Empathy
How Reading Helps Children Understand Their Emotions
Reading together on World Read Aloud Day can be a kind of therapy for children.
Posted January 27, 2022 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- Reading can foster intimacy with a child and help them understand their powerful emotions that have emerged during the pandemic.
- Reading allows children to see the world through someone else's eyes and helps them learn how to negotiate difficult situations.
- When reading aloud, ask children questions about the text to help them develop empathy and process their emotions.
Cutoffs and estrangements—by circumstance or by choice—have plagued generations in my family.
In 1938, when my mother was only 12, the rising tide of anti-Jewish hatred in the town where our family had lived for 200 years led my grandparents to send her to America, all by herself. My mother was an “unaccompanied minor” before the label existed. Years later, she learned what she had escaped—the Nazis had murdered her parents in concentration camps.
My mother processed her losses just as most children would: She personalized everything. Too young to comprehend the political situation in Nazi Germany, she couldn’t understand that, by forcing her to leave her family, homeland, language, and friends—her entire identity—her parents had saved her life.
Instead, my mother felt abandoned. She figured her parents had sent her away because they didn’t love her anymore.
Even now, at the age of 96, my mother suffers the lingering pain of having carried that painful misperception for most of her life.
History Repeats Itself?
When the pandemic emerged in March of 2020, I could no longer routinely visit my young granddaughter. Like many grandparents, I was sad and deeply distraught. What worried me most was that my granddaughter was too young to understand why her beloved grandmother had disappeared.
I feared family history would repeat itself, and my granddaughter, like my mother, might think she was responsible for events that had nothing to do with her. She might believe that I stopped visiting her because I didn’t love her anymore.
To reduce her anxiety and mine, I wrote two children’s picture books—Happy Harper Thursdays: A Grandmother’s Love for Her Granddaughter During the Coronavirus and The Return of Happy Harper Thursdays: The Guiding Light of a Grandmother’s Love. These two brightly illustrated picture books help little people understand their big emotions. They attempt to explain to young children, simply and clearly, why we haven’t always been able to be with our loved ones during the pandemic.
Reading as Therapy
The value of reading aloud together is a timely topic as World Read Aloud Day is February 2nd. This global effort, created by the nonprofit LitWorld and sponsored by Scholastic, is celebrated annually in more than 173 countries and is all about bringing people together to share stories. Adults reading with children help them learn to discuss complex feelings while, importantly, fostering greater intimacy and a stronger connection.
During the pandemic years, children have had to adjust to frequent changes at home, at school or daycare, and among friends and family. Like adults, they’ve experienced a tangle of negative emotions. Sad, lonely, fearful, anxious, disappointed: Children, unlike adults, just aren’t equipped to understand this chaotic mix of circumstances and feelings.
Books are an ideal tool to help young children identify and express feelings. For children, reading works much like role-playing, allowing them to see the world through someone else’s eyes. When readers identify with a character, they understand that others also are experiencing and coping with personal struggles—just as they are. Picture books are especially engaging and helpful for young readers, with images and words working together to clarify powerful emotions.
Through reading, young people gain new perspectives. They see examples of how to negotiate friendships, handle conflicts during play, and generally manage their feelings. In addition, books build empathy in children—skills that need to be taught, nurtured, and practiced over time.
Strategies for Reading With Children
Looking at images and reading words on the printed page aren’t sufficient to help children process emotions and develop empathy. When reading with children, keep in mind these strategies:
- Pick the right book. To help children learn to identify and manage their feelings, choose texts that explore typical life scenarios. Familiarity helps them understand more concretely what they or their peers might be experiencing.
- Identify a character’s feelings. Teach children the vocabulary for their emotions. When reading a story, ask about a character’s emotions in simple terms. For example: “Why do you think the wolf blew down the pigs’ houses? How do you think the pigs felt when the wolf blew down their houses? What do you think the pigs should do? What did we learn from the story about building a house?”
- Take time to ponder. To help young readers put themselves into the character’s shoes, it’s important to pause periodically and reflect upon what has happened in the story. Researchers recommend some thought-provoking questions to help a child relate to the character’s emotions:
- How do you think the character feels right now?
- Why do you think he/she did what he/she just did?
- What would you do if you were the main character right now?
- Based on what we know about the character, do you think he/she will do what you would do? What might he or she do instead?
- What would make the character happy right now?
- What do you think will happen next?
Cultivation of Empathy, Intimacy, Even Community-Mindedness
As adults help children answer these questions, each child brings his or her own feelings to the text. Children gain confidence in their own ability to control their environment when they’re able to predict an outcome of a story. As readers become aware of their own emotions, they gain empathy and are likely to become more compassionate, more community-minded people. Eventually, if readers become parents themselves, they’ll use these reading techniques to raise empathetic, self-aware children of their own.
I only wish someone had helped my mother, through reading, to understand her deep feelings of abandonment. Then she might have lived more easily with her losses and reconciled her sorrowful past with a happier present.
