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Through My Eyes... |
“The Tree is Crying”—observing empathy in a two-year-old
Jul 13, 2011
By Cornelia Spelman
A Two-Year-Old Demonstrates Empathy
I was touched to hear my visiting two-year-old grandson Leo comforting his stuffed bear as they cuddled together inside the large cardboard box they were playing in -- Leo was calling it his "cozy box." I didn't hear what injury Bear had suffered; only heard Leo say, in a tender tone, to his red flannel bear with cross-stitched eyes, "It's okay, Bear. Don't cry. It's okay." He hugged him. He suggested that I hug him, too.
Later that morning, in the park, we observed a tree that had been brutally broken in a recent storm; its bark ripped off, its top jagged, its sawed-off limbs rendering it shockingly un-tree like. "What happened?" he asked his step-grandfather and me. "There was a big storm, and the wind broke the tree," we told him. He proceeded to dig with his blue shovel, but a few minutes later, pointing to the tree, he asked again, "What happened?" Again we told him, "There was a big storm, and the wind broke the tree." As he explored the slide, the swing, the little bridge in the park, he would return to his thoughts about the tree and ask, again, "What happened to the tree?" We took him over to it to look at how it was broken, and to smell the pleasant odor of the wood inside the bark. He observed the odor, the appearance, of the tree; the branches that had been piled up nearby. Then he said, "The tree is crying."
When, long before his birth, I wrote a picture book for children entitled "When I Care About Others," I wished to help young children learn how we all--children and adults-- need to care for others and to be cared for by them. I hoped that many children, and many of their parents and caregivers, might benefit from the simple but reassuring messages in the book about the comfort we can find in each other. So many of us were not as fortunate as the child who already knows, at two. So many of us did not have parents who, like his, have amply demonstrated to him what it means to feel for others and to receive comfort. Neither I nor his step-grandfather were so fortunate, nor even his own father, my son, who at two was being raised by me, his single mother. But through their love and care, and with the support and love of a large group of friends and family, my son and daughter-in-law have built a "cozy box" for their little boy and have provided him with living lessons on empathy so that he is able to offer it to his bear, and even to a tree.
