Gratitude and Empathy in Child Development
Launch library · evergreen read
Gratitude and empathy tend to develop closely together in young children over time, since genuinely recognising someone else's effort first requires imagining their particular perspective and properly understanding what that specific effort actually cost them personally in time, patience, or precious energy spent doing it carefully and well for them.
Encouraging children to ask simple questions, what do you think that actually took, how might that person have felt while helping, builds this valuable perspective taking skill gradually through many ordinary daily moments rather than through formal lessons taught at school by a teacher standing at the front.
Nurtured carefully together over time, these two related capacities tend to reinforce each other steadily, producing children who notice others more readily around them and respond with genuine consideration rather than simply routine, learned politeness offered by rote memory alone without much genuine feeling behind it at all, ever, from anyone at all.