Chapter 16
From Babies to Behavioral Shift—Canada
THE ROOTS OF EMPATHY GREEN BLANKET WAS SPREAD ON THE FLOOR of the classroom. A mother and her tiny four-month-old baby entered the room and all the children stood around the blanket in a circle while quietly singing the Roots of Empathy Welcome song. As she slowly walked around the inside of the circle, the mother held her daughter in front of her at the children's eye level, so that every child had a chance to connect lovingly with the baby. The children soothingly repeated the same song as the baby went around, and it seemed as if every child was being emotionally touched by the experience.
This same scene plays out with children in every Roots of Empathy program around the world. A Roots of Empathy family visit always starts with the Welcome song. And whether children are singing in Cree or in French or in English, it's always the same tune, same format, and same program. They aren't aware of it, but the experience is being biologically embedded in their brains.
After the Welcome song, the class sits down around the green blanket. The mother also sits and gently places her child before her. In the middle, the baby seems vulnerable, but not threatened or threatening. Guided by a trained Roots of Empathy instructor, the children learn to observe the baby carefully. Slowly, surely, and miraculously, the children find the humanity in the baby by coming to understand that baby's intentions and feelings. Babies do not hide their feelings; they have no screens or filters. You can always tell when a baby has a problem. Lacking words, a baby emotes with vocalizations and movements, which Gordon describes as a “theatre of emotion.” As the children begin to understand a baby's language of feelings, they start to name those feelings. Then they are guided by the instructor to understand and name their own feelings and the feelings of others—the very definition of empathy. By finding the humanity in the baby, they learn to find it in themselves and each other. They learn that we all share the same feelings—this is our common language, our first language; it is the foundation for our shared humanity.
The year-long Roots of Empathy program is demonstrating a new way to relate to other human beings. The program is predicated on the notion that while schools are responsible for what children know, Roots of Empathy gets at what they feel and what they think, through direct, experiential learning about empathy. And that's the difference. Every child sitting around that blanket is very much transformed. Those children who didn't grow up with a loving attachment relationship in their lives may not know much about how love works, but as of this day forward, they will not forget. A new pathway has been created in their brains.
And throughout the rest of the program, they'll have this pathway strengthened. As Mary explains:
In your first eighteen months of life, you decide if you are lovable or not, if you deserve to be taken care of, if you're worthy. If you figure out that the only people you love can't always be depended on, it's going to be a problem. So parents become the most important people in determining how the baby feels in the world and how they grow emotionally. Just by loving the child, the child responds. That's how they learn the human language. They don't need Berlitz, they need love.
And that foundation of love is the inspiration behind Roots of Empathy.
Empathy Can't Be Taught, But It Can Be Caught
The Roots of Empathy program is designed for children ages five to thirteen and offered in classrooms from kindergarten up to Grade 8. Mary started the program more than fifteen years ago, and to this day parents still ask her if it is ever too late for a child to develop empathy. She often answers by telling the story of Darren, who saw his mother murdered in front of him when he was four. Since then, he had been in and out of foster care situations and was held back twice in school. His tattoo and shaved head made him look menacing, and he was two years older than anyone else in his eighth-grade class, which was receiving the Roots of Empathy program.
During class one day, the volunteer Roots of Empathy mother was explaining that whenever she put her baby in a Snugli (a cloth carrier to hold a baby close to the chest), her baby wouldn't snuggle in and face her, and only tolerated it when facing outwards. As the bell rang and most of the kids were leaving to go to lunch, the mother asked if anyone would like to try on the Snugli. To everyone's surprise, Darren volunteered. He ever so gently put the baby in the Snugli, chest to chest. The baby molded completely into him, something the mother had just explained she couldn't do with her child. Darren took the baby into the corner and started to rock back and forth. A few minutes later as he gave the baby back, he asked the Roots of Empathy instructor, “Do you think if no one has ever loved you, you could still be a good father?” For the first time he believed in the possibility that maybe he, too, could be a loving parent, even though he had experienced very little love in life himself.
