Kid Considerations:
It Begins With the Children
I
should be working on other things today. But, after another senseless shooting,
this one blatantly motivated by the toxic combination of racism, misplaced
masculinity, guns, and violence, I find that I cannot reconcile the dissonance
in my soul, and I am compelled to return again and again to this simple
question: what happened when this killer was a child?
The
complexity of racism, bigotry, hatred, and violence cannot be diluted to a
single cause, but I think we can examine critical points of development for
young children that have clearly failed to foster what I believe to be,
perhaps, the most crucial element in growing adults who turn away from that
racism, bigotry, hatred, and violence that has been so deeply embedded in our
culture for so long. That element is empathy.
For
the last couple of months, I have been working on creating a new training topic
for early childhood professionals: spirituality, morality, and ethics in the
daily lives of young children. Developmental psychology and educational theory
has, for a very long time, resisted or rejected the notion that very young
children are capable of the thought processes often deemed necessary for
purposeful and meaningful spiritual experiences, or for being able to think
morally and act ethically. Fortunately, there are a growing number of
educators, theorists, researchers, and parents who feel differently. As
explained by psychologist and professor Tobin Hart in his book The Secret Spiritual World of Children
(2003):
“These researchers have generally concluded that
children do not and cannot have a spiritual life prior to the development of
formal reasoning, usually sometime in adolescence […] When we look a little
closer, we can find grand exceptions to Piaget’s model. Even young children
have shown a capacity for thoughtful consideration of big questions
(metaphysics), inquiring about proof and the source of knowledge
(epistemology), reasoning through problems (logic), and reflecting on their own
identity in the world.” (Hart, pgs.4
& 92)
As I have reflected on the individuals
gunned down in Charleston, and the young man who enacted this terrorism,
joining the growing ranks of young, most often white, and almost always male perpetrators
of mass shootings, I keep returning to my original question, and that answer:
empathy.
As young children develop as
social-emotional beings, it is important that we recognize and foster their
ability to connect with the feelings of others in active, prosocial ways.
Again, young children regularly demonstrate this capacity, but adults often
fail to recognize it as such:
“More
recent research shows that toddlers between 18 and 22 months display empathy as
measured by orienting themselves to the sound of distress, visually checking
what is happening, showing emotional arousal (such as appropriate facial
expression), and engaging in prosocial activities such as helping, soothing, or
sharing” (Ann S. Epstein (2009). Me,
You, Us: Social-Emotional Learning in
Preschool. pg. 36).
Anyone who works with young
children has seen these impulses acted out in myriad small interactions on a
daily basis. But “seeing” them is not enough: we must acknowledge them,
reinforce them, model them, and build upon the potential embedded within them.
We need to develop a better
understanding of the capacity that all children have to experience wonder; to
evaluate social interactions for moral and ethical value; to discover their
relationship to self, others, and the world; to be empathic, caring
individuals; and to grow as spiritual, moral, and ethical actors in their own
lives. Young children are not simply empty vessels waiting to be filled—they
are fully formed, yet constantly evolving members of a family, a classroom, a
community, a nation, and a world. If, as
a culture, we continue to fail our children in fostering empathy and connecting
it with spirituality (which does not necessarily have to be rooted in a
specific religious doctrine or practice) that informs moral beliefs and ethical
actions, then we will continue to betray our better natures, and we will
continue to mourn the lives taken by those whose hearts and souls are empty. It
begins with the children.
