Age Diversity & Empathy
Lack of age-diverse friendships is making us less empathetic
“I feel like I can’t tell you anything without you getting mad” my teenage daughter, Lily, tearfully told me last week. I wish I could say she is wrong but the truth is that, as much as it hurts to admit it, I am having a lot of trouble empathizing with her now. When she talks to me about her experiences I try to understand and share her feelings but my childhood was so different from hers that my attempts to empathize with her by referring to my feelings at her age are abject failures. It leads me to feel frustrated and her to feel like I’m angry. I’m a therapist! It’s my job to be able to empathize with others and I’m usually very good at it! Why can’t I empathize with the sweet and wonderful teen I love to infinity and beyond?
Empathy is probably one of the abilities that are least understood in our society. There is a common belief that we can only empathize with situations and experiences we have personally gone through but this belief is very much untrue. Just as referring back to my feelings as a teen is making it hard for me to understand Lily, having personally experienced something can actually make it harder for us to empathize. You see, the thing about empathy is that it is not about understanding how you felt in an experience, empathy is the ability to understand how the other person feels and share that feeling with them in the moment. There are many things that can hamper our ability to really empathize with other people. Lack of exposure to people who are different from ourselves is one of the worst things that can happen to our ability to empathize and the lack of age diversity in social settings might be one of the worst things we’ve done to our capacity for empathy.
We are not born with the ability to empathize with others, empathy is a skill that we develop throughout our lives. We teach children to empathize by asking them how they would feel: when little Johnny grabs Jane’s toy and won’t give it back we might ask, “Johnny, how would you feel if Jane took your toy like that?” Then, when he answers something like he would be mad and sad we go on to ask him to notice that Jane is crying and so maybe she is feeling mad and sad just like Johnny would. The thing is, this is only the first step in developing empathy. Asking Johnny to think about how he would feel is developing his emotional awareness and then asking him to understand that Jane might feel the same way is developing his “theory of mind” or ability to think about how other people are thinking and feeling.
These are important parts of developing empathy, they build a foundation upon which this skill can be built, but the truth is this type of teaching is not enough to develop true empathy. To truly empathize with another human being we must be able to understand how they are feeling. We have to go further than understanding how we have felt or how we think we might feel and learn to understand others’ feelings, even if we would not feel the same way at all.
Perhaps there has been a time in your life when you were telling someone a story about something that happened to you, maybe you were even telling it in hopes of receiving some emotional support (aka empathy), but after you finish telling it the other person says, “oh, you must have felt so XYZ!” and it was nothing like the feeling you actually experienced. Maybe you tried to tell them that you didn’t feel that way but felt a different way instead and maybe they responded with some version of “you shouldn’t feel that way… I went through that and I felt XYZ!”. That happens because their experience is getting in the way of understanding your experience. Substitution of your own feelings might be a place to start learning empathy but when we get stuck there we might never be able to empathize, no matter how hard we try.
If you want to grow your ability to truly empathize with others’ the best way to do so is to form friendships with a wide variety of people. Diverse friendships give you opportunities to observe how different people have different feelings about similar circumstances and train your brain to stop assuming that others will have the same response. Once you are able to set aside your feelings you can do the work of understanding how others’ feel. Once you understand, your mirror neurons should automatically do the job of helping you share in those feelings with them. Voila! Empathy!
Being around people of different ages is an important way for us to develop our empathic skills. It helps us make our ability to perceive and understand others’ emotional states more accurate and automatic. Although it is often outside of our conscious awareness, humans are expert pattern recognizers and the patterns we are the very best at being able to recognize are those related to facial expressions and body language. We are naturally social beings who depend on each other for our survival; we need to understand others’ emotional states in order to make our relationships work.
When we are talking with another person we are detecting small changes in their facial expressions and body language that tell us how they are feeling and this process is vital to empathy. These small facial changes are called “micro-expressions” and they change throughout our lives as our facial structures change. It is through regular exposure to people at different ages (ethnicities, genders, etc..) that we develop our internal “library” of micro-expressions and increase our ability to automatically understand how other people are feeling. At first we probably will have to ask people how they are feeling in order to know but as your inner library grows you will soon understand automatically.
80% of our actions are actually happening at an unconscious level through a process called autonomism. Your brain is a distributed system, this means that any action is activating different parts of your brain at the same time and a part of your frontal lobe is acting as the manager that coordinates the different parts and feeds it to your consciousness automatically. Our consciousness has a limited amount of capacity at any given time and if we didn’t make actions we regularly perform automatic it would be very hard for us to be aware of anything outside of the thing we are doing at any given time.
For instance, when you are learning to read it takes your full consciousness capacity to remember the sounds of letters, put them together, and then translate them into the meaning that you associate with that combination of sounds. During this time your ability to comprehend what you are reading is likely to be very low — it takes your full consciousness capacity to understand what each word means and leaves very little room for understanding what the words mean when you put them together into sentences. Soon your brain will autonomize the process of identifying letters, pairing them with sounds, and matching the sounds with the meanings — once you can do this you have successfully learned to read. There is a catch, though, because once your brain autonomizes the process it actually removes your ability to consciously access the processes that are happening while reading and prevents you from being aware of them.
If you look at any word in this article and try not to read it you almost certainly will not be able to stop yourself from reading it or having awareness of the process it took to do so. Give it a try, look at the word “elephant” without reading it and see if you can.
The way that we are currently segregating ourselves by age is disastrous for our empathic abilities. The brain is a “use it or lose it” system. It erases information that hasn’t been used for a long period of time in order to run efficiently. When we are not connecting with people of different ages, our abilities to recognize age-related micro-expression differences decreases and our ability to automatically detect how people in age groups we don’t have friends within will gradually diminish.
