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Culture of Empathy Builder:  Marcy Axness

 

Marcy Axness & Edwin Rutsch: How to Build a Culture of Empathy in the Family

Marcy Axness has a private consulting/counseling practice specializing in mind-body fertility, pregnancy psychology, adoption, and early parenting.  She is author of Parenting for Peace: Raising the Next Generation of Peacemakers.

 

Marcy also provides training for adoption, education, and mental health professionals about the latest findings in the science of human thriving.

How to build a culture of empathy in the family?
1. By giving our children the gift of a well-built brain -- i.e., the frontal and occipital lobes have the circuitry they need to even process empathy!! This begins before most people think parenting begins - in the womb, or even earlier. It is our birthright to experience empathy, and that right is taken from us if we don't have a well-wired brain.
2. For the child to witness and experience empathy, in an everyday, all-day way.
3. Model empathy with our own cells, through how we care for ourselves.

 

 


 

Transcripts

  • 00:00 Introduction

  • (transcription pending)

  • (Video Transcriptions: If you would like to take empathic action and create a transcription of this video, check the volunteers page.  The transcriptions will make it easier for other viewers to quickly see the content of this video.)

 

At the Heart of Humanity: Cultivating Empathy Through Attachment

The subject of empathy — and whether it’s an endangered trait — has been on many people’s lips and pens in the wake of unspeakable events in the past several weeks, on US soil and US-occupied soil....

 

A lack of empathy toward an ethnic group or a social class doesn’t spring full-blown from the head of anyone, but rather, can trace its bitter little roots back to a lack of empathy towards other individual humans… and even before that, to a missed opportunity to learn empathy the only way we really learn it: by living it on the receiving end in our earliest years of life.

 

 

2012-02-17 - Parenting for Peace by Marcy Axness, Ph.D.: A Book Review

I am counting on Parenting for Peace (Sentient Publications) to do what The Joy of Cooking did for the world: create community amongst parents who will savor the joy of raising peacemakers.

 


How to build a culture of empathy in the family?
1. By giving our children the gift of a well-built brain -- i.e., the frontal and occipital lobes have the circuitry they need to even process empathy!! This begins before most people think parenting begins -- in the womb, or even earlier. It is our birthright to experience empathy, and that right is taken from us if we don't have a well-wired brain.

2. For the child to witness and experience empathy, in an everyday, all-day way. There are so many ways in our daily life to engage and embody empathy. Also so many ways to display it -- in the stories we tell and share; in the conversation and the entertainment the child is privy to; in our routine daily practices, such as how we care for / engage with pets and even with objects in our home!

3. For the young child another way to open the door to empathy from the beginning is how we model empathy with our own cells, through how we care for ourselves. (This is maybe a subset of #2, am I cheating??) E.g., for a parent to smoke, that closes the door of empathy for all their 50 trillion cells. Do we ever think to give thanks to those cells before a meal perhaps? Or to thank our heart for the magnificent work it does? Our feet? (This can be part of a wonderfully nurturing bath routine -- to essentially have empathy for the community of cells, organs and tissues that make…US!)
 

 

 



Thanks--