Posts Tagged ‘teens’

Teaching Kids Empathy (AUDIO)

April 2nd, 2010

virginia-prescottFrom 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.

Listen to the Interview

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‘The Empathic Civilization’: The Young Pioneers Of The Empathic Generation

February 9th, 2010

From the Huffington Post. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett  is a Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

For my niece Robin, who graduated from Vanderbilt University in May, an important part of her college experience was the volunteer work she did working with Sudanese refugees. Every week she spent hours helping them resettle in the Nashville area. She also worked to make Americans more aware of the suffering in Sudan’s civil war, especially in the Darfur region, and helped raise money for resettlement costs. In her junior year, Robin spent a semester in Cape Town, South Africa, where she wrote an honors thesis on expressions of public opinion in South Africa’s democratic system. Now she is contemplating going to graduate school in some kind of international field.

Robin’s experience is not unusual today. She is part of what pollster John Zogby calls the “First Globals,” a generation of 18-29 year-olds whose “planet is their playing field.” Today’s emerging adults see themselves as international citizens to an extent rarely experienced before. Coming of age in the era of the Internet, cheap travel, and surging study abroad programs, they’re drawn to global music, sports, fashion, and service. Almost a quarter of the emerging adults Zogby polled expect to work abroad.

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Transforming Children’s Anger

January 5th, 2010

Inbal Kashtan Explores How Empathic Connection Can Reduce Sibling Rivalry and Family Conflicts

What parent has not experienced a surge of protectiveness when your older child hurts their younger sibling? Our cultural training calls on us to immediately take two roles: the judge, determining who did what wrong and what the consequences will be, and the police officer, enforcing the consequences. These are thankless jobs that usually result in frustration, resentment, pain, and separation between parent and child and between the children themselves. Sadly, our actions do not really contribute to our deepest yearnings: peace, connection, trust and love in our homes.

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Short Video on the Power of Empathy

November 25th, 2009

Nonviolent Communication Trainer Catherine Cadden shares her experience of using Empathy to make connection with a student in the Ku Klux Klan, and bridge the gap between him and the other students in the class.

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Parenting: Empathy and Honesty with Teens

August 27th, 2009

Are there one or more youths in your life with whom you would enjoy:

  • Having the conversations you may be most terrified of having?
  • Sharing scary honesty: Hearing theirs and expressing yours?
  • Cultivating a relationship that embodies trust, appreciation, and mutuality?
  • Learning how to re-center and remain connected to needs “no matter what is thrown your way”?
  • Developing a capacity to “be with what is”, even if that includes having pain from your own teen years stimulated?
  • Creating boundaries in a “power-with” way that invites compassionate communication & wise action?
  • Deepening communication skills and integrating it in a way that responding empathically becomes the first response?
  • Releasing enemy-images that “fog up” seeing the beauty that lay within yourself and the youth you care about?
  • Laughing more with the intensity of life?

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