.
With a little guidance, even very young children can learn about respect, empathy and kindness.
Everyone, including very young children, can learn to be kind and compassionate. When children are kind to others, the home and schools become better places with fewer cases of bullying taking place. And there’s no better place to start cultivating kindness and compassion than the home. Here are some useful tips.
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