Empathy: teaching empathy in children. Empathy training book, with empathy exercises

April 28, 2011 - PRLog -- "Empathy: teaching empathy in children - Empathy training with empathy exercises: Empathy for children: parenting in empathic ways" is now available on  on http://www.iswb.org/

How to teach empathy in children? What is the difference between empathy and sympathy? This book (http://www.amazon.com/Empathy-teaching-children-exercises-parenting/dp/1461048540/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303939408&sr=1-5), based on "A course in Happiness", is a training in empathy for parents, teachers, educators, etc. who want to facilitate empathy in children. The book comes with selected empathy exercises.

Empathy is “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner (Webster)”. Empathy is distinct from sympathy (a feeling of compassion or concern for another, the wish to see them better off or happier. ), pity (feeling that another is in trouble and in need of help as they cannot fix their problems themselves), and emotional contagion (imitatively "catching" the emotions that others are showing without necessarily recognizing this is happening).

While the way children understand the intellectual meaning, and implications, of empathy varies from case to case, a straightforward approach makes everything easier to relate to. For example, show a few pictures of people who clearly look happy, bored, suprised, etc and ask children to identify what these people are feeling. Then, show pictures of people waiting for a bus, looking at their watch, etc. and ask children to identify what these people are likely to be thinking. Then, just explain that is empathy: the capacity of understanding what other people feel and think. Explain that we all have this capacity for empathy, and that it gets better and better when cultivated with determination. Show pictures of happy kids in groups, playing together, listening to each other, etc. and explain that kids who are empathic are better at understanding their own feelings and the ones of peers, parents, teachers, etc. This resulting in people liking even more to communicate with them, at the advantage of everyone's happiness.

To know more about "Empathy: teaching empathy in children - Empathy training with empathy exercises: Empathy for children: parenting in empathic ways ", please visit http://www.amazon.com/Empathy-teaching-children-exercises... and on http://www.iswb.org/

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