3 Empathy-Building Activities for Kids
By regularly practicing empathy, children learn to recognize unique perspectives and exercise compassion for themselves and others.
Empathy allows kids to navigate difficult situations, support others (and themselves) in need, and recover from setbacks. Empathy is a key component of resilience and a growth mindset—learn how to nurture it through 3 simple activities!
Emotion Stories
These emotion poppers can be used in many different ways to help kids identify and contextualize emotions—a major component of emotional literacy and empathy-building!
Push the popper that best describes how you felt at bedtime last night or as you push each popper, talk about a time when you experienced that feeling or try our favorite way:
Hide the poppers around the room. As the child finds each popper, have them identify the emotion and set the popper on a table in the order it is found. When all the poppers have been found, identified, and set in place, ask the child to tell an “emotion story” that follows the order of the poppers. How do we go from mad to sad to happy to silly to overwhelmed?
There are so many stories to tell! Tell an emotion story from the perspective of self, parents, siblings, teachers, bullies, friends—anyone! Give a location prompt, this story will take place at recess. Through storytelling, kids learn to take unique perspectives while exercising creativity to explain and understand fluctuating emotions.
2. What Would Puppy Do?
This puppy-in-a-matchbox is not only soft and cute, it is also an excellent tool to help kids practice problem-solving and perspective taking. We like to use the puppy as an approachable proxy for a child’s personal struggles. This builds empathy for self and others!
Give the child personally-relevant scenario prompts and ask them to show and explain how puppy would behave and feel in those situations. Here are a few examples:
If a child is struggling with peer issues: Puppy loves playing at the dog-park, but sometimes he plays too rough and then the other dogs don’t want to be near him. Can you show me how puppy might feel and what he might do? What is something helpful you could say to puppy?
If a child is struggling with separation anxiety: Puppy’s owners have to go to work, so they bring her to doggy-daycare. Can you show me how puppy might feel and what she might do? How could you comfort puppy?
If the child seems receptive, you could personalize the scenario by asking them, have you ever felt this way? What would help you?
3. I Heard Your Feelings
These visual scenario cards encourage kids to examine different perspectives by drawing from personal experience and exercising inferential thinking.
This kind of perspective-taking helps kids process social, emotional, and moral dilemmas while also cognitively rehearsing appropriate reactions. This low-stakes rehearsal of prosocial skills helps kids develop a mental roadmap on how to behave productively and engage with others.
When you have a quiet moment, try a few of these cards and observe a child’s empathetic reasoning skills in action!
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