Building Moral Intelligence - Essential Virtue 1

Empathy-
Identifying with and feeling other people's concerns.

There are 3 steps to building empathy:-

Step 1:- Foster awareness and an emotional vocabulary.

- Tune in to your child's feelings and listen with empathy; listening calmly to your child with your ears, eyes and heart. Tune in to his/her body language

- Acknowledge what is causing the emotion; acknowledge what situation is causing your child to feel the way he/she does.

- Label how the child is feeling; label the emotion and say it back to her. It may sound simple but it validates that you understand how he's/she's feeling. For many children, just knowing that you understand can be very healing. It also helps your child to develop a stronger emotional vocabulary.

- Kindle a resolution for the child's needs; help your child resolve his/her emotional needs.

Step 2:- Enhance sensitivity to the feelings of others.

- Praise sensitive, kind actions; one of the most effective ways of enhancing a behaviour is by reinforcing the action as soon as it happens. Whenever you notice your child behaves in a sensitive, caring manner, let him/her know how pleased that makes you feel.

- Show the effect of sensitivity; sensitive, kind acts - evens mall ones- can make a big difference in people's lives, hence point it out t your child to help him/her see the impact his/her actions made.

- Draw attention to non-verbal feeling cues; point out facial expressions, posture and mannerisms of people in different emotional states. It sensitizes your child to ther people's feelings.

- Ask often, "How does he feel?"; ask your child to ponder how another person feels.

- Use the formula "feels + needs"; ask children questions to help them discover people's needs and feelings.

- Share why you feel the way you do; use situations as they arise to describe how you feel about them and why.

Step 3:- Develop empathy for another person's point of view

- Switch roles to feel the other side; the next time there's conflict between siblings, between your child and a friend or between you and your child, ask each participant to stop and think how the other person would feel if the roles were reversed. Then ask each person to talk about the problems as if he/she were teh other person

- Walk in my shoes; ask your child to step into your shoes and pretend that he/she is you. This helps your child to understand how the other person is feeling about a situation.

- Imagine how the person feels; get your child to imagine how the other person feels about a specific circumstance.