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Getting Behind The Eyes of Your Child

By Dr. William Sears

Getting behind the eyes of your child is an exercise in mutual sensitivity. I saw this mutual sensitivity develop particularly between Matthew and Martha. When Matthew was upset, Martha knew what he needed, almost as if she could get inside his mind. Matthew also became sensitive to Martha. When she was having a bad day, 3-year-old Matthew would sometimes come up and put his hand on his mom's shoulder and say, "Dats OK, mommy. I help you."

Getting behind the eyes of your child is one of the earliest forms of modeling empathy to your children. While we all have our favorite values that we want to instill in our children, top on our list of tools to succeed in life that we want to give our children is the quality of empathy. Empathy begins with the ability of a child to think through what he's about to do. Empathy is teaching a child how to get behind the eyes of another child and imagine the effects of their behavior on the other child -- before they act. The child with empathy thinks before he acts.

In collecting research for our newest book -- Kids Who Turned Out Well, What Their Parents Did -- here's the correlation that seems to stand out: parents relate to us that because they spent a lot of time getting behind the eyes of their children early on, they see how their children are becoming kids who care. These children have been brought up realizing that empathy is a normal way of family living. In contrast, therapists we have interviewed tell us that a main trait of sociopaths is the inability to empathize. They act before they think. They don't imagine the effects of their behavior on other people -- before they shoot up the high school. In fact, in the wake of the recent newspaper headlines and school shootings, when we surveyed parents we found that those who had practiced many of the attachment styles of parenting and modeled empathy for their children often reported to us: "My child is most unlikely to ever shoot up a high school." Teaching your children empathy is indeed a long-term investment.