We can see evidence of how age segregation has hurt our ability to empathize in many current social trends; the increasing numbers of adults that don’t like kids, younger adults and kids who think that elderly people’s lives don’t matter and have trouble appreciating their value, and the way many adults come to think that kids “today” are bad and have no respect like they did when they were young. In each case the issue that is making it hard for people to enjoy, appreciate, value, understand, and want to be around people in other age groups is that they are having trouble recognizing the emotional states, or inner experience, of people outside of their age range. We are uncomfortable around people whose emotions we can’t read; it makes us feel anxious, distrustful, and makes us confused about how we should react or respond. When we aren’t familiar enough with micro-expressions at different stages of life we find it difficult to connect with, empathize with, or like being around people at the ages we find hard to detect.
Throughout history, aside from modern times, we have lived in societies where people of all ages were were mixed together and had friendly connections with each other. This proximity and connectedness at different stages of life helped to support our ability to feel empathy for each other, effectively provide emotional support, trust each other, and understand how very valuable every member of our society is.
The way that we segregate ourselves by age is robbing our children (and adults too) of opportunities to develop empathic abilities. The lack of age diverse friendships may be most profoundly harmful, and cause irreparable damage, to children. This is because our “use it or lose it” nature is even more pronounced as our brains develop. We are born with the potential to develop many skills that we never will develop and which will be “pared away” during sensitive periods of our development if not used by that age. For instance, if an infant is never able to form an attachment with a particular caregiver (by being regularly taken care of by the same person) by the age of about 2 years it can become difficult or even impossible for them to ever have any feelings of attachment for another human being. This phenomenon is called reactive attachment disorder and it just might be one of the saddest things that can happen to a person — imagine how awful it would be to never be able to experience love — and it can’t usually be repaired after about age 5 or so.
Empathy is a complex process and the pattern library of emotion detection needs exposure to diverse types of people in order to properly develop. Just as you can’t build a house without first constructing a framework, our brains begin developing empathy by creating an empathy floorplan, or structure, within which different empathy skills are contained. Empathy, however, is less important for survival than caution and for most of history it was vitally important for our survival to be able to know the difference between people like ourselves, “us”, and people who don’t belong to our tribe, “them”. During the construction of our empathy floorplans the ability to distinguish between “us” and “them” is an important boundary of who we feel empathy for.
Our pattern-detecting brain begins sorting people into “me/not me” in infancy and then into “us/them” in early childhood. In order to do this it creates categories of traits that are important to pay attention to and assigns them a positive, negative, or neutral value. Traits that fall outside of the categories we have found to be useful are only noticeable to us if we consciously try — the ones within important categories will automatically be fed into our pattern recognition systems. If children only have opportunities to develop meaningful and mutually beneficial relationships with people near their age they will still create a pattern recognizing category of age groups but they will likely find that people outside of their own age group who aren’t family feel like “them” instead of feeling like “us”. This difficulty persists as those children grow into adulthood and will make it hard for them to feel comfortable in social situations with non-age-peers.
“Wait! Wait!” you might say at this point, “what about their parents, their grandparents, their aunts and uncles and family friends? Shouldn’t that be enough to build those categories?” Well, it certainly would be nice if that were the case but our empathy systems are far more complicated than that. To briefly explain, the way that we empathize with people differs among several interacting dimensions: closeness of relationship and dynamics of power balance are just two of many but they make a big difference here. The closer we are (depth of connection) to a person the more we are able to detect their emotional state and empathize with them; the bigger the difference in the amount of authority each person has in the relationship the less we can empathize with them.
Perhaps you have noticed that most kids (maybe even you as a kid) are not able to have empathy for their parents very well until they are close to or during adulthood. While the closeness of the relationship makes kids really good at detecting how their parents are feeling (and when they should ask for ice cream or an empathetic ear), the fact that parents have pretty much absolute authority over their children as minors makes it hard to translate that detection into empathy. In a similar fashion, it can actually be somewhat difficult for parents to truly empathize with their children because the power imbalance gets in the way — many parents, instead, empathize with how they think their child is, or “should be”, feeling instead of being able to actually understand the experience of the child. This same issue arises often in relationships with imbalanced power: employees and bosses, teachers and students, police and people who they are trying to serve, and even customers and service providers (servers, drivers, doctors etc..). It is this issue that prevents “family” (whether blood-related or close family friends) from being enough to let children see different age groups as being “us”. As a child, adult family members tend to all have authority over you and never become a part of the friendly “us” that happens with mutual benefit and when the power difference is low.
Lastly, empathizing with diverse people is something we need to keep doing in order to maintain our ability to do so. Some skills, like riding a bike, stay with us even if we haven’t used them for years but things like empathy and other social skills will fade away with lack of use. Many people have noticed, as we begin to emerge from our pandemic-related isolation, that a lot of people have lost their social skills and emotional intelligence; this is just one example of how we need regular practice to maintain our abilities. Even if we were able to have diverse friendships as children, if we segregate ourselves by age as adults we will likely find ourselves becoming less and less able to understand and empathize with people outside of the age groups we tend to connect with socially. For this reason, it remains vitally important for our empathic abilities to have friendships with people at every stage of life.
In order for us to have opportunities to form friendships with people of different ages we need to form communities and spaces where age-diverse people can connect, have fun together, and feel comfortable around one another. We will also need to overcome our fears and prejudices about friendships between children and adults — which is a big hurdle itself and what I will address in my next article, “How to actually keep your children safe from experiencing abuse”.