For Mary, this story told her never to give up on anyone. She often says that empathy can't be taught, but she is adamant that it can be caught—developed through experiencing it, as Darren did by witnessing the empathy that the mother had shown for the baby in his classroom and later by coming to understand the baby's feelings and feel love for the baby himself. Roots of Empathy is built on the certainty that we are all born with the capacity for empathy, but we need to experience it to more fully develop that capacity as we age. When children experience empathy for “their” baby, it gives them a foundation for life that will help them grow into more empathetic people, friends, parents, and citizens down the road.
The experience around the Roots of Empathy green blanket is a platform, a springboard that helps children dive into their own emotions and feelings. After discussing why the baby might be feeling happy, excited, worried, anxious, or angry, the instructor then uses those feelings to reference the children's lived experience. When was a time that you felt frustrated like our baby? What did you do about it? When was a time that you felt so angry that you cried like the baby? Who did you tell and how did you cope and how did you know you were angry? The discussion turns ever inward. When did you feel like that? How can you tell when others feel that way? As the children share their experiences and reflections on feelings, they come to realize that their deepest emotions are shared by others and they are not so different after all. The program builds the children's emotional literacy; it builds their coping strategies, augments their self-knowledge and shows them ways to self-regulate. It connects them, each to the other.
Mary often says that we live in an emotionally illiterate society, particularly in North America. It is no wonder that many children don't know what their feelings are, let alone how to describe them or manage them.
Throughout the year, the children watch the baby grow and develop. Each predictable developmental stage that the baby goes through and each milestone in the baby's life adds to the range of emotions that children observe. For example, when babies crawl for the first time, children observe how proud they are of their new skill, and then have a chance to reflect on a time they learned to do something new. They learn to feel proud of the fact that once they couldn't do many things like their babies—perhaps riding a bike, jumping rope, or reading a book—but now they can. And they come to realize there may be other things they can't do yet—but they will learn to do them eventually, just like their baby.
Roots of Empathy also builds on the fact that babies display different reactions and emotions according to their unique temperaments. For example, it may turn out that a particular baby is easily frustrated and cries often. This can be a powerful lesson. In Roots of Empathy, children learn to identify a baby's temperament and reflect on what their own temperament is like. They learn about individual differences, and that it is okay to have a temperament that is distinct from others as it is important to understand and accept people with temperaments different from their own. A Roots of Empathy instructor might get children thinking about ways to help a more cautious baby feel better, such as introducing new things slowly or bringing him to his mother for comfort if he is truly overwhelmed and having a hard time adjusting to a new environment. All this intensifies the richness of the discussions and the impact of the program on children's emotional literacy.
Mary often explains emotional literacy to educators by asking a traditional question from the world of academia. “If Johnny has three apples and Amelia takes two, how many are left?” The Roots of Empathy program asks the question entirely differently: “If Johnny has three apples and Amelia takes two, how is Johnny going to feel?” Mary notes that how Johnny feels is going to determine everything he learns that day—or not. Roots of Empathy proposes that if we can use the universal access point of public education in developed countries to raise levels of empathy and increase the social and emotional learning of children, we can have a ripple effect in almost every single measureable outcome of societal wellness—from criminal activity, unemployment, addiction, poor parenting, and family violence to civic participation and mental health. The research on social and emotional learning clearly states that when children have a better understanding of their own emotions and a greater sense of connection with others, their academic performance improves, and so does their success and happiness in later life.
Research on Roots of Empathy clearly shows that the program is making a large contribution to children's social and emotional learning. For more than a decade, independent researchers worldwide have been studying the program, and have consistently found that Roots of Empathy significantly reduces aggression (including bullying) and increases pro-social behavior (such as sharing, including, and cooperating) among children who receive it. The effects of the program have even been shown to last at least three years, in the longest study of program benefits that has been conducted to date.
Now research into the program is taking a new turn. At the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS), Drs. Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl are conducting a brain-based study of the program in Seattle, using state-of-the-art, noninvasive MEG imaging technology to measure activity in different parts of children's brains. Using this technology, they will be able to show whether the program has a biological effect on key indicators of social-emotional competency, such as increased activity in areas of the brain that indicate the ability to regulate emotions. It will be one of the first neurophysiological studies ever to measure the effects of a social and emotional learning program on a child's brain, with results expected in 2013.
