Is it possible to teach empathy...

[Ben10WasTheSpawnNowWeLoveLego]

...so someone really feels empathy? That's it really :(

quiet bump :)

From my own experience with Dd1 and 3 I would say, probably not.

But that doesn't mean that you can't teach Dc's to behave in an appropriate way in individual situations.

The problem always occurs when the situation is new. I have been able to teach the DD's that you shouldn't laugh when somebody falls over etc but we have to do the teaching as we go along. IYSWIM.

My Dd's are pretty good at remembering how they are supposed to act in the situations they have been taught about.

Sorry if thats not what you wanted to hear.

Don't forget though all Dc's are different so what mine do might not apply to yours.

I don't think you can either Ineedalife.

I agree that I have been able to teach him (in the main) not to laugh when someone gets hurt or to echoalically say "are you ok?" but have no idea if I can teach him to care if he slams my bad arm in the door as he did yesterday or hurts the cat or upset someone etc etc. My dad thinks it must be possible to teach but I don't think so.

I think maybe, it is one of those things that can improve with age and experience. As children bank more information they know how to act in more situations.

Dd1 is 23 this week and she still struggles with empathy but she knows how to act in loads of situations.

It is one of those thigs that you can't give up with. Try to keep it in mind that it is unlikely that he wanted to hurt you when he shut your arm in the car door, but he wouldn't understand the implications of slamming the door when your arm was in it.

Lack of empathy also makes it difficult for my girls to apologise, they didn't do whatever it was on purpose so why should they apologise.

It is very difficult, I understand. I think it one of the hardest things to deal with on a day to day basis, when you are working so hard and they don't seem to care.

Thank you for sharing your experience re your DD1.

I just can't get my head around it. I can deal with all of the other bits of what we think is DS' probable ASD. This one just gets me every time and I cry every time he displays the lack of empathy. I'll just have to try to get used to it.

This is actually quite a complicated one as it's to do with the areas of the brain which are working or not. Basically in order to have empathy people have to have experienced something of what the other person is experiencing, remember that experience, build a general picture (not an exact one) of the experience and imagine how the other person is feeling. ASD kids have problems with all of these areas.

From my own experience, my DS seems to manage it very occasionally and I don't know why that is, though when people are crying he does try to comfort them by trying to make them laugh (not always appropriately).

PS. My DS has just turned 10 yrs and has dx of AS.

It depends on the child

Empathy can be micked really by learning a sort of extrapolation process: when someone hits me I feel X and that's called sad so when someone else is sad I know what it feels like.

And many people with ASD have plenty of empathy: so much that they have to shut it down in order to cope (?The Intense World Hypothesis of Autism? (Markram, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2518049/).
Or present but faulty empathy (?Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis of Autism? article written by Adam Smith (opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=tpr).

My own boys seem to represent each study: one with highly developed machiavellian empathy but little emotional, and one who is over empathic to the point of shutdown.

I ahven't been able to teach them anything to change that. But I think ds1 (Machiavellian Child) is elarning how to compensate.

I think children can learn to think from anothers point of view but that is not quite the same as feeling it. However although ds did not appear to be empathic when younger I would say he definately feels it now at nearly 12. He can misunderstand facial expressions and think someone is upset when they are not,( and throw his arms around said person) and he misses subtle signs - but that is not lack of empathy as such more lack of imagination and interpretive skills. Ds did not used to apolgise for things he saw to be accidents either. He is much more able to be empathic for physical feelings he can see are wrong ( hurt knee, broken art work) than others feelings that are hard for him to interpret.
It used to upset me too. Still does - but it has got better with time. Ds would notice if I screamed in pain now - but he might not realise it was his slamming the door on me!

Thank you for the links Peachy. I will have a read of those.

DS is only 6 so has time to learn - have your children learned to compensate/ increase the level of empathy by themselves or have you "done" anything to help them?

Sorry that was a question to all of you who kindly answered me.

Peachy wow those papers are technical and I will have to spend a long time digesting them but I definitely picked up that DS's brain must have grown quickly as the first paper states. When he was 3, his head was the same size as mine and he needed an adult size bike helmet!

Ben, I think a bit of both in answer to your question. Sometimes we see him compensate or empathise in a very natural way over something which we know hasn't been taught and other times we've explained the best way to behave when a situation has come up and he's not understood how to respond. We would generally do this by asking a question first to find out what he hasn't understood, then we would try to get him to come up with better ways of responding. It's not always possible do go through this process at the time, but we come back to it later when things are more relaxed. I would definitely say it gets better as they grow older.

I dont know to be honest. DS is also 6 and at the moment I would say no you cant :( not to really feel it I mean.

If he sees tears he will ask what is wrong, he will come up and say in one tone "come on hug" then he says in same tone "better now" and walks off. If he doesnt see tears then there is nothing wrong and you just get a hard stare.

He took money from his sisters purse (has an obsession with counting money). he is quite open and will count it in the front room regardless of who it belongs too. DD was upset as he has put it somewhere and we cant find it. He genuinely cant remember and its been days looking. He went to his money box and gave her £2 and said there you are you have money now and walked off. He cant understand the big deal that its missing and why she is upset. btw it was £30!!

And yet he had empathy for his sister when MIL dog was put down by wishing on a star for him back. But in the same breath said "the wish was for DD mummy not me" and got on with what he was doing as if it was a case of she can be happy now but I am not bothered lets just play.

I'm convinced having pets (kitten at 3, dog at 4) did more to help DS's empathy than anything else.

