empathy OR discipline
Saturday April 04, 2009

Thank you Alice for your very quick reply. I apologise for accidentally sending you my original version of this email with all the spelling mistakes! It is repeated below with corrections.

I think it is true that only by feeling our own suffering can we truly develop empathy. It is certainly the surest way to believe that children suffer! I do believe though that there is benefit in giving parents better role models, different ways of responding by pausing and choosing rather than reactively doing what was done to them. Do you see any value in that at all?AA

AM: Giving the parents advices how to teach their child to behave doesn’t open the path to their (the parents’) own history, it only gives them more power and leave them often emotionally blind and thus still WITHOUT EMPATHY. For instance the often repeated advice to send the child away for “time out” is one of the many examples of advices how children should be maltreated when they are “nasty” because they are unhappy. Nobody would send a friend to a separated room when she cries without knowing yet the reason of her distress but doing this with an unhappy child is often recommended by experts of upbringing. Do you still agree with me?