Often hear parents feedback that their children's emotional awareness is weak, see others encounter difficulties or injuries, fall, etc., not only will not help to cope, but will also laugh, children feel that seeing others out of the situation is a particularly funny thing.
This is a bit of a headache for parents. I think that children's cognitive understanding can be constantly taught, but the improvement of emotional awareness and empathy ability is really difficult for parents, and they don't know how to teach.
Among ordinary children, we will find that they will take the initiative to care about the emotions of their parents, such as when they are naughty, if their parents do not stop or show anger, they will still be unscrupulous to make trouble. When they perceive that Mom and Dad are angry, their performance will be somewhat restrained.
For example, two ordinary children playing together will often feel happy because one of the friends is happy, which has a lot to do with the child's empathy ability.
So what is empathy? Empathy, also known as empathy or empathy, refers to the ability of an individual to understand or feel the other person's experiences or feelings, or to place himself in the other person's perspective to experience his or her feelings.
Empathy includes two aspects, namely cognitive empathy and emotional empathy.
Cognitive empathy refers to the ability to recognize the emotions and feelings of others, while emotional empathy is the ability to make corresponding emotional responses to the emotions and feelings of others.
For children with autism, the defect of empathy is mainly manifested in two aspects, first, they have difficulty recognizing emotions and it is difficult to understand the psychological state of others; second, they are unable to carry out appropriate social behavioral responses.
Through observation, we will find that most of the children of the lineage will avoid the eye contact of others, lack of interest in the call of the family, language and other behaviors; should not be named, do not want to be close to people; do not have an attachment relationship with their parents, do not observe and imitate the simple actions of others, and lack of communication skills in communication with children of the same age, etc. Behind these manifestations are related to one of the typical symptoms of social communication disorder.
So, how do we develop children's empathy?
1, we must be patient to listen to the child; the first step in cultivating the child's ability is to achieve a demonstration of empathy. As parents or teachers, we should pay attention to and affirm the children's emotions and feelings, so that the children can better understand the emotions and feelings of others. Conversely, if children's emotional feelings are often ignored, it is impossible for them to care for others with empathy.
When the child has a certain emotion, let the child realize his own emotional state, for example, when we interact with the child, the child laughs, then we can input to the child "I am so happy" such emotional feelings. As the child understands his own feelings, we gradually guide the child to identify the basic emotions of others.
In short, we must first be patient and listen to give enough responses in time, so that they know why they have this emotion and feel the care and attention of their parents.
2, timely guidance of the child; we are to stand in the child's perspective to understand his feelings, empathy with him. If it is simply preaching, it will only make the child unable to understand and express his feelings correctly. For example, if a child and a parent walk on the road and see a child falling to the ground, we can guide the child to comfort the child by saying "the child fell, the injury is hurt, it hurts".
We should be good at using small daily things to guide children to positively understand the behavior and emotions of others, convey empathetic thinking patterns to children, and help children think differently.
3. Create an empathetic environment; the empathy ability defects of autistic children also have a certain relationship with the living environment. Some parents ignore their children's emotional needs because they are busy at work, and the intervention of too many multimedia devices makes children lose a lot of life experience, so that they cannot get the opportunity to empathize.
In daily life, we should create more empathetic living environments for children, so that children can increase the opportunities to communicate and socialize with others, so that they have feelings of needing help and feelings of being needed by others.
The cultivation and improvement of children's empathy ability is infiltrated into children in a subtle way, first guiding children to understand their own emotions and emotions, and then gradually transitioning to the emotional understanding of others, while constantly creating an environment to fully let children experience.