Everyone is Working on Something: Developing Empathy and Acknowledging Difference

An important part of building children’s confidence is about building empathy. You may have a good sense of what each child can do well and what they may struggle with. While we want to help children feel confident about their abilities, it is also important to help children name the things they find challenging.

We often talk with educators about children who are experiencing difficulty in the classroom, frequently behavioral. Sometimes the conversation is about a group of children who aren’t accessing the curriculum in quite the way a teacher had hoped. Teachers are frequently unsure about whether they should talk to children about what they are having difficulty with.

But we must. It is especially important to engage children in this conversation. And it is a form of Responsive Scaffolding, one of the Four Intentions of Complementary Curriculum. 

The first step is to normalize the experience of finding something challenging and showing children that everyone is working on something, and that we all have different abilities. This helps each child identify what they find easy and hard, but it also sets the stage for conversations about what peers are working on. This builds empathy for others and an understanding that everyone needs support in one way or another. 

Early in Lisa’s teaching career she found the book Is it Hard? Is it Easy? by Mary McBurney Green, illustrations by Len Gittleman. Here is her well-loved copy.

When there is a child in the classroom who experiences difficulty coming to meeting or sitting still, or children have outbursts and behavioral issues, we often skirt around these difficulties with the entire group. Using a book like this one to foster conversation allows us to say, “It is hard for Cheri to sit at meeting but it is easy for her to add lots of details to her pictures.” “It is hard for Michael to control his body all the time but easy for him to do the monkey bars.”  Here are some examples from drawings children ages 3-5 did after hearing this book and being asked,

“What is hard for you to do and what is easy for you to do?”

The pages were made into a class books to be read over and over. And of course you can share what you find easy and hard to do because you know, everyone is working on something!

Sometimes we are working on big physical challenges or diving into something deeply emotional or intellectual or all at the same time! No matter the task, being responsive to our own needs and the needs of others helps everyone to develop empathy and the disposition to celebrate and support.