A wise woman (my mother) once said to me: "If you want to feel compassion for someone who is really annoying you, imagine that that person is two years old." It works. We are all, in reality, not much different from two-year-olds. We are all, in our own clumsy ways, asserting ourselves in the world, expressing our joys and fears, and calling out for help that we desperately need. It's not hard to look at any human being, even the meanest one, and see the two-year-old.

My essay today was inspired by an article entitled Fighting Bullying with Babies, by David Bornstein, posted recently on the New York Times Opinionator blog. (I stole Bornstein's title for this essay, which is why I put quotation marks around it.) Bornstein's article is about the Roots of Empathy program, founded more than a decade ago by Mary Gordon in Toronto. Here I'll say a bit about Gordon's program and then describe some other examples that demonstrate the power of babies and young children to bring out the angel in us and squash the devil.

The Roots of Empathy Program

Mary Gordon founded Roots of Empathy after years of working with abusive parents and abused children. She saw the cycle. Children growing up unloved and surrounded by violence became unloving and violent parents. The idea behind her new program was to bring real babies and their moms (and sometimes dads) into school classrooms so that children from all backgrounds could gain experience looking at babies, talking about babies, and thinking about what it is like to be a baby. The idea was that this would help set children on the road to becoming, ultimately, better parents.

She found, through experience, that her program also had a remarkable, more immediate effect on the classrooms that participated. The children who had this experience--of a monthly visit from a baby and parent--became kinder and more compassionate with one another. Bullying declined. Kids who were previously teased and taunted for being different were now in many cases admired for their differences. Apparently, the exposure to the infant, and the discussions of the thoughts and feelings that the infant evoked, served as a powerful force for the spread of compassion throughout the classroom--an effect that would last the whole month, from one baby visit to the next.

Here's a sample story from Gordon's book about her program.[1] In one eighth-grade class the toughest and meanest looking kid was Darren. He was two years older than the others because he had been held back, was already growing a beard, had a tattoo on the back of his partially shaved head, and was intimidating to all around him. Darren's mother had been murdered in front of his eyes when he was four years old, and he had lived in a series of foster homes. So, he had to look and act tough. But the 6-month-old baby who had been brought to the classroom melted him.

The mom had brought along a Snuggly, trimmed with pink brocade, which she used for holding the baby close to her. Near the end of the class visit--after the class had spent 40 minutes observing and talking about the baby--the mother asked if anyone would like to try on the Snuggly. To everyone's dismay, Darren raised his hand. With the Snuggly strapped on, he then asked the mom if she would put the baby into it. With, I imagine, much apprehension, the mother did just that. Darren then sat quietly for several minutes in the corner rocking, while the baby snuggled contentedly into his arms and chest. When it was time for the baby and mother to leave, Darren asked the mother and the instructor: "If a person has never been loved, can he still be a good father?"

The Roots of Empathy program has now spread throughout Canada and made inroads into a number of other countries. Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, has conducted controlled studies, not yet published, which purport to show that the program greatly reduces aggression and increases kindness not just on the day of the baby's visit, but throughout the school year.[2] In an essay I posted six months ago I claimed that no anti-bullying program tried in standard schools to date had been proven to be effective over the long run (see post of May 12, 2010). Schonert-Reichl's studies, when published, may lead me to revise that conclusion. Mary Gordon likes to say, "Empathy can't be taught, but it can be caught. You catch it from babies."

Pastor Daniel Dean and the HOPE Community Center and School in Tampa

I met Daniel Dean two months ago at a symposium on the value of free play that I helped to organize in Binghamton, New York. He was brought to the symposium by my friend Jerry Lieberman, who is president of the Florida Humanist Society. Jerry wanted my academic colleagues and me to meet Daniel and learn from him, and Daniel himself came with the hope of learning something from us. I don't know if Daniel learned anything worth knowing from us, but I certainly learned an enormous amount from him, and I intend to keep learning from him.

Daniel Dean, who was born in Jamaica but grew up in Florida, is a Christian pastor and community leader. He and volunteers built--literally built, with shovels, saws, and hammers--a community center on North 22nd Street in Tampa, at a corner long known for drug dealing, prostitution, and violence. The mayor of Tampa had offered a vacant lot on this corner to anyone who would build something there that would help to improve the neighborhood, and Daniel took up the challenge. He and his wife Suzette, along with other volunteers, would build a center that would house a church on Sundays, a daycare and school on weekdays, and a community and recreation center, for people of all ages, on weekday evenings and at other times when school wasn't in session. Some people thought he was crazy. The place would be vandalized, destroyed before the roof went up. And if the roof did go up and children came, the children would be in constant danger from the "element" surrounding it. But Daniel thought differently, and so far he has been proven correct.