Published:

07/29/2014 08:27pm

Fostering Gifted Compassionate Children

Helping children activate their inner compass when dealing with life problems takes practice. Especially when the default choice for this guidance is their ego. Unknowingly, parents and culture overlook the mutual benefit that gifted compassionates have to observe without judgment, feel without fear and find direction in the dark. Encouraging these abilities provides a wonderful model for emotional, psychological and spiritual health.

Encourage children to feel more, emote less and know the difference

The most important step in understanding how compassion is formed in children is helping them examine the difference between their feelings and emotions. This distinction is elusive to most adults. Understandably, emphasis is often placed on emotions, as this is the precursor to medical intervention (i.e., medications) and a quick fix for many parents.

In truth, once adults give way to the idea that emotions are the problem, they teach children to no longer trust their feelings. Once medicated, navigating their lives with a feeling can be lost indefinitely. Or worse, if ignored feelings are repressed and relegated as unimportant. The result is that children stop trusting their true compass.

The distinction is simple: Feeling is a reaction to the immediate moment, and the organ of perception is the human heart. This is their real compass. Emoting is a re-enactment of a previous experience, tied to memory, and the organ of perception is the ego.

By default, the ego is the perceived compass. When feelings surface, help your child examine their origin. What did they make up about the hurt they just experienced? Inherently, the culprit is often guilt or shame. In the same way that a light does not turn on without electricity, a thought evaporates without an emotional charge.

Help children examine the thoughts that accompanied their feelings. If they are false or exaggerated, and often they are, teach kids to recognize this and let them go. This helps build trust in their instincts. The goal in developing compassion is to teach children to feel more and emote less. Why? Because one keeps them living in the present moment, the latter causes regression into painful self-evaluations and false thinking.

Help children distinguish between what is driving and pulling them

By definition, passion is the unique gift of feeling the heart’s conviction about something. It can literally provoke us to find a release for it. Creative people know this feeling very well. In fact, it is the friction of creation itself. We forget that passion means suffering.

Compassionate children have a close relationship with this suffering, and they feel its friction every day. Often out of their awareness, this is what is pulling them. If not given a constructive form of expression, a child’s feelings can become an inner angst that fuels a multitude of behaviors and emotional problems. Feelings should never be introverted or devalued as unimportant or unworthy of expression. Parents need to recognize that their child’s passion is a feeling before it becomes an emotion. This means it is a valid reaction to the moment they are in.

Ignored over and over again, such feelings evolve into emotions or re-enactments that validate hurtful memories and ideas of being unworthy. We now know that the ego stores these memories. Also out of awareness, this is what is driving them.

The goal in raising compassionate children is helping them make the distinction between these sensations. It sounds like a tug-of-war because it is. This is between themselves, between their parents and ultimately between the culture. Acknowledging that compassionate children are ‘spirited’ or feeling people, helps them understand this inner friction. Unexpressed feelings do not evaporate into thin air. They have to go somewhere and there are only two possibilities: in at the self or out at the world.

To ignore this dynamic in developing children risks breaking their spirit. We know that such a break is the source of mean-spiritedness. Directed inward, it harms children’s self-esteem. Directed outward, we know these children as bullies. The friction of the human spirit’s pull and the ego’s push is what it means to be who we are. One provokes the other to keep us in motion and growth. Out of the child’s awareness, this process cannot do what it is intended to do, which is to support the heart’s conviction to simply be.

Reinforce children’s curiosity, not their fear

The biggest trick the ego plays on children is that it makes them afraid of being afraid. If we are not careful as parents, we can get behind that distortion and strengthen its hold on kids. Fear happens normally to warn us of impending threat and is a defense mechanism born out of self-protection.

Sensitive and compassionate children are vulnerable to fear because they are inherently curious and often times adventurous. If their curiosity has been met with opposition, criticism or resistance, their ego will store that away as anxiety. False thoughts paired with the emotion of fear creates a hypersensitivity to the world around them. Sensitive by nature, compassionate children can lose the capacity to distinguish between real and imagined fear. In the extreme, this becomes paranoia. Consequently, parents must encourage the exploration of their child’s fears.

Teach that growth comes from adversity

Compassionate children look for meaning in their lives at a very young age. They have a sense that things happen for a reason. It is their way of saying there is a relationship between their adversity and understanding its worth. Like pieces of a puzzle, gifted compassionates seek breakthroughs from life’s hardships. They want to understand the ‘why’ of life and look for sense in whatever is happening to them. This should not be discouraged.

We say that adversity builds character, but children first need to be taught that it tears it down, or is hurtful. Growth is not pain free. In fact, life is not pain free. Compassionate children can learn to be less frightened by this process. They will not wait passively for the clarity of personal growth. They will ask questions.

In fact, compassionate people learn that life is less about answers and more about better questions. They are young philosophers and big thinkers, the kind of people the world needs more of. As a result, gifted compassionates have great potential to grow humanity. Clearly, their continuous and profound shifts in perspective often bring clarity in a world that is often confusing for many.

Activate your child’s full navigational abilities

The biggest dividing factor in a developing child is self-judgment. We recognize this quality as self-blame, self-punishment (guilt) and self-loathing (shame). It distracts, disrupts and even dismantles gifted compassionates because the division is so great that it takes a lifetime to understand.

