Curious about Empathy- Are your children empathetic etc?

[Shoemakerelves]

I have two DC, one 4, one 7.

The youngest has always shown tremendous empathy from an early age. She is the child who will comfort you if you are upset, will ask you if you are feeling tired, will reassure you. It is quite astounding. When she plays role play with her sister she will actually cry if she is acting a role. I ask her if she is ok and she says. "Yes I'm only pretending" but she is really crying and I find it quite upsetting. It does happen more when she is tired.
Her sister leads the role play and is very controlling so she does have to concentrate for long periods of time.

My eldest child, in contrast is very sensitive and an anxious child. She picks up on other people's stress and does become quite difficult when stressed herself but I can't recall her showing empathy to others.

If her sister is upset there is no attempt to comfort. Other people's upset tends to make her angry so I believe she gets stressed by it but she isn't sympathetic towards it. She does not or rarely shows remorse if she hurts her sister or someone else. She does express empathy towards animals in the sense of not wanting to hurt or eat them but towards people she seems indifferent.

I'm sure these are both normal but different ends of the same spectrum but was curious as to other people's experiences of empathy in their children.

My eldest was never a huggy child either- although very clingy and only recently does she say I love you. Again my youngest is the opposite.

Do you have my children OP?? You are describing them exactly.
I wondered if the anxiety thing in a firstborn came from the fact that parents are a bit more tense and uptight first time round.
Interestingly DS1 cried a lot as a baby and is now very vocal about how he feels and how things affect t him. DS2 was a contented baby, hardly ever cried, but as a teenager is much more of a closed book and is far harder to read.

I think empathy and knowing what to do in a situation are different. She may just find it difficult knowing what to do to comfort, and the worry of that then makes her angry along with the feeling of being out of control.

Mine all show empathy in different ways.
Dd1 would try and distract. So she'd show a book she liked, or perhaps go and get something to eat for them. If that didn't work she didn't really know what to do, so would often retreat away from the situation. She would try and make sure that if it was something she had done that had upset the person then it didn't happen again. She hated saying sorry and said it only under pressure.

Dd2 goes for the nice words and trying to do something about it. So if someone had upset a friend she'd be the one shouting at them to go away and leave her friend alone. She also says "sorry" very easily if it was her fault-but is quite capeable of doing the thing again.

Ds is the huggy, "I love you" kiss kiss, empathy. He's always been the most huggy, I suspect partually because he was ill a lot as a baby so needed a lot of hugs.

I don't think saying "I love you" is a sign of anything really. Wasn't something my parents ever went in for-but we knew that we were loved. Otoh a chap at my primary his parents would greet him with that and say it frequently (to his embarrassment by the end), but, looking back, he was at least borderline neglect and emotional abuse-and that was from the little I knew of him, which wasn't a lot.

My older 2 almost never say it. Dd1 doesn't do talking about emotion much, and never has. Ds says it all the time. Is it nice? yes! Does it mean he loves me more? No! Just his way of expressing it is telling me.

Thanks both. I suppose the subject interests me because I do have a lot of difficulties parenting my eldest so I'm always trying to understand her better and my very complex relationship with her.

My observations on DS1 are that he he finds new situations very stressful. Talking about things in advance helps but there is a fine line between that and him then imagining the worst as he has a tendency to catastrophise situations. We have found over the years that he needs to be gently nudged out of his comfort zone to face challenges.
If he's worried about something his behaviour can be quite difficult, we've learned to acknowledge how he feels but stress to him that the behaviour isn't acceptable.
He can also get a bit down about how difficult life is sometimes so we try to focus on the positive things.
We've found that giving more responsibility, not less works really well.
All of this has sort of morphed through trial and error though...

DS never used to even notice if I cried in front of him. I had a bad patch of depression when he was about three so there was a sudden increase in crying and I worried about it and tried to hide it until I realised he never really picked up on it at all Then I worried that I'd made him indifferent by crying in front of him all the time. I no longer think this - that's depression talking for you!

He is empathetic but it's in a very different way to how I expected. He will be able to identify an emotion if you ask him to actually look at somebody's face but he rarely reacts directly to it - I think it makes him feel uncomfortable. He will say sorry etc on his own terms (which is what I've always done rather than expecting an apology always) but often has to be reminded that it's a nice idea. He doesn't usually come up with the idea that it would be nice on his own. And he doesn't really get that somebody can still be upset/hurt/cross about something which he's since got over, although perhaps that comes with age.

At five he watched an episode of Doctor Who where the doctor lost contact suddenly with one of his companions and was really sad about it and DS was absolutely distraught, sobbing "The doctor is saaad!" and didn't get over it for ages. His little heart totally broke :( Again, he'd never really reacted to sad scenes on TV before so I didn't expect it at all.

I think normal, but he didn't get empathy/kindness to animals for a long time. He was closer to three or four before he understood that they weren't just toys and what that meant. He does like hugs, though.