Dr. Bruce Perry, MD, National Council, Washington, May 4: I had to transcribe a few quotes that really hit me hard from his speech, to provoke you to watch his whole video: “Born for Love: “Why Empathy is Essential – and Endangered”
"Empathy is what makes us human,” he says – but this has not sunk in. If simple kindness isn’t enough, what about the minor fact that it’s brain science? Or that by ignoring this basic fact, we’re violating biology, so we’re on track to be dying as a species?
”From birth, we seek intimate connections, bonds made possible by empathy — the ability to love and to share the feelings of others,” Perry begins. But “our policies routinely violate the biological reality of empathy, and that’s destructive…
“For example, we pass on to the next generation explicit choices that we’re going to teach math — but not music… We don’t care if everyone learns to read and perform music or not, but they’ve got to do arithmetic… We have extensive rules for all the things everyone has to learn to drive a car… but we don’t do the same for raising a child! We don’t make any systematic recommendations, or ensure that everybody who’s about to have a child has the fundamental knowledge of what’s necessary for the child…
“We’re exposing our children to levels of violence as a problem solving technique, at rates that are at least 50 times greater than alternate methods of problem-solving… READ MORE...
Comments (0)