As another school year ends, many parents wonder how to make the best use of the summer months. Sometimes, parents choose tutoring or targeted work addressing an area with room for improvement. Maybe a student is below his peers in math, or perhaps he needs to solidify a critical skill area. I have known decent writers in high school who seek out a writing course to finesse their essay writing skills so work in college won’t feel so demanding. Summer can also be a period to focus on softer skills that take children time to develop and that may be difficult to focus on during the school year, when so much is going on.

Empathy is one of these soft skills. It draws others to us and contributes to our resilience, making us better able to recover in the face of adversity. Social support keeps us from falling as far, so that we have less to bounce back from. To be empathic, one needs to read and feel other people's feelings (affective empathy) and to understand other people's perspectives (cognitive empathy).

The capacity for emotional or affective empathy partly comes from our experiences. It's hard to imagine anyone's distress if we have never suffered distress of our own. This is not to say that we must have had the exact same experiences as others; we can recognize the emotion of sadness even when it is caused by events we have never endured. For example, a person who has lost a grandparent can recognize the pain of a peer whose best friend moves far away.

Another aspect of empathy involves understanding the other person's perspective—how they see the situation that led to their particular feelings. Often, in order to be cognitively empathetic, we need to know something about another person’s historical experiences to understand how an event is likely to be felt by that person.

Recently, I had a classroom........

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