Children need adults, more than ever, to help them in cultivating and sustaining empathy.

A 2010 University of Michigan meta-analysis claimed that in the US, we’ve seen a 40% decline in the empathy of young adults. This drop was measured across 14,000 college students between the years 1979 and 2009.
 
There wasn’t a cause pinpointed for this decline, although the researchers couldn’t help but speculate in their comments that it had something to do with the dawn of social media, the popularity of violent video games, or even the airing of celebrity reality shows—the vestiges of what they dubbed “Generation Me.”
 
But there’s a danger in dismissing an entire swath of our culture with a “kids today” judgment—it doesn’t offer a solution for how to cultivate compassion and safety in our youngest citizens. And if we want to build a kinder, safer, and more tolerant world, we need to work with children and young adults in cultivating caring and empathy by modeling it for them as adults.
 
Children themselves have reported that they’re eager to get the kind of modeling and direction from adults that can help them grow their empathy and perpetuate kindness with their peers. In a 2017 survey of children ages 9 to 11 about kindness and caring, 83% said it would be easier to be kinder to one another if they each had an adult who really cared about and listened to them.
 
That’s not all. 77% of those same children said that it would be helpful if an adult modeled what to do and say in challenging situations—which supported yet another finding of the study—that the biggest thing stopping children from being kind to one another is not knowing how to respond when they see a peer being picked on or ostracized.
 
In her article, “Four Ways to Nurture Kindness,” Dr. Michele Borba points out that acts of kindness aren’t merely a feel-good behavior that children exhibit as a point of good manners. Acts of kindness stimulate and foster the development of empathy in the brains of children, along with improving health and reducing anxiety.
 
Kindness, Dr. Borba notes, “spreads faster in environments that foster it. That premise applies to our homes, classrooms, schools, neighborhoods, and communities. Perhaps our biggest mistake: we don’t model kindness nearly enough.” 

Schools are an ideal environment for adults to cultivate the violence prevention values of Care, Welfare, Safety, and Security^℠ that children can take into the rest of the world.

Schools are an ideal place to develop cultures of caring—by modeling the values of Care, Welfare, Safety, and Security^℠, adults can improve the climate of the educational setting for themselves as much as they do for children. And a profoundly positive offshoot of that, according to Dr. Borba, is that kindness and empathy can spread far faster in such a supportive setting. 

Collaboration builds community, and CPI training keeps the classroom community consistently safe and positive.

[For more on this story by Emily Eilers, got to The Case for a Culture of Caring in Schools]