Today is my final post on  Szalavitz and Perry’s book Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential- and Endangered. In case you missed them, check out last June’s post on Too Much Empathy, July’s post on Baby Bonding & Stress Reduction, or August’s post on Screen Time. 

Doing Good Together provides so many excellent resources for increasing compassion and empathy in our own children, resources that I tap into every week for this blog and for the sake of my own children. What interests me more in Born for Love is the final question posed on the book’s dust jacket: “What can we do to increase this vital capacity to love and care in society.”

The final two chapters of the book take a long look at society-wide trends, and several important factors can be tackled to improve empathy throughout society.

Build Strong & Healthy Families: Empathy begins at home and it begins in the first days, weeks, and months of life. By contrasting America’s family policies with that of Iceland and other Scandinavian countries, my support for improved family leave policies has been strengthened. By guaranteeing parents the time to connect with their baby in the early months and making reliable, high quality child care available as the baby becomes a child, parents will be empowered to raise empathetic, socially connected children.

If you’d like to get more involved in lobbying for reform of America’s parental leave laws and other issues impacting parents and children, check out MomsRising.org (don’t worry, dad’s are invited too).

Reduce Economic Inequality: Income disparities tend to place both physical and emotional barriers between people that make empathy more difficult. Just listen to the waves of vitriol in our political rhetoric. The “us versus them” talk on both sides of the aisle paints the poor and the rich as practically different species. Even as our country prides itself on a belief that class doesn’t matter, we’ve been losing ground to European nations and Canada, where lower class individuals are more likely to become wealthy than in the country that made the American Dream an iconic slogan.

While the policy strategies to reduce income inequality are up for a healthy debate, you and I can go a long way to reduce the “us versus them” issues in our own families.

Check out some of Doing Good Together’s suggestions for family volunteer projects that reduce poverty. These projects can help address local needs, address the grander issue of poverty, and help reduce the physical and emotional barriers between your family and others who happen to need a little extra assistance at the moment.

Increase Relational Wealth: Robert Putnam’s classic book Bowling Alone said it all; our social connections are breaking down. From Born for Love we learn that these social connections are critical to empathy, as they calm our stress response systems and provide the opportunities for us to give and receive (in other words practice) empathy and kindness. We all, even the youngest among us, spend too much time isolated by technology or regulated by seemingly necessary activities.

Connect!  Build connections beyond facebook and, um, blogs. Turn off the technology whenever possible, set aside the multitasking and the hyper-enrollment in activities, and reach out to as many family, friends, neighbors, and community members as you can.

The opening of the final chapter provides us with the best possible conclusion for this pithy book:

Empathy – fully expressed in a community of nurturing interdependent people – promotes health, creativity, intelligence, and productivity. In contrast, apathy and lack of empathy contribute to individual and societal dysfunction, inhumane ideologies, and often brutal actions.

Knowing now that empathy is something we can practice, something we can improve at, and something we can instill in our children from the very first moment we meet them, I am inspired now more than ever to work at growing empathy wherever I can.

Tags: Books & Resources, Grown Up Books

About Sarah

Sarah Aadland is striving to make family volunteering a meaningful habit for her family of five. Join the conversation as she ponders what they may (or may not have) learned and looks for helpful information about raising compassionate kids.Though she plans to one day put her Masters in Public Policy back to work for social justice, she sees family volunteering as a way to build a stronger community, a better world, and a more connected family. In addition to her children, Sarah tends a large garden, a small flock of chickens, and a habit of mindfulness amid the necessary rituals of parenting.

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