We Need a Global Warming of Our Hearts
Roots of Empathy encourages children to be fixers or changers. If they see someone being cruel or unkind in the classroom or on the playground, they have an opportunity to stand up against it. The program instills the “everyone a changemaker” attitude by operating on the principle of participatory democracy. There is no praise for a right answer in a Roots of Empathy program—in fact, there are no right or wrong answers in the program at all, just children sharing their thoughts and feelings. Children are always acknowledged and thanked for their contribution to the group discussion, and therefore know that they are being heard. “If a child gets to hear that their voice counts in grade one, can you imagine how powerfully they can grow as citizens? And as changemakers?” Mary asks. The participatory democracy approach also builds children's intrinsic motivation. They contribute not to be rewarded by praise, but because they want to share in the discussion. And what is most amazing is that as they go through the program they do grow as changemakers.
Mary tells a story of a class of nine-year-old children lining up to go out to recess. When the teacher wasn't looking, one boy grabbed another boy's hat. The smallest little girl in the class looked at the boy who had grabbed the hat, and told him as calmly and powerfully as she could to give back the hat. He looked up and down the row of children and by their silence and the look on their faces, he realized that the moral majority was on her side. In most classrooms, no one would have said anything. In this case, the bully learned that his game was not going to work because there were children in his class who cared about how other children feel and were willing to stand up for it. Better yet, he learned that if he did similar things in future, he was going to be the one who would be embarrassed. The ecology of the class was now forever tipped. Mary knows hundreds of stories that play out like this one.
Mary looks at the world and thinks about what the nature of a citizen is and what we need to do to build a more civil society. She created Roots of Empathy's mission around building a more caring, peaceful, and civil society by raising levels of empathy in children and adults. She passionately believes that we can increase children's empathy quotient and decrease their aggression toward others. If she can effect that sort of change in society, then people will find it difficult to dehumanize or turn their backs on others. Our world today offers lots of examples of people who propagate cruelty, who decide that if others are different in some way or believe in different things, they have the right to marginalize them. But when you introduce empathy to the picture, it is much harder to believe others are so different from ourselves. Roots of Empathy helps children intentionally identify how we are different but also how we are the same.
I am convinced that one of the biggest things we need to do to change the world is erase the concept of “the other.” In order to be successful, we have to do more than secure economic prosperity; we will wither and fail as a society unless we become empathetic. We may be divided by any number of differences—geography, culture, race, class, age, ability, sexual orientation or gender—but we are all connected by shared emotions.
Using the baby makes it easy to explain that we are all different in some ways, but that doesn't make us good or bad, she adds. It means we recognize the differences and value them rather than marginalize them. Our feelings are what ultimately connects us as human beings. And empathy, one of the most important human traits, is what allows us to connect to each other.
Roots of Empathy's aim is to change the world, child by child, and the program is now spreading widely and internationally. So far, about four hundred thousand children worldwide have received Roots of Empathy's programs in seven countries. The program has a large reach across Canada where it began, but it is also growing in the United States, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man, Scotland, and New Zealand. Roots of Empathy received a 2011 Globalizer Award from Ashoka, which is helping the organization to further increase its reach in a sustainable way, internationally. But perhaps the most important thing that Roots of Empathy is doing is leading by example, influencing the world's thought leaders, social entrepreneurs, and humanitarians by demonstrating the difference empathy makes to our global well-being. In 2010, Mary was asked to speak about emotional literacy as part of the United Nations' International Literacy Day celebrations. It was the first time the concept of emotional literacy had been included at the event.
What Roots of Empathy has helped to launch is a world empathy movement that aims to create a shift in education—and beyond—so that empathy is nurtured as the most important trait we need to create an “everyone a changemaker” world. “It's about creating a more humane world,” says Mary. “This is about the human family—we all share this world together. But it is only through empathy that we'll be able to solve the world's problems.”