My Published Articles for ViewsHound: Teaching Our Kids Empathy and Compassion

Monday, September 1, 2014

Teaching Our Kids Empathy and Compassion

Ditas ( my daughter) and Carenna ( my grand daughter) in Paris

My youngest 11 yr old grand daughter, Carenna Katague Thompson, is in 6th grade in our local Roman Catholic Elementary school.

Yesterday she came home in tears. As a big and tall 6th grader she is walking home in a big group of kids from her catholic school. The route passes a local hospital and their new Cardiology and Heart Center. As they were walking a woman ran outside of the center, obviously distraught and grief-stricken, wailing "why? Why?" One of the 7th graders started filming her on his phone and the 6th graders all started making fun of her imitating her. Not even making an effort to consider that she may have just lost her husband, or mother, or child.

The kids all laughed while my grand daughter held back her empathetic tears, knowing the searing pain of losing someone they loved. My daughter even said, "hey you guys, maybe she just lost a loved one?" and they all ignored her. So much for teaching compassion and empathy to our children.

When I posted this incident in my Facebook Page, I received a few comments. One of the comments I like to share is as follows

“ Values are taught by parents. I'd be curious as to how many kids enrolled in the Catholic school actually attend church of any denomination. It seems that many religious schools have become the places parents send their kids because they don't want to put their kids in the local public school. It has little to do with religious education.

If religious education stops at the end of the school day that is a real problem. Any child who is raised in a congregation ought to have attended many funerals by the time they are in 6th grade. They should have been around grief and understand what it is because their parents should have been right there with them explaining it as they attended funerals and visitations as a family. Kids will listen to, or ignore, what they choose as a message from the school if that message is not reinforced at home.”

My daughter wrote on her FaceBook Page:

"Carenna and I did email the Principal who is very compassionate and who does a great job at school assemblies telling teaching stories etc. I do want Carenna to learn both empathy and compassion for those facing adversity, BUT also to be gracious and congratulatory to those who have triumphs and joyful things happen to them as well.

The awesome Principal handled it beautifully and spoke with all the students and their parents. The kids were young and immature and just not thinking, but it became a learning experience for all and I think it turned out for the better. Thank you all for the support. Sometimes I feel very alone in raising this sensitive wonderful daughter of mine".

I can not agree more at the above comments. Do You agree?

As a background to this post, my grand daughter lost her Dad about two years ago. My son-in-law was a victim of colon cancer at a young age of 52. My daughter until now is still grieving at the loss of her husband. However through her paintings and art work, both her and my grand daughter are holding on. Thanks to the support of her numerous friends and family.

Here's the site where my daughter and grand daughter exhibit their paintings and photographs as part of their therapy. www.grievingthruglee.com

There are several articles on how to instill and develop compassion in children at home in the WEB. However an article from www.brighthorizons.com attracted my attention. In that article, the author four items that will encourage empathy, caring, and compassion as follows.

1. You need to discuss to your child feelings and consequences of actions. Children who are helped to understand emotions and how their behavior impacts others are more likely to develop a deeper sense of empathy

2. Don't be afraid to explore negative emotions. Children who are allowed to show anger, sadness, or distress and helped to cope with these emotions tend to become more sympathetic and competent in later social situations.

3. You must validate caring behavior when you observe it. It will help children identify positive courses of action and last but not least,

4. You must provide opportunities for your child to care for someone or something other than themselves - a pet, a plant, or another person. Even if you can't take in a pet, perhaps you can have your child feed a neighbor’s cat.

Children first have to feel good about themselves to turn those positive feelings towards others. Children who grow up with helping and responsibility modeled are more likely to show those behaviors towards others.

For more details: http://www.brighthorizons.com/family-resources/volunteer-children/parents#sthash.rOyqZwwu.dpuf

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Monday, September 1, 2014

Teaching Our Kids Empathy and Compassion

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