The Visible Empathy of
Infants and Toddlers
Valerie Quann and Carol Anne Wien
Katherine, eight months old, sits on
the carpet in the middle of a bustling child care room. She has been mesmerized
by a pop-up toy but glances up during her play and seems frightened by the
commotion around her. Brandon, 19 months old, who sits nearby, notices her
change in mood. Katherine begins to cry. Brandon toddles toward her and gently
leans over to whisper in her ear. He babbles
to her in an unmistakable “motherese” tone, seeming to convey “Don’t
worry” while also gently patting her hand. He comforts her in the same way the
teachers comfort the children.
Do infants and
toddlers really show empathy? What does it look like? Can empathy be
documented in very young children who have limited language skills? Can
educators discern any factors that enable empathy to develop in infants and
toddlers? The purpose of this article is to invite conversation between
practitioners, teacher educators, and scholars on empathy in young children. We
write the article as teacher educators whose work involves training early
childhood educators and elementary teachers. We describe what Quann observed in
a multiage setting, what we make of these observations grounded in qualitative
research, and our reflections. We do not try to tell others what to do, but
rather we ask, What do you think about the possibility of the very young in
your setting showing empathy? Do other practitioners see anything like these
episodes? What do empathy researchers think about what we are seeing?
The setting
Quann had worked in an urban child care
environment in which 58 children from three months to six years of age are
organized into four classrooms, one of which is multiage. The program, a lab
school in a university setting, served an ethnically diverse population with
many families from professional backgrounds. In her work, Quann had noticed
that very young children seemed fine-tuned to one another’s feelings and able
to put themselves in the position of others long before researchers in moral
reasoning expect to observe empathy (Piaget [1932] 1965; Kohlberg 1969, 1984;
Kohlberg, Levine, & Hewer 1983; Damon 1988).
Definitions of empathy
We define empathy in very young children as the
capacity to observe the feelings of another and to respond with care and
concern for that other, noting Hendrick’s definition of empathy as “kindness
toward another when there is a perceived or real sadness about that person.
This [showing kindness] is a difficult task because young children are
essentially centered on themselves and have great difficulty grasping how
others feel” (1998, 223). We argue, in contrast, that teachers do see
remarkable incidents of empathy among very young children. Noddings (1984, 30)
offers the notion of empathy as “feeling with” the other; we agree that there is a mutuality of
feeling offered by one person to another.
We acknowledge the
psychological literature on empathy, altruism, and prosocial development
(Eisenberg 1982, 1986, 1992; Hoffman 1982, 2000; Damon 1988; Sroufe 1996;
Braten 1998; Denham 1998) and offer our teacher research as a counterpoint that
shows what practitioners observe and experience. In doing so, we recall
Malaguzzi describing how Reggio educators believe that learning about children
could happen first and foremost from observing children themselves: “Indeed,
education without research or innovation is education without interest”
(Malaguzzi 1998, 73). We want to ask what others think about what we have
found.
Pedagogical documentation
Pedagogical documentation is a form of teacher
research inspired by the educators of Reggio Emilia. It uses photographs of
children at work, samples of their efforts, and text—children’s conversations,
teachers’ thoughts—to show to those outside of classrooms the intriguing events
occurring inside classrooms for young children (Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence
1999; Giudici, Rinaldi, & Krechevsky 2001; Cadwell 2003). We felt that by
documenting these events for those outside classroom life we could show the empathy
of infants and toddlers. These are episodes so evanescent that their duration
is a matter of seconds or minutes; they are events that can be missed
altogether if adults are not alert to them.
At the lab school
where she had worked, Quann observed the infant/toddler classroom (8 children,
ages six months to two-and-a-half years old) and the multiage group (13
children, ages two-and-a-half to four years old), which joined together for
substantial parts of the day on nine occasions over 10 weeks. Each observation
lasted about three hours. Watching for episodes of empathy, she photographed
and took careful notes when discerning an event that seemed to fit our
definition. She documented 13 episodes, from a brief flashing moment to an
extended period of several minutes. Quann made seven sets of documentation
panels with photographs and descriptions to share with the classroom teachers
in a collaborative reflection on what was occurring. Here is what she found.