He's essentially very fair minded, but learns the "rules" for everything which means he doesn't always realise he's upset someone. Once he does if he feels it's a fair thing he has no qualms in apologising and trying to make amends. It's helped massively with friendships as his mates know it's not intentional iyswim.

I went to a talk with an ABA provider who had a child who had made progress with everything except empathy.
They figured out the only person he seemed emotionally connected to was his Mum.
They videoed his Mum eg being sad, showing pain, tears etc and showed the video to him and from there he was able to develop / learn empathy I guess by understanding the emotion and relating it to the events and then being able to generalise that to other situations and other people
Not exactly sure how they taught it but interested that the video modelling / repetition element seemed to work

DS2 is 12 now and shows no sign of being able to learn empathy. He feels cross when people are upset, or interested in a detached sort of way. Case in point, my pending divorce, DS2 has been entirely unaffected by any of the emotional upset that the rest of the family have been feeling, so there are some advantages!

Thanks ladies.

Bochead We have two cats which incidentally I did get when he was 5.5 to try to teach empathy and gentleness as well as it being a very good reason to give my DH for needing cats .

Agnes, that is interesting to hear. We don't do ABA so not sure how we would be able to use the technique.

Ellen :( It's mixed feelings isn't it as you are happy that he isn't unhappy but it again makes the differences more obvious. Hope everything is going as well as can be expected for you x

I think horse riding helped ds with empathising - the horse needed understanding of very basic needs ( such as giving treats). It was the first time I saw a glimer of empathy it made me a bit teary to see it! I always feel he understands horses better than people!
We have automatically used exagerated face and body language. I think it helps ds to be more aware ( of how we feel maybe not anyone else) but that is not quite the same as empathy.
I was very ill a couple of years back and collasped on the floor. Ds could understand the floor was cold and hard so got his blanket and pillow for me! I think that is empathy!

Ds tends not to be empathic, very similar to a lot of other people's descriptions on this thread, but, he seems to be able to 'get it' retrospectively, if we spend a lot of time afterwards talking about an event when he would have felt a similar way and relating his feelings to how the other person felt.

That said, he then can't generalise it to the next time he sees a similar situation, although I think he does eventually to some extent and he is improving as he gets older, I suppose as he has more and more experiences to compare.

He has learned that he should be sympathetic, say, when someone is ill. So every single morning when I come downstairs all bleary eyed, grey and exhausted he will ask me if I'm poorly. If I say yes, he makes sympathetic-ish noises ("oh dear, never mind, hope you feel better soon" etc) but only because that's what he's learned he should do, not because he 'feels' sorry or bad for me being ill - if that makes any sense. There's no actual feeling behind the words, so it doesn't fool me, although he must be improving, because he can fool people that don't know him very well sometimes these days

This morning DD was trying to help DS close the garage door and got her hand trapped or banged. Cue wailing. DS didn't mean to hurt her so he saw no reason to apologise. "I'll ask if she's alright" was as far as he would go. And TBH I thought she was making a bit of a fuss about nothing because she was hungry, so we all went in and ate bananas.

Often when DS gets upset about things it's because he's hungry, so I tend to try and get some food/liquid into him to calm him down. No point trying to analyse feelings with a hungry child. So now, if he sees that someone is genuinely upset DS offers them food. He has rote learned that food is the best consolation. Oh dear.

Or sometimes if a friend is upset his main concern is that it might have been his fault somehow and he might be in trouble. He can be very shifty or even run off.

I should probably be modelling exaggerated empathy displays for him to copy. I actually find PDEs (public displays of empathy) a bit embarrassing myself and have to remember to crank it up to fit in. I wonder how much of this PDE thing is cultural and to do with the decline of the stiff upper lip.

That's right Pipin - it's the actual empathy, the real inside his brain caring that I want to fix rather than teaching reactions to situations.

He had an operation himself so I thought that might help him understand my operations but luckily his op was quite minor and recovery very easy so he clearly has no experience to relate to about this particular situation.

Thanks PipinJo

Remembering that it is a physical thing that is causing this I think is very important for me. I can't see it, therefore I forget esp at times of stress.

Having just googled Theory of Mind - nope he's got not much of that going on.

He just doesn't seem to ever learn the building blocks no matter how many times you teach the correct behaviour or tell him that it isn't appropriate behaviour that he is displaying. Won't read social stories etc. Hopefully if/when we get a dx next month I'll be able to access someone to help me deal with this stuff so that I can help him (not that he wants to be helped with it ).

Have a look at www.autismandempathy.com/ which is a decent look at this whole subject.
Yes, we can and do learn empathy. There are two kinds - the instinctive sort where the brain automatically triggers a response to an event...and the kind which is triggered by reason. Both are real empathy. Only the brain wiring used is different.

I can empathise just fine, despite being autistic. For me, it relates to understanding how something felt for me, or whether it is obviously unfair for someone else. If I've had a sprained ankle and someone else gets one, I know how much it can hurt. I will genuinely want to make sure that person is looked after so they don't injure it any more. It's why I joined St John Ambulance and did work as a nursing assistant for some time.

I'd almost argue that empathy that has to be achieved through reason and hard work is more 'real' than empathy that is done without thinking about it at all, just as an instinct in the brain.

What takes a lot of doing is learning how to make our faces, eye contact, body language and tone of voice and wording that says "I am empathising with you". Again, that's nearly all automatics in a non-autistic person's brain. In ours, it's done by learning. Takes a long time to learn those skills manually. But that doesn't make us unfeeling robots. We are capable of extraordinary caring and extraordinary seeking after justice and fairness for people. But we may be rubbish at displaying the right words and actions to show it. And it takes a long time to perfect it, for us.

Hope that helps a bit