A very curious reaction among young children is the contagion of emotions. Surely you will have seen the chain effect that occurs among babies. Have you wondered why babies cry when another baby cries? Is the principle of empathy, the basis of emotional communication.
It is very common in nursery schools, in which several children live daily, but also in the parks among children who do not know anything. Babies get scared and break into tears when they hear another child's cry, or at least feel affected.
While empathy, the ability to tune emotionally with others, is based on self-awareness, awareness that begins to emerge around two years, there are certain precursor signals of empathy in younger children like crying when other children cry or feel distressed when another is hurt. Even newborn babies are able to capture feelings in their mother's face expression.
Evolutionary psychology has discovered that babies are able to experience empathic anguish even before becoming fully aware of their individual existence, separated from other children. Babies react to any disturbance of close people as if it were their own, and break into tears when they hear another child's crying.
Imitation as the basis of empathy
Children imitate the anguish of others as a way to get to better understand the feelings of others.
Just as a child breaks into tears when I see another child crying, it is also common if a child hurts his hand, that another person looks at his hand to see if he has also been harmed, or that when he sees another person crying, He rubbed his eyes even though he wasn't crying.
This imitation motor, according to the theory of the American psychologist E.B. Titchener, constitutes the authentic technical meaning of the term empathy. He argued that empathy is derived from a kind of physical imitation of the suffering of others in order to evoke identical feelings in oneself.
Titchener defined empathy in the twenties, looking for a word other than sympathy, because you can feel sympathy for another person without sharing their feelings.
At what age do children stop crying when they see another child cry?
The motor imitation of children disappears around two and a half years old, stage of development in which they learn to differentiate pain from others from their own. From this moment, they do not stop feeling empathy, but it evolves and they demonstrate it in another way. Instead of getting the cries of others, they are able to differentiate that the suffering is from another and they become more capable of comforting or calming the child who cries or has been harmed.
When they start to become aware that they are an entity separate from others, become more sensitive to the signals that allow them to know what the feelings of others are. They try to calm more actively the grief of another child, caressing him, hugging him or offering him his favorite teddy bear.
Conclusion
As parents, it may distress us that our baby cries when another baby cries, nothing happened to him. It gives us the feeling that they are suffering for free.
But the imitation of crying, as well as the imitation of other behaviors of the suffering of others, is the precursor of empathy, a very important quality in the emotional development of the child.
It implies a emotional attunement, the recognition of the emotions of other children with whom it relates, being a sign a very valuable feature of their personality and basis of future personal relationships.
Emory Photo on Flickr More information | Intellectual development, El Rincón del Vago - Emotional intelligence in Babies and more | Yawning in children is not spread until the age of four. When should socialization begin in children? When do children lose the ability to be empathic?