Three forms of empathy
We saw three types of empathy in the pedagogical
documentation. Proximal empathy occurs when a child shows concerned care for a
distressed classmate who is close by, though not having been involved in the
classmate’s upset. Altruistic empathy occurs when a child offers concerned
care in response to another child’s suffering by noticing it from afar. Self-corrective
empathy occurs when a child offers concerned care in response to his or her
own actions causing distress to another.
Proximal empathy
In a show of proximal empathy a child responds
with care and concern to a nearby child who is hurt. In Quann’s observations,
this usually occurred when two children were playing in a learning center
together. The responding child did not cause nor have anything to do with the
other child’s being hurt or upset, but was nearby and decided to help in his or
her own way, usually with kind words or touching.
The following is an example of proximal empathy.
The
difficulty of scissors. Destiny (23 months)
and Pratha (20 months) play in the creative area, attempting to make scissors
cut paper. Destiny, who has not had much experience using scissors, struggles
to hold them. As she struggles, her index finger bends backward and she begins
to cry. Pratha says, “Ouch,” and touches Destiny’s hand. Pratha then looks up,
presumably for a teacher. Teacher Leona comes over with ice and comforts
Destiny. Pratha stands nearby with a concerned look on her face.
In proximal empathy, a child becomes aware of and responds to
another child’s suffering because they are close by. In this instance, Pratha
seems to “feel with” Destiny, acknowledging her hurt and wanting her to feel
better.
It seems that some
children become upset when other children are visibly upset. Our inference is
that even infants and toddlers “catch” the feeling of distress and respond,
perhaps because of their relationship with the upset child, perhaps out of
shared knowledge of what it feels like to be upset, or perhaps out of a global
emotional tone for the situation. It is as if the child who witnesses the hurt
wants to communicate her acknowledgment of the hurt.
Ice
will make it better. Wyatt (two-and-a-half
years) has fallen on the carpet, and it quickly becomes clear that he is
injured. A teacher comforts him. Amanda (17 months) goes to the small fridge in
the room and retrieves an ice pack. She brings it over to Wyatt. Her face says,
“There,” as she puts the ice beside him and “All better now” as she turns and
walks away. She is smiling.
Many children in this classroom attempt to show
care for their upset peers by bringing them ice. Perhaps the children remember
that when they were hurt, the teachers brought them ice and then they felt
better. Once, a child brought another child ice when he was crying due to
morning separation from his parent. The upset child accepted the ice and, very
soon after, stopped crying. In this environment, it was as if ice represents a
gift of caring, of compassion: to be offered ice is to be healed.
Altruistic empathy
In altruistic empathy, a child notices distress
from much further away, when involved in a different activity that might
preclude attention to the distress of another. In altruistic empathy, there
seems to be attunement to the distress of others and a concerted desire to
assuage it.
Offering objects
as comfort. Matthew (22 months) is out of
sorts today, crying at the gate at the classroom door, wanting to leave
(presumably to go after his mother, who left about an hour earlier). Two
teachers have tried to comfort and distract him, but he remains upset. Amanda
(17 months) brings him several trains; everyone knows they are his favorite
toy. He throws them over the gate. One teacher successfully redirects him to a
puzzle. Later, the other teacher picks up the trains and returns them to their
bin.
Amanda peers
into the bins. She looks around the room, and when she sees Matthew, her face
lights up. She brings the trains over and silently puts them on the table
beside him. Colin (17 months) walks by the table, picks up the trains, and walks
away. Matthew cries out and begins to chase Colin. He moves to a corner, crying
loudly, and throws several toys. He has a large bell in his hand as Amanda
approaches with another train she has found; she offers it to him. He puts the
bell down, takes the train, and sits on the carpet, holding it. Amanda returns
to reading books with Emma and a student teacher. Matthew puts down the train,
goes to a bookshelf, picks out a book, and joins them. He is much happier for
the rest of the morning.