Parents must understand that compassion by nature observes and witnesses life as it seeks to understand the benefit or purpose for suffering. Underdeveloped, compassionate children will see guilt and shame as useless and begin to think of themselves and others as fated victims. These children want to save the world and often grow up to become helpers. They also are called black sheep.

Parents can teach that the capacity in which children care for themselves trickles down to others. It will not only make them better parents when they grow up, it will make them better people. Growth from life’s adversities is not bolstering the ego; rather, it is activating the child’s heart as a compass.

How do we identify gifted compassionate children? (1) They mirror in the outside world what they are experiencing internally; (2) They feel in real-time or present-tense almost immediately; (3) They view the ego as an adaptive function, not as their compass; (4) They have a deep conviction to follow their heart for direction; and (5) They pursue what feels true versus what they are told is right or wrong. Cultivating and encouraging these gifts makes them wonderful role models for those who lack their awareness.

Never ignore your child’s emotions

A child’s emotions are a feedback mechanism for the quality or accuracy of his/her thoughts. If this is true, children’s mental perceptions of themselves and their lives should be a topic of discussion. Look for these opportunities and share the wisdom of your adult lessons that came from introspection and reflection. If children go unattended with their faulty or false thoughts, they form a false self. This is the beginning of the fateful harm of guilt and shame. Much of what causes a young child pain is made up or imagined. We know that the worst use of imagination is worry. Intercept this process before it becomes a hard or fixed structure in a child’s personality.

Make a distinction between feeling and emoting

If emotions give us feedback about the quality of our child’s thinking, feelings give us a glimpse of their heart’s intent. This is the breeding ground of what counseling and psychology call authenticity. The reason for distinguishing the difference between feeling and emoting is to help your children install their valid compass. In doing so, we allow them to trust their intuition and develop the heart or passion that is pulling them.

If a child’s heart is ignored, overlooked or discounted, the ego becomes the default guide. Not just the child’s personal ego, but the influence of the collective ego or culture. This default and false replacement of ego as a compass is the core of adolescent confusion and erupts in their lives behaviorally. We see the shock and discouragement of this reality in our headlines every day.

Teach kids to face vs. avoid their fears

Unfortunately, children learn very early that fear is a wall or hurdle to be overcome. Or worse, to be avoided. In truth, fear is, and always has been, a motivator. In fact, the best depiction of this truth is in the childhood story, “The Three Little Pigs.” Being chased to three houses by the big bad wolf (fear) represents necessary levels of maturity. Moving from straw, to sticks, to bricks is only possible because fear actually motivates the child to move.

The trick is to teach children not to look over their shoulder (focus on the past) at fear. Largely because this leaves them blind to what is in front of them: emotional growth. Said differently, they will run past the next house (stage) and prolong the fear that is chasing them. Many of us never get past the first or second house (straw and sticks) and live in fear for most of our lives.

It is important as we grow as human beings to shift from looking at fear through the eyes of a child. Fear has two functions: To warn us of impending threat and motivation. It is not designed in nature, nor in the human condition, to keep us frozen in place. This inability to distinguish between real and imagined fear is paranoia. This is epidemic in our culture and a hard perception to alter if not caught early.

Children need to learn that reward is earned not free

We are reinforcing the self-esteem of our children to such a degree that many are getting the distortion that there are no dues to pay in life. This is irresponsible and false. While it is easy to learn to win, it is our losses that remind us we have to hit the playing field of life the next day and continue to practice.

There is a cartoon depicting two parent birds sitting on a limb with their child bird. The child is laden with ribbons, trophies and awards. The father looks at the mother and says, “Geez, in my day we just flew!” The message here is that wisdom and emotional growth does not come from birthday cakes and bubbles. It comes from just doing what we need to do to be our best, but not with a sense of entitlement. Rather, it comes with a sense of gratitude that a breakthrough occurred or advancement happened because of determination.

Compassionate children can evolve useless suffering or feelings of victimization into useful adversities and opportunities for growth. The conviction of their heart is every bit as tenacious as the stubbornness of the ego, if given station as the real compass.

Urge children to trust their hearts

Teaching children to distrust their hearts implies that their compass is broken. Teach them to tap on the glass or question the stuckness they feel, and kids will discover it is their needle that is stuck, and not them.

Compassionate children have a built-in navigational ability that is above the norm. Being able to view their lives objectively, feeling the friction of their passion and adapting will ultimately move kids in a valid direction. Isn’t this the point? Authenticity is found when we listen to the feedback of our hearts’ desires. It may not always feel right--especially to another person--but it almost certainly will feel true to the child.

Summary

Essentially, compassionate children are less fearful of their feelings. In fact, they have a closer relationship with feelings than most individuals. Fear is first and foremost the most important emotion all children can distort. Compassionate children feel deeply, so they also emote deeply.

The last thing we want children to do--gifted or not--is to identify with thoughts and emotions that breaks their spirit. The culture has artfully called these children bullies. But what if they are simply products of a broken spirit? What if their feelings were discounted, ignored and misdirected until they created mean-spiritedness?

Toward the self and others, this developing problem in our culture is perpetuating the re-enactment of wound after wound. Judgment, apathy, cynicism and anger make our children afraid of fear itself. Remember that fear has an important function--one that moves us toward emotional maturity. In fact, our children can learn how to suffer rather than swim in it.

Objectivity, motivation, adaptation and direction are the gifts of a fully developed human being. Compassionate children come into the world with this device and can lose sight of it if it is not recognized.