Practicing Empathy

1.    Spanking your child. Decades of research tells us that spanking creates undesirable outcomes for children. Some of these include: increase in aggression, increase in anti-social behaviors, increase in mental health issues, diminished moral development and a decrease in empathy.

2.     Yelling at your child. Yelling damages the child-parent relationship. Research shows that individuals that are empathetic have relationships with their parents that are close, warm and supportive.

3.  Time-Out. Feeling isolated and rejected are strong emotions. Time out does not help children gain skills that lead to acceptable social behaviors or help them to learn to perspective take.

4.  Rewarding. Children definitely need to learn what is acceptable behavior and what is not. By rewarding children, we are only motivating them through extrinsic means. “If you’re good, you’ll get a treat.” When those extrinsic rewards are removed, the child does not have the skills to be able to perspective take, show empathy and behave in a manner that is socially acceptable. We need to guide and teach children to be intrinsically motivated – meaning that when you’re not in the room, they will still act in a manner that is socially acceptable – demonstrating kindness, and showing empathy to others, not because of a reward they’ll receive but rather because they want to.