As the teachers notice when reviewing the
documentation panel with Quann, Amanda’s solution is more fine-tuned than their
own: she “knows” exactly what will please Matthew—his favorite toy. When Colin
walks off with her offer of comfort, Matthew becomes enraged and loses all control.
Amanda hangs in, finding another train and offering it once again. It is as if
she assures Matthew that he will be comforted, as if she has a sort of
persistence in seeing him through his upset. We might infer that while the
teachers clearly make many different attempts to console this child, a young
child in their midst joins them and also makes repeated attempts. Altruistic
empathy is kindness in which a child interrupts her own activity and goes out
of her way to be kind.
Extended altruistic empathy
A single child reacted in a thoughtful and
striking manner toward another’s hurt when a roomful of other children did not
notice the problem. Amanda displayed empathy for other children’s suffering
when she was not only not involved in the cause but was often busy playing in
another part of the room. If she noticed that another child “needed care” of
some kind, she would often leave what she was doing to go to that child and
offer help.
The
symbiotic relationship between helping and being helped. Wyatt sits in a low, wheeled cart for mobility after he
has broken his leg. Wyatt tries to maneuver around the room, but his cart gets
stuck on the leg of the sand table. Amanda is on the other side of the room
reading a book. She glances up and notices Wyatt gesturing and making sounds.
She leaves her book on the carpet and walks over to Wyatt. She leans over and
looks in his eyes. It looks like she is saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll figure this
out.” Wyatt smiles at her.
Amanda
tries to move the cart back and forth but cannot make it move. She tries to
push the book shelf on the other side of the cart, but it is too heavy. Then
she tries to push the sand table aside and is successful. Wyatt points to the bookshelf and Amanda moves
his cart in that direction. Wyatt uses his hands
to move the wheels on his chair so Amanda needs to help him only minimally.
Together the children move to the bookshelf.
Amanda waits
while Wyatt searches the shelf. He chooses Goodnight Moon but cannot
quite reach it. Amanda waits, as if to see if he can reach it. When she
realizes that he cannot, she moves the book closer to him so that he can grasp
it on his own. Wyatt takes the book but looks distressed when he realizes that
he cannot move his wheels with the book in his hand. He looks at Amanda and she
accepts the book from
him. Wyatt points to the carpet area, indicating that he would like to go
there. Amanda holds the book in her hand and pushes Wyatt to the carpet area.
She smiles and goes back to her spot on the carpet.
Amanda is a mere 17 months old. She shows what we
consider a deep sense of empathy, in that she seems to put herself in the place
of others, to grasp their needs, even when she is not directly involved in the
situation. In the midst of another activity, she spots others in need. As we
watch her reactions while helping, her smiles and appearance of satisfaction,
we infer helping others in need is deeply satisfying to her.
Self-corrective empathy
Self-corrective empathy occurs when a child is
the cause of another child’s hurt feelings or injury. In response to the
resulting suffering, the perpetrator shows empathy toward the hurt child. The
following example shows how this works.
Empathy
for hurt feelings.Michael, a pre-schooler, is putting spools on a string to
make a necklace. He is quietly working alone when Amanda approaches and starts
to play with the end of his string. With her other hand, she reaches for a red
wooden ring. Michael yells, “No! Go away.” He pulls the string out of Amanda’s
hands. Amanda’s face crumples, as though she might cry, yet she still tries to
grab the string. Michael then puts some beads near her and says, “Here, these
are for you.” They work silently, with Amanda watching Michael string his
spools onto the string as she does the same. He glances over at her and notices
her watching him. He smiles and says, “Look, you’re doing it.”
Michael first
reacts harshly, protecting his activity from interference. When he sees Amanda
start to cry, he stops and seems to rethink his reaction. In fact, he changes
his response from a harsh rejection to an offer of material that enables Amanda
to join his activity. We believe that this is a sophisticated empathic
behavior. Michael reacts egocentrically initially, protecting something he sees
as his. Yet, following Amanda’s hurt, nonverbal reaction, he invites her into
his activity. Essentially, he switches his mind-set from exclusion to
inclusion. We think this a profoundly moving response, for even in adulthood it
is difficult to change one’s behavior midstream to be more tolerant, more
inclusive.
