Empathy for Your 2-Year-Old

Now Is the Right Time!

As a parent or someone in a parenting role, you play an essential role in your child’s success. There are intentional ways to grow a healthy parent-child relationship while growing empathy in your child so that they can work to develop healthy relationships and prepare for future success in school and life.

Empathy means the ability to take the perspective of and interpret the thoughts and feelings of others, including those from diverse backgrounds and cultures. Empathy directly relates to social awareness —  the ability to understand social and ethical behavior norms and recognize family, school, and community resources and support. “Empathy can be instilled, and it is composed of teachable habits that can be developed, practiced, and lived.” ¹

Two-year-olds learn better to understand themselves through interactions with you and other caregivers. They are just beginning to know their strengths, limitations, and feelings. Parents and those in a parenting role share in this learning and exploration. This is an ideal time to begin to teach about empathy. The steps below include specific, practical strategies to prepare you.

Why Empathy?

Your child’s secure and trusting connection with you is pivotal to their emerging empathy for others. You can support their growing empathy as you interact and share love and conversation.

Today, in the short term, building empathy can create

• greater opportunities for connection, cooperation, and enjoyment
• feelings of safety and security
• greater ability to develop friendships and play with other children cooperatively
• a sense of wellbeing and motivation to engage

Tomorrow, in the longer term, growing empathy in your child

• prepares them for preschool and kindergarten
• develops the ability to share and take turns with adults and other children
• builds skills in self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationships, and responsible decision making
• deepens family trust and intimacy

Five Steps for Growing Empathy

This five-step process helps you and your child develop empathy. It also builds critical life skills in your child. The same process can be used to address other parenting issues (learn more about the process).

Two-year-olds are highly active, exploring their environment and everything in it. They add new words to their vocabulary regularly but do not know how to name their big feelings. Frustrations with not being understood may result in them losing control more frequently. Despite your child’s new ability to use words, continue to pay close attention to their facial expressions, movements, and sounds to work on understanding what they are trying to communicate. Your efforts to learn from your child will create empathetic interactions that promote empathy in you and your child. In becoming sensitive to your child’s verbal and nonverbal expressions, you

• are responding to their needs
• are growing their trust in you, sense of safety, and sense of healthy relationships
• are growing motivation for you and your child to work together
• are deepening your ability to communicate with one another
• are growing your own and their self-control (to calm down when upset and focus their attention)
• are modeling empathy and problem-solving skills

Actions

• Each time there is an opportunity, share how you are feeling and ask your child how they feel: “I am getting hungry; are you feeling hungry?” Two-year-olds do not yet have a feelings vocabulary and cannot describe their body sensations when upset or dealing with big feelings. They will need your support to be successful.
  • For example, if your child makes a disagreeable facial expression, notice and name the feeling. “I noticed that when I told you to share your toy with your friend, your eyebrows squished down, and there was a line in your forehead. Were you feeling mad?”
• Practicing naming feelings will enable your child to identify their feelings and others and seek support when needed. This can help reduce the length and strength of tantrums as your child gains skills in understanding their feelings.
• When reading books, point out feelings. Talk about what you notice. “I noticed the duck in this story felt sad when he couldn’t have another cookie” or “When the little bear shared his toy with his friend, he looked happy. He had a smile on his face.” 

Two-year-olds are in the early stages of learning to play with others and develop friendships. Your ability to guide them in becoming sensitive to others’ thoughts and feelings will give them the skills and confidence to forge new friendships and play cooperatively. Learning about developmental milestones can help you better understand what your child is going through. Here are some examples: ²

• Two-year-olds are starting to see themselves as unique, individual people. They develop the understanding that they can have their own thoughts and feelings and that someone else could have different thoughts and feelings. This is key for beginning to empathize with a thought or feeling that is different from their own, such as, “Why is my friend sad because I got to eat all of the cookies?”
• Two-year-olds are eager to engage in imaginative play and, at times, cooperative or parallel play with other children. In cooperative play, children work together towards a shared goal, while in parallel play, they play side-by-side with similar toys but independently. Through play, children gain vital practice with all of their developmental milestones.
• Two-year-olds can show defiant behavior and test boundaries as they learn about the rules and attempt to understand your values.
• Two-year-olds can recognize common feelings like happiness, sadness, and anger.
• Two-year-olds may begin to experience separation anxiety when you leave them.
• Two-year-olds can imagine what response might be appropriate or comforting in a particular situation.

