Ways To Teach Your Children Empathy – let’s take a look.
Empathy is something that people think can’t be taught, that you either have it or you don’t. But it can be taught. Anyone can learn about what empathy is and how they can use it. Learning empathy at a young age is so important, as it helps to positively shape children’s mindset and inspires them to use empathy and kindness skills throughout their lives to support themselves and others.
Empathy Day is a great opportunity to introduce children to the concept of empathy. In 2025, it falls on the 12th of June, but the wider festival goes from the 2nd to the 12th of June. Empathy Day encourages children to share and listen to stories, learn new skills and exhibit empathy to others. The benefits of being an empathetic individual are endless, and learning about it provides a range of life skills, such as emotional intelligence, understanding and empathising with people’s feelings and emotions. All children should have the chance to learn about empathy and how to show it, so we’ve lined up some ways for you to teach your children all about it.
Ways To Teach Your Children Empathy
Role playing
Games are fun for children of all ages and abilities, and they’re also an engaging way to learn new skills. Role-playing games specifically enable a child to act as a new character and put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Using role play is a great way to teach empathy through creating fictional scenarios and characters where they can practice and develop empathy by understanding their character’s story. This can help them to embrace people’s differences and become less quick to judge others, as it encourages them to empathise with others’ situations.
Writing and sharing stories
Encouraging children to share and write their own stories of a time when they showed someone empathy is a lovely way to inspire other children and reinforce positive empathy traits. It’s also a great way to allow children to work through their own memories and emotions when retelling the story, and feel a sense of pride when helping others. Writing stories further enforces empathy. By creating a fictional situation, your children can imagine themselves showing empathy and kindness to others as well as receiving it. It’s a lovely activity for children to do at home or with their friends.
Empathy Quiz
Make learning fun by encouraging your children to take part in an empathy quiz and see how they would feel and react in certain situations. The quiz is ideal for older children (around 10-11) and the quiz includes questions such as “do you get excited when your friend is excited?” and “do you catch other people’s emotions?”. Understanding their answers to the quiz questions can be a great place to start teaching empathy and expanding on their already present empathy skills. Using a quiz can help children understand their own feelings towards others and may help them understand how they can teach empathy to other children.
Empathy bingo
As mentioned above, playing games can be a wonderful way for children to learn interactively. Empathy bingo is great to play at home, in the car or in the classroom. The idea of empathy bingo is to list different situations in boxes which evoke different emotions in your children. They can then ask their friends how this situation would make them feel, and if the emotion matches their own, they can cross it off the box. You can also play a simpler version of the game where each box contains a word associated with empathy, such as “understanding” or “kindness”, for younger children and when an emotion is mentioned, they can cross it off. Don’t forget, the winner has to shout bingo!
Empathy jar
Empathy can be shown in many different ways. These could be kind words of encouragement, showing others that you understand how they feel, comforting someone when they’re down and acts of service. Support your child to make an empathy jar – this could include notes of appreciation to friends and family, such as “thanks for being a great friend” or “I appreciate everything you do for me”. The jar can also contain notes of praise or comfort for when a friend or family member is feeling overwhelmed or in need of some support. The jar could also contain kind acts of service, like “I will clean my room”, “I will help around the house” “, I will help make dinner”. You can personalise these to your child’s age and abilities. Now the fun part, the decorating! Feel free to encourage your child to personalise the jar; they can make it as colourful as they want, using paint, stickers, markers, anything you think that they can use to make the jar as eye-catching and vibrant as possible!
You’ve reached the end of the blog, but we hope you have enjoyed reading about our Empathy Day ideas and you’re feeling inspired to support your children on their empathy journey.