Why Some Children are Losing Their Empathy Abilities

To have and express empathy requires that a person has had opportunities in life to imagine what it’s like to be inside another person's mind and life...

Image by Amberrose Nelson from Pixabay

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fullness of your bliss I feel-1 feel it all.
—William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, Intimations of Mortality

Criminologists note that two of the fastest growing segments of the criminal population are teen and pre-teen murderers. Children are being convicted of some of the most heinous crimes imaginable, and one of the shocking qualities of these young killers, robbers, and rapists is that they often express no remorse whatever for their crimes. They lack empathy, the ability to imagine what it must be like to be another person, to live within another person’s skin, to feel the feelings that another person might have.

Startling evidence of this is trend in its early stages was found in the 1996 report of the U.S. Justice Department, which found that murders committed by teenagers in the United States had tripled in just ten years. The number of teenagers using guns to commit murder had quadrupled. Numbers are down substantially since the 2021, but this is still a very real crisis.

This is of concern since both children and adults with ADHD often score low on tests that measure empathy. And the trend seems to be increasing: children are more likely to be non-empathetic than are their equally-ADHD parents. Some psychologists speculate that they’ll also grow up to be less empathetic adults than their parents (although at this moment no studies of this have been done that I could find.)

Why would this be?

So far, no one has offered a reasonable explanation, other than to note the fact that children and adults with ADHD are often less empathetic than their non-ADHD peers.

I believe, however, that there is a cause. It’s specific and definable, and when considered carefully makes perfect sense. When I first thought of this I was in California at dinner, before giving a speech to an ADHD support group. So I bounced the idea off two psychologists and a psychiatrist who had joined us at dinner. All thought it had merit, so I shared it with others, got similar responses, and now I offer it up for your consideration.

The Loss of Fiction

To have and express empathy requires that a person has had opportunities in life to imagine what it’s like to be another person. While some may say this is an inborn characteristic, studies of sociopaths who grew up in violently abusive situations, and animal studies (yes, animals can show empathy, particularly primates), indicate that to a large extent empathy is learned.

So how and where and when do we learn empathy?

Certainly to some extent it’s learned in the family, observing how parents and siblings express their feelings and hearing them tell stories of how they feel or how they reacted to certain situations. But in our modern TV- and screen-driven society, this type of interaction is diminishing.

Another source of empathy-learning opportunity comes from peer groups, although children are notoriously cruel and pre-empathetic. While peer-group interaction provides an important opportunity for children to learn empathy, it may not be the most important. And when the peer groups themselves are based in non-empathetic behaviors (such as gangs), peer groups may actually serve to either deter the learning of empathy or to cause children or adults to suppress empathetic behaviors.

Television, the movies, and the theater all seem as if they would represent opportunities for children to learn empathy, but in fact none offers the opportunity to really get inside another person’s skin. We can observe people’s reactions in these media, but we don’t know what they’re really thinking.

Only fiction, principally in the form of the novel (and, lesser, in short stories), offers the opportunity to get inside the mind of another person.

While it’s true that our internal world literally ends at the edge of our skin, with a well-written novel the reader actually has an opportunity to vicariously inhabit the body and mind and soul of another human being. Novels don’t just show action and dialogue like TV and movies; they present thoughts.

The reader knows what the scene looks like not because of the novelist’s description, but because the skillful novelist shows us what the character is seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting.

When reading a well-written novel, we’re actually inside the mind of another person; we sense the world with their senses, feel their reactions, and know their thoughts.

This is a powerful tool to teach and build empathy.

For the first hundred millennia of human history this was played out by oral tradition. Zog sat around the campfire and regaled the tribe with tales of his ancestors or of his hunt, how he felt, what he saw, how terrified he was as the tiger chased him through the forest.

With the advent of written language and then the printing press, the oral tradition was replaced by the written word and then the book. For the past five or six thousand years this was the main way stories were told and empathy was taught.

Then came television and screens.

Numerous researchers have chronicled the rise in television viewing since it spread like Kudzu across the American landscape in the 1960s. They’ve noted over and over again that the more television children watch, the less likely they are to perform well academically, and the less likely they are to read for recreation.

Marie Winn, author of The Plug-In Drug, and others have carefully chronicled the correlation between TV watching and criminal behavior, particularly violent behavior. Many point to the content of the TV shows as feeding violent instincts and tendencies.

But literature and oral tradition have been filled with violence for nearly all of human history. The Bible, for example, has books within it that recite one gory story of mass murder after another, along with rules of behavior which have death as the penalty for breaking. Traditional fairy tales and children’s stories are filled with violence. TV may be drenching children with violence, or at least educating them how to be violent, but it may not be as responsible for the loss of empathy as is the loss of what TV has come to replace: reading fiction that lets us into the minds, the inner thoughts, the feelings, the internal realities of the lives of other people.

This is not to suggest that ADHD is caused by people not reading, but some symptoms and co-morbidities, particularly lack of empathy and poor academic skills, certainly could be.

Reading is a focusing exercise, training young brains to maintain their attention on a single thing for a long period of time. Unlike TV and the internet, which have fast-moving images and therefore don’t train a longer attention span, reading requires effort, thus training the brain in this regard.

Reading is also an academic exercise. It trains the processing of language into visual imagery which is so essential to functional long-term memory, and with practice people learn to read faster and faster. This, of course, can only benefit schoolwork.

Finally, reading is an empathy exercise. When a child is reading Tom Sawyer or a teenager is reading one of Toni Morrison’s novels, they are engaging in the core-activity of empathy: vicariously experiencing the life of another.

But there’s a chicken-and-egg phenomenon at work here. Children with ADHD are less likely to become excited about reading at a young age, perhaps because of ADHD is, in part, often a learning disability or perhaps because our schools are so poorly set up to teach ADHD children to read. Whatever the cause, the effect is that kids with ADHD tend to read less well, and so recreational reading is difficult for them.

This difficulty means they often don’t become hooked on reading fiction at a young age, and may grow into adulthood without ever having read anything not required by school. Because they’re not reading for recreation they’re not improving their reading skills, making recreational reading an ongoing difficulty.

Try an experiment. Ask several of the ADHD children or adults you know how many novels they’ve read in their lives, and in the past few years. Then ask yourself which of these people seems the most capable or incapable of showing or experiencing empathy. I predict that your results will be the same as were mine when I did this: the less fiction a person reads, the less empathetic they often appear and may, in fact, be.

Read to your children. Get them addicted to good fiction. It may take having them listen to books on tape during a long trip in the car (we did this with all our kids), or reading to them every night before bed (ditto). Read instead of watching TV as a family activity: all these are ways to get kids hooked on fiction and build their learning empathy.