Supporting pupils’ emotional wellbeing

What is empathy?

Empathy is defined as ‘the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation’.

In the animation below, Brené Brown¹ explores key steps to showing empathy. This includes putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, not judging them or their point of view, and showing that you recognise their emotions.

As Brown explains, empathy is ‘feeling with people’ – not trying to add a silver lining to their problems or distract them with something positive but being alongside them in their experience.

Empathy can often be confused with sympathy. While sympathy leads you to feeling sorry for someone, which can cause isolation and disconnection, empathy builds connection and strengthens relationships.

Understanding behaviour as communication

Throughout the pandemic, many children and young people have missed out on key experiences that are vital to their healthy social and emotional development, which can have a knock-on effect on behaviour.

The Kooth Pulse 2021² report discovered that there has been a 62% increase in young people having issues with school/college, a 47% increase in sadness and a huge 115% increase in children and young people revealing a loss of aspiration and motivation.

It can sometimes be hard to empathise with a child or young person when they are behaving in a way that you find challenging. When the behaviour feels disruptive or unreasonable, it may seem that the best option is to provide a punishment. However, this is unlikely to prevent similar incidents from happening again in the future.

A useful way to change your perspective on behaviour is to view it as a form of communication, usually of an unmet need, that is distressing rather than challenging.

When you are curious about behaviour and question what it is trying to communicate, you are better able to respond with compassion and empathise with what the child is experiencing.

A study³ conducted in California found that training teachers to adopt a more empathic mindset, that focused on making pupils feel cared about and valued, significantly reduced the number of young people being suspended from school.

Responding with empathy

Responding to behaviour with empathy means validating the child’s feelings and experiences, ensuring they feel listened to and understood. This can help to build your relationship with the child and help them to feel safe, supported and more open to learning.

The clip below, from the animation Inside Out, is a great example of how to validate someone's experiences and respond to their feelings with empathy and compassion. Joy tries to distract Bing Bong from his emotions, while Sadness attunes to him, making him feel heard and understood.

At the heart of empathy is co-regulation. By supporting children and young people through distressing emotions, you model calming behaviours and help children to develop their ability to regulate on their own.

Co-regulation also gives children the opportunity to experience kindness and empathy on a regular basis, helping them to learn how to become kinder and more empathic themselves.

Empathy and the Thrive Approach

The Thrive Approach is underpinned by neuroscience, child development and attachment theory research.

Thrive uses insights from attachment theory because it helps adults to develop empathy and compassion for those in their care, through understanding the potential origins of behaviour.

As an attachment-aware approach, Thrive shows how behaviour can be positively improved, while giving children a sense of security and enabling them to build emotional resilience. Ultimately, this can lead to children and young people leading fuller, healthier lives where they can take on life’s ups and downs and thrive.

Coming up next...

The next part of this series will explore connection and the benefits of building safe, supportive relationships with the children and young people you work with. Add us to your safe senders list to ensure you get these insights straight to your inbox.

References

1. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston and a visiting professor in management at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business. View her website here.
2. The Kooth Pulse 2021 report examines data from April 2020 to March 2021 to present the state of the nation’s mental health. Read the full report here.
3. 'Brief intervention to encourage empathic discipline cuts suspension rates in half among adolescents' - Jason A. Okonofua, David Paunesku, and Gregory M. Walton 2016. Read the research article here.