Teaching is different than just telling. Teaching builds basic skills, grows problem-solving abilities, and prepares your child for success. Teaching also involves modeling and practicing the positive behaviors you want to see, promoting skills, and preventing problems.

Actions

• Model empathy while interacting with your child. Modeling empathy can be one of the greatest teaching tools.
  • Share the focus. As you spend time with your child, follow their lead. As they pick up new toys or explore a different part of the room, notice and name what they are exploring. It may feel unnatural initially but pretend you are the narrator of their play. For example, “I see you grabbed the red block. Now you are stacking it. You’ve got another block. The tower is getting higher!” Your verbal observation will allow your child to feel seen and heard and develop their verbal skills. ³
  • Notice gestures and listen for thoughts and feelings. Attempt to figure out what your child is trying to tell you. Name it when they express a feeling on their face or through their body. “I noticed you are smiling. You look happy.”
  • Children require your attention to thrive. Try to build a special time into your routine when you are fully present to listen to what your child has to tell you. Turn off your phone. Set a timer if needed. Then, notice your body language. Ask yourself, “What is my body communicating, and how am I demonstrating that I’m listening?”
• Read and “pretend play” together.
  • Use reading time and select a book of faces to help your child learn to identify the different feelings of other children. Point out how you can tell each child’s feelings and practice recreating those cues with your child.
  • After reading a story together, act out the plot and use feeling words and expressions to match how the characters feel throughout the story. This expands their feelings vocabulary and teaches them how to recognize a wide range of perspectives and feelings they might not encounter in daily interactions with others.
• Make your thinking and feelings explicit. Talk about how you feel, why you feel it, and what signs you are giving, particularly when it’s uncomfortable. “I am frustrated because I cannot get the seat belt to work. Can you tell? My face is red and getting hot.”
• Talk aloud about how you respond to your big feelings: “I’m gonna take a few deep breaths before trying again and see if that helps.”
• Each time there is an opportunity, share how others may be feeling with your child. For example, if your child is with others expressing feelings, help your child notice cues from other children’s faces and body language. For example, “Her face is frowning. I think she may be feeling sad?” 

If you seize the opportunities in your daily routines, you and your child can practice new vital skills. Practice provides important opportunities to grow empathy as your child interacts with you and others. Practice also grows vital new brain connections that strengthen and eventually form habits.

Actions

• Set the rule or expectation in your household: Having feelings is always okay! This will help each family member feel safe expressing what they are feeling. What you do with those feelings is the crucial next step in determining whether you take responsibility for your feelings and actions so that you do not harm yourself or others.
• Whenever you see another child become emotional, use it as an opportunity to figure out the feeling together. “What do you think he’s feeling now? Why do you think that?” Offer support to help them be successful. “I think he might be sad because he fell down. What do you think?”
• Read together. When you read stories together, you engage in an activity that can be deeply connecting for both of you. Reflect on the story, and you’ll take the learning opportunity one step further. “Do you think Little Red Riding Hood was excited to go to Grandma’s House?” Involve your child in selecting the book, holding it, and turning the pages to build ownership and interest in reading.
• Play games to practice feelings. Playing games like Going on a Bear Hunt allows you and your child to try on different feelings and practice facial expressions, tone of voice, and movements that match those feelings. For example, when you are running from the bear, you feel scared and move fast. You might have your eyes widened, and you might even be screaming. Learning those feelings when having fun allows for your full attention rather than being distracted by your heightened feelings.
• Initially, practice may require more teaching. However, avoid taking over and telling your child what others are thinking and feeling without allowing them the practice of guessing.

