True Empathy

This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.

Cruelty and callousness seem to haunt many corners of American life. Bullying allegations surface almost weekly in national news. In recent weeks we've heard about both the alleged bullying of a football player and of Jewish children in a middle school being subjected to brutal anti-Semitic harassment. A few weeks ago a teenage girl was mercilessly bullied by two other girls -- a possible factor in her suicide. Over Labor Day weekend, approximately 300 students -- now known as the Stephentown 300 -- broke into the home of former NFL player Brian Holloway and urinated on carpets, graffitied walls, and stole personal belongings while gaudily photo-documenting their exploits on Instagram and Twitter.

These events are clearly extreme. But quieter, everyday selfishness and indifference to others -- among both children and their parents -- is all too ordinary. Students who struggle socially are too often mocked, gay teens are still too commonly ostracized in many schools, and too many parents are hyper-focused on their own children while nearly blind to other children -- they harangue players on the opposing team at sporting events or lobby for more playing time for their own child, for instance, or quickly jump on their child's teacher for failing to immediately remove a student with a behavior problem who is disrupting their own child's learning.

What to do? Across the country, empathy is now being heralded as a key part of the answer, and many parents and teachers are being told how to develop it in children. If people can walk in one another's shoes, the thinking goes, they won't act so hurtfully.

To read the complete article, visit the Huffington Post.