Teaching Children to Be Kind in an Unkind World

Caring attitudes and behaviors are rooted in a person’s capacity for empathy. Research (Kestenbaum, Farber, and Sroufe 1989; Braze l ton and Greenspan 2000; Hoffman 2000) shows that quality of care and security of attachment affect children's later capacity for cognitive development, emotional regulation, and behavioral control. Nurturing caregiving in a safe environment allows for continued development of neural pathways, which in turn, allows for mastery of increasingly sophisticated cognitive skills necessary for emotion regulation, and social perspective taking (Selman 1980), prerequisites to empathic behavior (Bryant 1985). True empathy requires that an individual possess the capacity to discriminate another person’s affect, see a situation from another person’s perspective, and respond with genuine emotion (Minuchin and Shapiro 1983). However, contextual factors such as extreme poverty, homelessness, chronic exposure to violence, and insufficient nurturing or childcare practices can interfere with cognitive and emotional development, obstructing the capacity to care about others and to behave empathically. Americans live in a violent place. In fact, the United States is the most violent industrialized country in the world today (Thornton et al. 2002; Hamblen and Goguen 2005; Youcha 2005). Violence among children and teens is a more pressing problem in the United States than in any other country (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2003). A national survey of children ages ten to sixteen found that more than one-third were directly victimized by violence, including aggravated assault, attempted kidnapping, and sexual assault (Boney-McCoy and Finkelhor 1995). Marans and Schaefer (2001) reported on a study conducted at a Boston hospital showing that one of every ten children seen in the primary care center had witnessed a shooting or stabbing before the age of six (Taylor et al. 1992). Children’s exposure to violence cuts across all socioeconomic, racial, and cultural strata, as demonstrated by Hill and Jones’s (1997) study of ninethrough twelve-year-old children’s exposure to violence in low-risk versus highrisk neighborhoods. While children in both samples had witnessed assaults, stabbings, gang-related violence, robbery and rape, only 9 percent of those in the low-risk sample had witnessed a murder, compared to 32 percent of those in the high-risk sample (Hamblen and Goguen 2005). Children are also exposed to violence through the media. Topics once considered only appropriate for the eleven o’clock television news are presented at all times of day, with little regard for the cognitive ability and psychosocial safety of the developing child. Film clips of beheadings; the torture of prisoners of war; war-zone hostages begging for their lives at gunpoint, and war-torn victims cradling the bloodied bodies of family members can be viewed from a computer desk chair or livingroom couch. War and threats of terrorism on U.S. soil further complicate children’s psychosocial development, affecting their sense of personal safety as well as their understanding of what constitutes humane behavior. War may be an appropriate topic for teenagers to grapple with as they begin to think about their own developing values and beliefs. However, younger children lack the cognitive ability to view the ramifications of war from multiple perspectives while also mak-