6 Easy Ways to Measure Your Child’s Empathy

If you’re a parent, you probably want to raise a “nice” kid, but you might not realize that prosocial or altruistic acts are actually very complicated from a neuroscience perspective.

Luckily, there are actual ways to test if your children are empathetic enough—and then to tweak your parenting to change the results! Because what fun is parenting if we can’t conduct science experiments on our kids?

You might have heard that empathy starts in infancy, but in fact, babies can’t regulate their emotions at all—even the sound of a nearby crying infant can cue a stress response in a baby. We call this emotional contagion—it’s actually not until about the age of 2 that kids are able to begin controlling their emotional responses. Your child is likely still in the emotional contagion stage if you agree with both these statements:

1. When another child is upset, my child needs to be comforted, too.
2. When another child gets frightened, my child freezes or starts to cry.

Emotional contagion isn’t particularly desirable—it’s hard to help others if we’re feeling frozen ourselves. The first step towards controlling emotional responses is simple attention to emotion, and we usually start seeing signs of this by the age of 2. If the next two statements describe your child, then she already pays attention to emotion:

1. My child looks up when another child laughs.
2. When an adult gets angry with another child, my child watches attentively.

If you have a child who is old enough to pay attention to the feelings swirling around his personal space, the next two tests will let you see if he can effectively read those signals.

Reading emotions test #1: Get some paper and draw three big-headed stick figures standing in a semi-circle on a playground, but leave their faces blank. Draw one kid falling down in the middle, with a sad face. Maybe even add some stick figure tears. Give your child the pen and ask him to fill in the faces of the other people on the playground.

Reading emotions test #2: Use magazine pictures to find close-up faces with various expressions. Cut out just the eyes, avoiding the nose but including the eyebrows. See if your child can identify how the person is feeling just by looking at the eyes. Are they sad eyes? Happy?

If your child excelled at these tests, awesome! You are on your way to raising an empathetic child. But correctly reading emotions is only the first step. To raise a compassionate person, we must teach kids not just how people feel, but also what people are thinking. This type of cognitive empathy requires taking another person’s perspective, so it is limited by the age and neurodevelopment of your child. Start small here—you first need to test if your child has a fully developed sense of theory of mind (the ability to see things from someone else’s point of view). This usually develops between ages 4-6:

Cognitive empathy test #1: Ask your child to predict what the next-door neighbor would think was inside a raisin box that actually contained a marble. If your child answers “raisins,” they have the ability to see things from someone else’s point of view.

Cognitive empathy test #2: If your child passes cognitive empathy test #1, you can give the “Sally Anne test,” used to detect theory of mind: Use two girl dolls, Sally and Anne, to act out this scene: Sally places a toy in her basket and then leaves the room. While Sally is gone, Anne steals the toy and puts it into a box. When Sally comes back into the room, where will Sally look for her toy?

In order to do well on this seemingly simple Sally Anne test, the child must have developed cognitive empathy (or understand what Sally believes) in order to know that Sally will look for her toy where she originally left it. A child has to be aware of the difference between what you know and what someone else knows.

Children are usually unable to pass the Sally Anne test until around age 4, so this seems to be a function of brain development. Most kids nail it by age 6. If they pass, it simply indicates a readiness to have cognitive empathy. If not, they’re not developmentally ready yet.

So far these tests haven’t been about how nice your child actually is—they’re mostly just about what’s going on inside your kid’s head, exploring the building blocks of what could make a nice person.

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The true question is whether they might act to alleviate someone else’s discomfort –what researchers call prosocial behavior. This is where we see empathy in action!

Prosocial behavior test #1: Read your child the following story, previously published by researchers interested in altruism:

One morning, Chris was so late getting ready for school that he didn't have time to finish breakfast. By the time the lunch bell rang, Chris was really hungry. As he was unwrapping his sandwich, Chris noticed a kid sitting alone and looking sad and hungry. Chris thought that he must have lost his lunch or forgot to bring it. Chris didn't know what to do.

Then ask your child, "What would you do?" Ask your child to choose from the following choices:

(a) I would tell the teacher.

(b) I would not share because the other kid should learn to be more careful about remembering lunch and because I might be hungry in the afternoon.

(c) I would share because I could imagine how I would feel if I were that kid.

Answer (c) shows the most prosocial behavior. But this situation is theoretical. The next test shows what your child might actually do in real life.

Prosocial behavior test #2: This one may take a little orchestrating on your part.

Ask a friend that your child doesn't know very well to accompany you and your child somewhere. Next, ask your friend to carry something heavy and bulky, like a big box, into a building or car. Make sure both his hands are full, so he isn’t able to open the door for himself. Follow behind with your child, but pretend not to notice that your friend needs help. Pretend not to notice even when he bumps into the closed door several times. Will your child open the door for him? Bonus points if he drops something like keys and your child also picks them up.

It’s not enough to work on “being nice.” The world of empathy is a lot more complicated than that! Parents care most about raising a compassionate kid, and compassionate kids don't sit and feel or sit and think—they act.

Even if a child isn’t where you’d like them to be, you don’t need to wait until they are older to start working on empathy—start working on the building blocks of empathy now. Remember that these are practice-based skills, so the more you practice, the better you prime your children to be one of the good guys.