Teaching Empathy in an Overwhelmed World

I have been thinking about the importance of teaching empathy to your children recently, as I have been reflecting on the current events in the world. Just when things seem to be at their worst, it seems like a new event happens and I feel completely overwhelmed. I go on social media, and it seems even more overwhelming. 

How does one learn empathy? It comes from someone helping you learn it. We can indirectly learn it from others, but I think we miss out on "moral lessons" of how to treat other humans with kindness. Our examples in media are often not the ones we want to follow. 

It made me think about a specific memory with my son when my daughter was about 2 months old. I was in complete survival mode. My son was in tantrum mode most days. He just missed his mom. His mom was now a always tired human who was completely overwhelmed. 

During these long tantrums, I would often read this book called Duck and Goose, How do you feel? It was just pictures of duck and goose expressing different emotions in the book. I would read the book with him, and try to teach him about anger and sadness hoping my efforts would help me later on. I would focus on teaching him that love is why we needed to be gentle with his sister.  I told him that I loved his sister as much as I loved him. He just wanted her to back to the hospital and go back to his old life where he was center of my attention. 

We had weeks where these tantrums seemed to only get better slowly. I would often feel discouraged, but I noticed that the times to calm down would decrease. The intensity of the tantrums decreased and his ability to bounce back got better. 

This is when I started writing my daily wins, since I felt minimal progress. The writing down of my wins helped me see this gradual change. 

One day I had a massive win. I was once again sleep deprived, and I was trying to put up a new black out curtain in my kids room, so the morning sun wouldn't wake up my kids at 6 am. I was getting frustrated, and my son brought me his toy hammer. He said that it would help me, and then he asked "that's love"? 

I nodded. That was love. I told him that he was helping me and helping others is how we show love. I realized that he was learning from my daily mini lessons. The pyschoeducation about emotions took time for him. How do you define love? How do you show it? How do you feel it? These questions are abstract and difficult for a toddler to learn. 

But I think in that moment he understood it. He saw me struggling and could sense my frustration. He saw my need, and wanted to help. Was that empathy? Yes. 

He took action on his desire to help me by bringing me his toy hammer. Love is an action word. That was love. 

In that moment, I just hugged him and told him that he was showing me love, and how much I appreciated that. 

It meant so much to me in that moment. It helped me see that I was a good enough mom. I wasn't failing. My son was learning and growing. He wouldn't be hitting her forever. He could learn how to love her. 

I am not writing this to say that I'm a perfect mom or that I know all the answers. But I do think that these moral lessons of how to show empathy and love towards others is needed now. My heart aches for those in this world who are hurt because they are a recipient of other's harmful actions. 

So, here I am writing this while my son is talking to me about how he wants to make heart necklaces for the kids in his preschool. I drew hearts on paper, and he is coloring them. He wants to make a necklace for each kid. It wasn't my idea. I was planning on buying valentines at the store. But homemade heart necklaces sound pretty amazing too. 

Empathy doesn’t arrive all at once. It grows slowly, in moments we almost miss, during tantrums, in shared exhaustion, in small hands offering what they have.

Today, my son wants to make heart necklaces for his classmates. It wasn’t something I taught him directly. It’s just something he learned by watching, by feeling, by being loved.

In a world that feels heavy and unkind, I’m holding onto this: empathy is still being learned, one small act at a time.