Rhyming Prompt: December 15
I woke up feeling a little bit blue,
Just down in the dumps. I don’t have a clue
How I can snap out of this terrible mood.
But I’ve noticed that you are really quite shrewd.
Do you have any tips for how to feel better?
I’m usually happy; a real go-getter,
While everyone feels sad once in a while,
I think that I’m finally ready to smile.
Download the prompts for December 13-16 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).
A close-up image of the December 15 prompt. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border and a purple wax seal of a frog. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.
Other Materials:
I truly love these Eeboo “I heard your feelings” conversation cards, as do my kids, but they aren’t necessary.
One of the cards. A bear is sitting on a rock looking dejected, while a concerned rabbit approaches from behind.
The back of the card asks some questions about the illustrated scenario. How is Bear feeling? How does Rabbit know? What could Rabbit say to Bear? Should Rabbit leave Bear alone? How will Rabbit know? I find these prompts immensely helpful, and we try to run through a couple every morning that we have school activities.
An image of a forlorn Frantz. He is tucked into a wooden toy crib with a pink and purple baby quilt. The prompt is on his torso, and The Rabbit Listened is on the floor beside him, along with the box of I Heard Your Feelings cards.
Suggested Pose:
Frantz feels like he really needs to stay in bed today (and that’s ok!). He’s all tucked in, and he has some books and emotional intelligence tools nearby to help his friends support him.
Activity:
Have a chat about how to cheer your Festive Frog. If your child feels silly comforting a plush toy, that’s OK, too—just have a conversation about how they might comfort their friends, play-act scenarios, or share a story about a time you successfully comforted a loved one. We’ll run through several scenarios for how to effectively comfort people at the breakfast table using both personal stories and the I Heard Your Feelings Cards.
Rationale:
The vast majority of people respond to other people’s sadness with empathy. That is why sadness in other people can make us feel personally uncomfortable; we may be at a loss for what to say, or how to act, because we can all-too-easily imagine the grief and sadness the people around us feel. Children also feel empathy for those experiencing sadness, but while adults know that it’s important to push through our own personal discomfort to extend condolences to a grieving friend, or check in on our relative with depression if they withdraw, our children may not yet have the emotional and social savvy to do so. Some theorists have surmised that children’s still-developing self-awareness can interfere in scenarios that demand comforting behaviors, making it more challenging for children to distinguish their friend’s fraught emotional condition from their own (Hoffman, 2000, 2007; Kagan, 1981; Moore, 2007). Regardless the reason, in the vast majority of studies, children do not respond prosocially to their friends’ sadness, and instead become distressed themselves. As Nichols et al. note in their consideration of children’s reactions to other people’s distress:
Experiencing a peer in distress may be especially likely to generate contagious distress in toddlers if only because another child’s crying is so like their own. Thus, the social understanding demands may be uniquely challenging for mounting prosocial responses to a distressed peer. Indeed, in naturalistic studies prosocial responding to peers’ distress is quite rare. For example, one study found that toddlers in a daycare setting responded prosocially to their upset peers only about 3% of the time (Lamb & Zakhireh, 1997) while more than a third of the children became distressed themselves instead. In the more familiar home context prosocial behavior was slightly more frequent when toddlers played in dyads; between 12% and 37% of 12- to 30-month old children comforted, helped, or shared at least once when the peer was distressed. At the same time, however, up to 40% of children further provoked the peer and increased the distress (Demetriou & Hay, 2004). (Nichols et al., 2009, p. 5)
While this reaction improved with age, it did so incrementally. In other words, children experience an empathetic response to the distress of the people around them, but that response rarely translates into supportive helping behavior.
This data supports my own anecdotal experience; as a kid, I found that my sadness made people uncomfortable, but not particularly kind. I had Complex Regional Pain Syndrome as a child and adolescent, which is poorly understood even now, and was a veritable mystery then. The treatments were fairly medieval (Epidurals! Hallucinogenic drugs! Pain exposure therapy!) and the symptoms were odd and inconsistent. Sometimes my legs would be ghost-pale and ice cold, sometimes I wouldn’t be able to move them at all, sometimes I had to use mobility aids, and I was almost always in a great deal of pain. I missed huge stretches of school, birthday parties, field trips, organized sports, and other social activities. When I did make it to school, I had inexplicable ailments that my peers struggled to understand and I failed to adequately explain. Why was my leg jerking involuntarily when it had never done that before? Why was I crying in pain when I looked uninjured? Why had I been missing for four months? Why did I seem fine one day and at death’s door the next? My peers had invasive questions and I, like my doctors, had few answers. My peers did something completely natural that was nevertheless devastating: they withdrew almost entirely. The people who stuck around often said the wrong thing, but I loved them just because they tried. Of course they were uncomfortable with my sickness and sadness and confusion, but their relentless willingness to be in my life at all was a remarkable salve.
Some experts suggest that the best way to help kids translate their natural empathetic response to witnessing sadness into helpful action is to encourage them become comfortable with discomfort. I’m inclined to agree. Clinical psychologist John Duffy notes that we can help children comfort people by:
Running through hypothetical scenarios to practice tough interactions,
Emphasizing how important it is to simply be available,
Discussing how we might respond to other people’s spoken and unspoken social cues,
Clarifying that an awkward attempt at support is better than no support at all.
He notes that “It’s even OK to say 'I'm really sorry. I don't know what to say.’” What matters is letting people know you’re there for them, even if it feels inadequate.
By having our children comfort the frogs, we are giving them an opportunity to practice appropriate social responses to sadness. The next time our children need to comfort a friend, perhaps on the playground or at school, they probably won’t be able to consult us before they either act or decide to walk away. If we’re lucky, they may remember the scenarios we discuss today. We get to play, practice, and model all at once.
Book Recommendation:
Today’s recommendation is The Rabbit Listened, by Cori Doerrfeld. We first encountered this book because of the inimitable Dolly Parton, and it’s been in heavy rotation ever since. I love its minimalist illustrations and its emphasis on persistence and availability. You can watch the author read it aloud here.
The cover of The Rabbit Listened, by Cori Doerrfeld
References
Hoffman, M.L. (2000). Empathy and moral development. Cambridge University Press.
Hoffman, M. L. (2007). The origins of empathic morality in toddlerhood. In C.A. Brownell & C. B. Kopp (Eds.), Socioemotional development in the toddler years: Transitions and transformations (pp.132-145). Guilford Press.
Kagan, J. (1981). The second year: Emergence of self-awareness. Harvard University Press.
Moore, C. (2007). Understanding self and others in the second year. In C.A. Brownell & C. B. Kopp (Eds.), Socioemotional development in the toddler years: Transitions and transformations (pp.43-65). Guilford Press.
Nichols., S. R., Svetlova, M., & Brownell, C. A. (2009). The role of social understanding and empathic disposition in young children’s responsiveness to distress in parents and peers. Cognition, Brain, Behavior, 13(4), 449–478. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3359013/