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14 Fredericksburg Parent and Family • October 2019 One of the things that propelled me to start Girl Smarts were the stories of girls being bullied in school. I was angry. Angry that bullying was occurring, angry that the children doing the bullying weren't being held accountable and angry that our children were being bullied and didn't have the skills to stand up for themselves. When we worked to create workshops to support children who are being bullied, the first thing we focused on was the concept of empathy. I am sad to say, I don't believe we can stop bullying. It is born of so many human flaws, generational reinforcements of negative behaviors and a lack of self-aware- ness. I do not believe we will ever stop the behaviors from developing in some children. I do believe, however, we can shift our children's mindsets, so they have an understanding of how broken their aggressors are and how the aggressors' behaviors have nothing to do with them as the targets. In the next few posts I plan to talk about what we can do to help our children stand up for themselves and what we can do to ensure we don't raise kids who are jerks. Empathy is the ability to experience and share someone else's feelings. It is a deep sense of understanding and sharing someone else's emotional reality. When my boys were young, I found myself as concerned about their development of an emo- tional quotient as the development of their intellectual quotient. Our personalities are formed between the ages of 0 to 6. It comes from a variety of inputs, according to experts like Freud, Skinner and Bandura, and the management of those inputs is something my husband and I considered of critical importance with our children. One of my favorite mantras in parenting was: Cultivating EMPATHY Purposefully working on messages and actions focused on empathy has served our family well. But it wasn't easy. It took deliberate planning, deliberate conversa- tions and purposeful actions and dedication. Here are some specific things you can do to support the growth of empathy in your children. Turn days off into days on. If you have a three-day weekend or extended break, consider helping your children organize something to support others. Every summer my boys would organize a charitable drive in our neighborhood. We had pet shelter drives, food drives, toy drives for charity. The boys created the fly- ers, asked local businesses to support with free copies of the flyers, went to grocery stores to have plastic grocery bags donated and we went around together to distribute the flyers. They even formed a team name "Brothers for Others" to brand their efforts. The trip to the donation site was a trip filled with satisfaction, com- passion and understanding of the good fortune we shared as a family and the needs of others. It also laid the groundwork for their charitable efforts as young men when I was no longer the instigator of the effort. "What you say to your children becomes their inner voice." WRITTEN BY DIANNA FLETT MAKE A DIFFERENCE