9 Easy Ways to Help Your Kids Learn Empathy Every Day

New Yorkers know better than anyone that it takes a village! We show up for our communities. This means we want to raise our kids to give back. Put another way: We want them to learn empathy. “Empathy is about understanding a perspective or point of view of someone else,” says Sarah Scheldt, M. Ed., a parenting coach in Brooklyn. “Children respond to what they see their parents doing. So, while talking as a family about empathy is certainly important, showing them what it means is even stronger.” 

If trying to constantly model empathy sounds like just another stress on top of everything else (laundry, doctor visits, work), you’re not alone. But Scheldt says you can easily mix it into your everyday life. “Think about anything you’ve wanted your kid to get better at in the past like a sport or waking up for school on time. First, you show them how to do it. Then, you practice and do it together a lot. At some point, the magic happens. Your kids just know what’s expected and they do it,” she says.

9 Everyday Activities for Raising Empathetic Kids

Read a book together.

Read, discuss. Repeat. While reading, ask questions about the characters. “It’s much more helpful to teach a big concept like empathy when you remove yourself from the situation,” Scheldt says. “If you are already modeling how characters feel in a book, your kids now have something to anchor a future response and will be more likely to express empathy for others.” 

A few books she recommends: Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña or Have You Filled a Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud for younger kids and Wonder by R. J. Palacio for older kids.

Role play it out.

You can use puppets, Barbies, or just yourself and your kids. It’s good to act out responses to feelings and problems. As Scheldt says, “Remember, you want your kids to have skills before they are confronted with reasons to use empathy in the real world.”

Watch a movie.

Pose questions during and after the movie. You can ask, “How do you think they are feeling? What makes you think that?” Later, “What would you have done? Do you understand why the character felt that way?”

Here are a few films that hit on helping out community and friends: Inside Out, Wonder (an adaptation of the book mentioned above), and Zootopia.