Hoffman (2000)
discusses empathy-based guilt, a painful feeling of loss of esteem for oneself,
“usually accompanied by a sense of urgency, tension, and regret that results
from empathic feeling for someone in distress, combined with awareness of being
the cause of that distress” (p. 114). We are not sure we want to infer that
children so young are reacting out of guilt: what is clear is the successful
switch in response in the midst of emotion. We find this switch powerful,
because it suggests that positive care for others is strong enough to stop
one’s negative reaction to another person.
Hoffman noted in
his research that in their second year, children show “more aggression and more
pleasure in the victim’s distress when they caused the other’s distress than
when they witnessed it....In any case, causing
another’s distress is more likely to require adult intervention than witnessing
another’s distress” (2000, 136). Michael’s reaction is even more surprising,
given Hoffman’s suggestion that episodes such as this generally require adult
intervention. Michael, a preschooler, was able to regulate his own behavior and
did not require adult intervention. We consider his response a highly
sophisticated communication.
Discussion and reflections
When Quann discussed these episodes with the
classroom teachers, Kathleen and Leona, the teachers felt that Amanda’s
behavior was altruistic—in their view, offered without a notion of gain for
herself. Kathleen said, “[Amanda] seems to be completely empathic in an
altruistic sense....She’s not trying to make up for
something she’s done or make it better when she’s hurt somebody.”
Damon (1988)
argues:
Newborns have the capacity for some purely affective
empathic responses. These early feelings become the emotional cornerstone of
prosocial behaviour. But for effective moral action, the child must learn to
identify a wide range of emotional states in others. Further, the child must
acquire the ability to anticipate what kinds of action will improve the
emotional state of the other. (p. 15)
What is so striking about
Amanda’s day-to-day behavior is that she does seem to have what Damon
calls effective moral action. Amanda displayed this knowledge especially
well in the episode with Wyatt and his cart. She seemed to know intuitively
that Wyatt needed only a small bit of help to meet his needs. Some adults might
have taken over, pushing him where he needed to go and retrieving the book for
him. But Amanda offered him scaffolded support; she moved the book over just so
far so that Wyatt could reach it. She allowed him to push his cart with his
hands on the wheels, and she pushed only that small amount extra that enabled
him to be successful. Her actions imply that she understood the wide range of
emotional states that Damon discusses: she seems to understand Wyatt’s need to
participate and also the limits of his ability to do so.
It is legitimate
to ask whether Amanda is too empathic, interrupting her own activity to offer
care to others. Quann struggled with this, thinking she didn’t want Amanda to
stop being empathic, yet didn’t want her needs to be forgotten either. Hoffman
(2000) argues that it can be typical in later schooling for girls who are very
agreeable to have their needs overlooked for others who seem needier. Wien
argues that Amanda’s successful acts to restore positive emotion in others do
in fact satisfy a need in her—perhaps for harmony of relations or for restoring
others to equanimity—and that her success supports her sense of personal power
and efficacy, as seen by her smiles, even though she is not yet 20 months old.
Batson and Shaw (1991) would seem to agree with Wien’s interpretations of these
events:
Altruism and egoism...have much in
common. Each refers to goal-directed motivation; each is concerned with the
ultimate goal of this motivation; and for each, the ultimate goal is increasing
someone’s welfare. These common features provide the context for highlighting
the crucial difference: Whose welfare is the ultimate goal—another person’s or
one’s own? (p. 108)
How is empathy
generated? What conditions encourage empathy for others? The explanation for
the empathy shown by the children in this child care setting, we believe, is
the high quality of adult-child relationships and interactions modeled by the
teachers and adult family members. This school holds relationships at the heart
of its program. Forming and sustaining positive relationships is the first
priority, as teachers engage children in meaningful ways and form authentic,
lasting relationships with families. Leona said, “You have to work hard at a
real relationship with the family. If there are problems, we work at them.
