What does empathy look like?
Ten Tips to help parents, educators and caregivers build empathy

By Ellen Mossman- Glazer M.Ed. Life Skills Coach, Behavior Specialist.

When you’re automatic ‘empathy switch’ clicks on, you have stepped outside of yourself, for a few moments and into the shoes of someone else. You let go of your personal opinions, and respond with unconditional kindness and understanding. Your behavior emphatically says "Your feelings matter to me."

Being empathetic means you completely understand the other person’s current situation as if it is happening to you. When your child’s kitty got hurt, you felt the ache your child felt.

Empathy means you understand the needs of someone else even though you may stand to make a sacrifice. One toddler stares at the other’s snack. The child eating the snack automatically extends his hand to share some – an empathetic act at an early age.

Empathy does not necessarily mean agreement. Your teen’s groups of friends are going to another friend’s house after the movies. The parents are not going to be home. Your rule is parents must be home. You understand how frustrating and unfair that feels to your teen and you may say so. Nonetheless, you set your limits despite your child’s protests.

Having genuine empathy requires many little sub skills, including:

* understanding feelings
* accepting differences
* letting go of conditions
* predicting actions
* interpreting body language
* acting with genuine caring

Empathy is an especially challenging skill for kids and adults who have Autism and Asperger Syndrome. They are often misunderstood and mistaken for being cold or rude. That is because they typically struggle with reading emotions of others. Before they even get to the place where they can be empathetic, people on the autism spectrum need to be directly taught the skills of recognizing the words and body language that communicate how people are feeling. Like anyone else, they have feelings and desires to belong and build relationships.

Teaching empathy requires your modeling it as well as the more direct 'show and tell' method.

you want to improve how your kids respond to your behavior change program, you may need to fine-tune your reward system. Here are six key questions to guide you to create rewards to a tailor-made fit to your child's individuality.

1. Do your rewards have enough novelty to keep your child motivated? Even the most fun and unique rewards get old. Keep updated with rewards that propel your children and students to keep working towards a goal. Fine tune and freshen up rewards before their appeal fizzles out.

2. Are you overlooking praise as a natural and easy to deliver reward? Praise blossoms self-esteem. Praise is a compelling motivator. Kids love to hear their parents and teachers be proud of them. Praise the deed. "Good job on the clean-up. I don't see a speck of dirt!"

3. Are you rewarding for effort? Build success into your behavior program. Make sure your child can count on achievement. If a reward is getting an A, set it up so the child has opportunities to get the thrill of an A.

4. Are your rewards scheduled frequently enough? Remember the objective of a reward is to reinforce positive behavior. That means giving your child encouragement to keep doing the good thing. If the goal is a tougher for your child to achieve, set up your program to give little rewards or partial points along the way for effort or steps taken toward an end goal.

5. Are you keeping the focus on positive behaviors? Play down points not earned. You want your child to keep the thrill of earning in his mind and you do this by keeping the focus on building the points or accumulating the tokens. Allow your child to keep points once earned no matter how the scene may have deteriorated. At times he does not earn his points, that in itself is a penalty so you need do nothing more. Refocus on the positive.

6. Are you following through with your part? Parents, educators and caregivers are busy people and what sometimes is neglected, as a result, is their very vital role. A most common reason that a well-crafted behavior program does not work is because the adults get too busy and those essential and exciting check marks, parent initials or tokens don't get handed out. If it is impossible to be there consistently, let the tracking system be self-administering, where your child is on the honor system. You might be delighted by how he or she honors the agreement. It is okay to commit only to what you comfortably can do. And you will see, the time you give up now will pay off dramatically in the time and relief that will be your reward.

Copyright Ellen Mossman-Glazer 2006. All rights reserved. You are welcome to share or reprint this article, providing it remains as written with all contact and copyright information included along with a link to http://artofbehaviorchange.com This content is coaching and education and not intended to take the place of psychological services, where advised and appropriate.