As reported by the Boston Globe, on May 4, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick signed into law one of the most comprehensive antibullying measures ever passed. The family of 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, who killed himself in April 2009 after extensive bullying, attended the signing, as did a group of teenagers who advocated for a statewide “No Name Calling Day” that became part of the bill. The article reads in part:

The law, which advocates call one of the toughest in the nation, prohibits physical, emotional, and online taunting and mandates training for faculty and students. It requires school staff to notify parents about incidents and harassment under the umbrella of bullying behavior.. . . Patrick and other lawmakers also emphasized the role students would have to play in ending the physical and emotional taunting.

In signing the bill, Patrick said, “Bullying is not a normal piece of childhood. Emotional and physical abuse is more than, as they say, kids just being kids.’’

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Empathy is one of the five key CARES skills underlying Responsive Classroom practice that help build positive proactive attributes in children both socially and academically. The other four are cooperation, assertion, responsibility, and self-control.

Standing up to bullying requires being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to have a sense of what they are feeling — and when what they are feeling is pain, to want to alleviate that feeling.

Empathy is an early emotion. One baby cries in the nursery and many may cry. In preschool, when children see someone fall down and cry, they often go see what has happened and find out if they can help or lend a hand (even if sometimes they might have caused the hurt in the first place).

Notice that empathy seems to be an innate emotion. To become an internalized skill, empathy requires modeling and teaching, first from mothers and fathers and then from older siblings and peers (from whom young children learn enormous amounts). If that modeling is positive and kind, empathy will emerge. It is a self-rewarding skill. The reward is courage.

We can’t just rely on mothers and fathers and older siblings and peers to model empathy, though. We have to actively teach it in school. The definition of empathy I like best is “Empathy is how people behave when they believe they belong together.” That’s what we should expect in our classrooms and our schools. We may need legislation these days to expressly prohibit un-empathetic behavior, but to teach empathy we must:

• Take time to run thank-you circles in our classrooms where kids appreciate the small, specific things they do for each other on a daily basis — like waiting to go out to recess with a classmate, or helping a peer with a math problem, or standing up for a friend by telling someone, “Hey, he’s trying his best. Knock it off.” In a thank-you circle, any child who wants can give a thank-you: “Thank you, Evan, for standing up for me when I was trying to kick the ball at recess yesterday. I thought you were brave,” whispers Brian. “You’re welcome,” Evan replies with a smile.
• Model empathy as adults with each other through our words and actions, especially avoiding sarcasm and any humor that marginalizes or stereotypes by gender, race, or any other category.
• Pay attention to the small acts of unkindness, shunning, or not picking certain partners by addressing each act directly and privately with the children engaging in the behavior. This is holding children to your standard (and hopefully the school’s standard) of appropriate citizenship.

There are several worthwhile programs that help teach empathy:

• One of the best is widespread in Canada. See http://www.rootsofempathy.org/ and check out Mary Gordon’s book, Roots of Empathy. (For more on this theme, also see http://empathiccivilization.com/ for information on Jeremy Rifkin’s book The Empathic Civilization.)
• A great west coast program, Mosaic, has a wonderful residency program for kids to teach empathy through diversity. Check out http://www.yesmagazine.org/mosaic-project.