Empathy refers to one’s ability to comprehend and share emotional experiences of another individual. Cameron et al. (2019) state that empathy is a virtue since not everyone can empathize with others. Notably, empathy is a complicated set of emotions that children acquire after understanding and manifesting some feelings. Its sophisticated nature emanates from the need for developing emotional expressiveness and interpreting other people’s feelings. Children pass through stages of social referencing, emotional understanding, and sympathy before developing empathy for their mates.
Emotional development in children begins at infancy, where minors’ feelings depend on those of caregivers. Researchers believe that infants acquire emotional contingencies through operant conditioning, where they associate an emotion with consequences (Staddon & Cerutti, 2003).
For instance, a kid understands that a smile triggers a positive response. Between three to four months, infants can understand emotions based on voice and facial expressions. They respond to such gestures with a smile, movements of legs and arms, and vocalize. The ability to respond to such signals improves steadily until their seventh to twelfth month, depending on their growth rate.
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Social referencing is an essential stage of emotional development in infants, where they evaluate people, events, and objects depending on their familiarity.
It emanates from a person’s appreciation of a colleague’s emotions, which leads to behavior regulation (Walle, Reschke, & Knothe, 2017). Social referencing is common among infants around the age of 10 months. Notably, these children choose to interact with strangers, eat a given food, or play with toys depending on the caregiver’s reaction towards objects. Their judgments are more accurate when caregivers combine both facial expressions and voices. Through social referencing, kids heed warnings. Above all, recall memory plays a crucial role in the process since children remember warnings issued regarding playing with given objects.
Children start understanding emotions after 14 months after passing through the social referencing stage. After their second birthday, they use causes, consequences, and behavioral signs to evaluate feelings. Significantly, this relational dynamism enables them to attach an emotion to a given action (Darling-Churchill & Lippman, 2016). For instance, a child can establish the reason for a colleague’s excitement, such as receiving a gift. By the age of four, a child improves this cognition and can predict a possible reaction from a committed act. The ability to understand emotions and social experience improves children’s ability to learn feelings, which leads to the development of sympathy. At this stage, children can use their feelings to seek comfort from caregivers and parents.
Further comprehension and manipulation of emotions leads to the understanding of empathy and incorporating them whenever needs arise. Notably, empathy involves the recognition of emotions and relating to the experience. Children’s ability to recall memories enables them to develop empathy since it assists them in connecting to situations. Psychologists and theorists agree that empathy is an elaborate cognition that allows people to detect the variation between different emotions, take perspectives of a victim, share the feelings, and respond emotionally (Tully, Donohue, & Garcia, 2015).
Collectively, these four elements indicate that a child who cries when another baby cries do not show empathy, although such incidences are the basis of the same. Empathy is best witnessed after the age of four years, where a child comforts his or her colleague. They can react by sharing gifts or talk to their mates. Overall, the development of empathy in children is an elaborate process, which begins with understanding and perceiving emotions.
