4. Developing Endearment, the Notion of Interdependence and Empathy
“Take a look at this sweater. It’s comfortable, it keeps me warm…But where did this sweater come
from? What else do I need to have this sweater? What does it
depend on
?”
This is one of the ways of introducing the concept of interdependence to children that we have
come to enjoy.
“A store”, “money”, the children often reply.
“And the store? Do they make the sweaters? Where do the sweaters come from?”
Children very quickly catch on to the game. You need wool and sheep, you need shears, farms,
farmers, trucks, roads (and people to make the trucks and roads), and all of these things need
support, too, of course! The point of the mental exercise quickly becomes clear: Even a simple
item like a sweater is part of an interdependent web that encompasses a vast network of
relationships.
“And where does it end?” we ask. “Where does the web end?”
“It doesn’t end!” they often yell excitedly. “You need the whole world!”
Teaching interdependence is key for the cultivation of empathy and endearment. It enhances our
sense of connection to and dependence on others. It can also serve as an opportunity for us to
reflect on the many ways in which others, often unbeknownst to us, have benefited us in many
ways. We can help children and adolescents reflect systematically by asking them to keep
“gratitude journals” in which they write down things they are thankful for each day. This can help
children learn to recognize and focus on the positive things in their lives more readily, rather than
focusing solely on the negative.
Enhancing this sense of connection is crucial, and there are many ways to deepen this insight. We
have found it tremendously useful to help students learn ways of tuning in to the suffering of
others. Of course, by tuning in to their own suffering as outlined above, they are naturally learning
to tune in to the suffering of others; we work to make this process more explicit. For younger
children, we often play games that involve acting out and identifying others’ emotions to help build
emotional awareness and intelligence. In one game we place cards with emotion words such as
“scared”, “surprised”, “annoyed”, “sad”, “angry”, “hopeless”, “grateful” and so forth into a basket.
We ask one child to choose an emotion word and act it out for the rest of the class. The other
students are asked to name which emotion their classmate is feeling. Next we ask the students to
share what clues helped them identify the emotion being acted out. Then we ask the actor to
describe her strategy for expressing that emotion, taking care to elicit descriptions of how these
emotions feel in the body, and how we can better learn to recognize when we are feeling a certain
way. For adolescents, we have found that empathic reading circles can be extraordinarily helpful
on many levels. Through these circles, in which we ask students to read a short chapter of a book
together each week, adolescents learn to empathize with characters in these stories, to relate
these insights to their own lives, and to learn to share their feelings with others in safe, vulnerable
ways.
By attending more carefully to others, and by reflecting more deeply on their own suffering,
students gain insight into the suffering of others, and a deepened empathic response is often
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