Reference no: EM133101200
Many of you expressed strong emotional responses to ways you felt disempowered as a child. Many of the resolutions to each student's experience seem to result in approaching a child with a more open heart and be willing to hear what the child needs. The class's ability to connect to the concept of a child's need for empowerment and the expression of the child's need through behavior is really important. I feel this is a really positive insight to the depth of learning that is being demonstrated by students in the class.
In the past weeks, the class has been asked to examine their own perspectives and areas where subjectivity and judgment could influence how each student perceives both the children and the children's behavior. The class has reflected on adult character traits that support healthy development of children and how they mistreat children and want to me more caring patient and sensitive to children's needs. Then last week the class was asked to address the issue of punishment and start to come to terms with what punishment actually means to each student. The struggle starts. We say we want to do the best by children. I believe we do. I believe that, like children, we make mistakes despite our best efforts to efforts to support the development of children. So, what is to be done then?
The question is - Are you willing to be humbled by your mistakes and see them as learning opportunities to make changes and grow? The other option is to create excuses for the disparity between our feelings and actions. This choice enables us to justify our inconsistency between our hearts and our heads. This is the place where justification, blame and rationalization live. It is the invitation to mistreat children and assert we have the right to because we have to make the children "behave."
The next step in the process is to recognize what empathy blockers you use in your relationships (friends, family and children) and why? What can we learn by observing this information? What can it teach us about ourselves so that we may be present to do our work as teachers and parents?
It is the habit of people to put value on emotions, for example being HAPPY is good and being SAD is bad? How would things be different if happy and sad were considered to have equal value, that neither was better nor worse than the other, they are simply emotions that are on the human spectrum of emotions and each emotion is valuable because the emotion communicates to us to guide us in how we will respond to a situation (fear, anger, joy, grief, delight, or maybe agitation). All emotions are necessary. For example, I grieve my Mother's death because I love her so deeply. My love is worthy of grief, not opposed to it - no grief means no love. I honor grief in my life because it means I have the capacity to love deeply. Love and grief are both needed and help to inform the other.
Therefore, if we look more closely at our individual relationship to emotions we need to understand how connecting to the child's expereince works.
How do we, as teachers and parents, come to understand our role in the process of responding to children in a developmentally appropriate and healthy manner?
Children learn by example and imitation.
- Are your emotional responses worthy of imitation (remember the Exploration of Anger Assignment!!!!!!!!!!!)?
- Do you lead by example?
- Do you walk your talk? (Do as you say and say as you do?)
Prompt: Use the following information: the given list of "Barriers to Empathy" in the article, Emotions Are Not Bad, the chart above and looking at the role of empathy in our work with children, answer the following 2 questions:
- How does the above chart help support you in depersonalizing/ keeping emotionally neutral about a child's behavior so that you can be more objective when dealing with challenging issues? Please use a few specific examples.
- With self observation, do you believe that your emotional responses are worthy of imitation most of the time?
- What is the biggest "take-away from the information and class discussion around the article Emotions are Not Bad Behavior?