Hard. We respect differences in parenting styles. You could be working with this
family for five years. It’s a real relationship and we need to treat it like
that.”
Eisenberg (1992)
comments, “It seems obvious that teachers and peers must influence children’s
prosocial development. Once children enter school, they spend a large amount of
time with teachers and friends” (p. 112). In a child care setting, children can
spend up to 10 hours a day together. This is bound to affect their behavior in
terms of learning from what they see and experience.
The teachers in
this room said they strongly believed in using appropriate, positive language.
Kathleen also felt that the children learned much through modeling. Leona
agreed that the children saw others acting and reacting in a particular way and
then learned from that observation. Leona helped children negotiate their
boundaries by encouraging them to verbalize their feelings through language.
Both teachers would guide less verbal children by providing them with
appropriate language choices, saying such things as, “You are crying. That looks
like it really hurt when you were pushed. What could you say to Aidan?” If the
child was not verbal, the teacher would continue, “You could try saying ‘Stop’
or ‘That hurts’.”
The teachers also
recognized the importance of nonverbal communication. They taught the children
American Sign Language signs for stop, help, and more,
among other needs, to enhance their independence and to help them feel more
self-control during peer interactions. In addition, surrounding the teachers’
positive language was an aura of emotional regard for every participant in the
setting—children, teachers, and families. This aura of emotional support
included body language, voice tone and inflection, and a stance of caring that
becomes infectious and is caught by others in the setting.
Implications
for educators and administrators
We believe the relationship between teachers and
children is the most important factor influencing how children act within any
type of early learning center. Without the high-quality relationships that
Quann observed, we suspect little empathy would have occurred in this setting.
What we saw suggests three ways in particular that teachers and administrators
might encourage children to be empathic.
Create a culture of caring
The teachers Quann
observed always spoke in an authentic way, using natural language in a
conversational manner, with respect for each child, engaging the children and
responding to their needs. When children observe teachers and older children
behaving in this way, they catch the feeling and also pass it on. Helping
children understand the feelings of others is an integral aspect of the
curriculum of living together. The relationships among teachers, between
children and teachers, and among children are fostered with warm and caring
interactions.
A child cannot be
spoiled by being loved and respected or by learning how to love and respect
others.
Document prosocial behavior
Closely observing the children and forming
documentation panels greatly helped Quann’s understanding of what was occurring
in the classroom. After each panel was created, Quann met with the teachers to
reflect on what had occurred. This always brought out rich discussion and
deeper reflection on the classroom experience. Then the panels were posted so
that the children could observe and revisit their experiences with help from
the teachers. When teachers carefully observe children for empathy and other
positive social-emotional behaviors, and document those behaviors for others to
see, they highlight the importance of constructing positive socioemotional
spaces for living. In uncertain and turbulent times, we consider such values a
basic right and necessity for children.
Allow unhurried time
The episode in which Amanda helped Wyatt navigate between his needs
and his limits in their early childhood setting is an example of the benefits
that occur when teachers allow expansive time frames for activity. When Wyatt
was first stuck at the sand table, a teacher could have just reached over and
tapped the table aside so that he could get though. However, the teachers
waited, to observe what might occur.
Amanda came
quickly to Wyatt’s aid and gave him the help he needed to move throughout the
room. Wyatt was empowered to move himself with a small amount of help, and
Amanda was allowed to practice empathic behavior. It is this type of keen
observation and respectful interaction that permits children higher degrees of
participation in deciding what to do and allows teachers to see the remarkable
empathic reciprocity that even infants and toddlers seem capable of showing.
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Valerie Quann, MEd, ECEC, teaches in the School of Early Childhood Education at Seneca College in Toronto, Ontario. Valerie has a particular
interest in studying and teaching issues related to curricula, infant/toddler
development, and the design of high-quality environments.
Carol Anne Wien, PhD, is an associate professor in the Faculty of
Education, York University, Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Developmentally
Appropriate Practice in “Real Life” and Negotiating Standards in the
Primary Classroom and many articles on early childhood curriculum and
teacher development.
Copyright © 2006 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. See Permissions and
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