At this point, you have been developing your child’s empathy skills, teaching them to identify the thoughts and feelings of others at a beginner level, and allowing them to practice. Now, you can offer support when needed by reteaching, monitoring, and coaching. Parents and those in a parenting role naturally offer support as they see their child fumble with a situation in which they need help. This is no different.

By providing support, you reinforce their ability to think and feel with empathy, which helps them to grow their relationships and cooperate with others.

Actions

• Initially, your child may need active support. Use “Show me…” statements with a positive tone and body language to express excitement and curiosity. and ask them to demonstrate how they can work hard toward a goal. When children learn a new skill, they are eager to show it off! “Show me how you can help your sister when she feels sad.”
• Recognize effort using “I notice” statements like: “I noticed how you saw she was sad and gave her a toy to help her feel better. That was kind of you.”
• When you see your child frustrated or incapable, proactively remind them of their strength. In a gentle, non-public way, whisper in your child’s ear, “Remember how you enjoyed playing at the park with your new friend yesterday? You might enjoy doing it again today. I will stand beside you.”
• Actively reflect on how your child feels when approaching challenges. “It seems like you got mad about taking turns sharing the toy. You just stopped playing. Is that right? Did it help you feel better?” Be sure to reflect on the outcomes of their choices.

No matter how old your child is, your positive reinforcement and encouragement have a significant impact.

If your infant is working to grow their skills – even in small ways – it will be worthwhile to recognize it. Your recognition can go a long way in promoting positive behaviors and expanding your infant’s confidence. Your recognition also encourages safe, secure, and nurturing relationships — a foundation for strong communication and a healthy relationship with you as they grow.

There are many ways to reinforce your infant’s efforts. It is essential to distinguish between three types of reinforcement: recognition, rewards, and bribes. These three distinct parenting behaviors have different impacts on your child’s behavior.

Recognition occurs after you observe the desired behavior in your infant. Noticing and naming the specific behavior you want to reinforce is key to promoting more of it. For example, “You hugged your sister when she was sad. I love that!”  Recognition can include nonverbal acknowledgment, such as a smile.

Rewards can be helpful in certain situations by providing a concrete, timely, and positive incentive for doing a good job.  A reward is determined beforehand so the child knows what to expect. It stops any negotiations in the heat of the moment.  A reward could be used to teach positive behavior or break a bad habit. The goal should be to help your child progress to a time when the reward will no longer be needed. If used too often, rewards can decrease a child’s internal motivation.

Unlike a reward, bribes aren’t planned ahead of time and generally happen when a parent or someone in a parenting role is in the middle of a crisis (like in the grocery store checkout line and a child is having a tantrum. To avoid disaster, a parent or someone in a parenting role offers to buy a sucker if the child stops the tantrum). While bribes can be helpful in the short term to manage stressful situations, they will not grow lasting motivation or behavior change and should be avoided.

Actions

• Recognize and call out when things are going well. It may seem obvious, but it’s easy not to notice when everything moves smoothly. Noticing and naming the behavior provides the necessary reinforcement that you see and value your child’s choice.
• Recognize small steps along the way. Don’t wait for significant accomplishments—like the full bedtime routine going smoothly—to recognize effort. Remember that your recognition can work as a tool to promote more positive behaviors. Find small ways your child is making an effort and let them know you see them.
• Build celebrations into your routine. For example, after completing your bedtime routine, snuggle and read before bed.

Closing

Engaging in these five steps is an investment that will strengthen your skills as an effective parent or someone in a parenting role on many other issues and develop essential skills that will last a lifetime for your child. Through this tool, children can become more self-aware, deepen their social awareness, exercise their self-management skills, work on their relationship skills, and demonstrate and practice responsible decision-making.