The Wall Street Journal-20080205-Learn by Cooing- Empathy Lessons From Little Tykes- School Programs Hope Babies in Classrooms Will Reduce Bullying
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Learn by Cooing: Empathy Lessons From Little Tykes; School Programs Hope Babies in Classrooms Will Reduce Bullying
Full Text (1142 words)KENT, Wash. -- It's just Nolan Winecka's second time teaching a class of fifth graders at Emerald Park Elementary School in this Seattle suburb, and it shows as he stares nervously at the two dozen kids surrounding him.
He burps. And the class erupts in giggles.
Nolan is 6 months old and hasn't had any formal pedagogical training. But to the group that put him in the classroom, he has everything he needs to help teach children an unconventional subject. A Canadian nonprofit group, Roots of Empathy, is now bringing to the U.S. a decade-old program designed to reduce bullying by exposing classrooms to "empathy babies" for a whole school year.
Nolan is one of 10 babies in a test of this latest education craze in Seattle-area schools. In all, more than 2,000 empathy babies are cooing, crawling and crying in classrooms in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. The idea is that children -- typically from kindergarten to eighth grade -- can learn by observing the emotional connection between the babies and their parents, who volunteer for the program and who are with them in the classroom. It's part of a wave of programs aimed at boosting the "emotional literacy" of youngsters in schools by getting them to recognize and talk about their feelings rather than act out aggressively.
But the little tykes can be unpredictable teachers, prone to spitting up, diaper incidents and drooling. Some empathy babies melt down in class, but behave perfectly just when a teacher is trying to demonstrate how fussy infants can be. The babies also leave a big impression on their pupils, turning them into pint-size authorities on child rearing.
Mary Gordon, the 60-year-old founder of Roots of Empathy, has experienced this unruliness firsthand. A few years ago, Ms. Gordon, a former kindergarten teacher from Newfoundland, led a visit of an empathy class at a Toronto school for Adrienne Clarkson, then the governor general of Canada, and her husband, the novelist John Ralston Saul. The visitors were to see an exercise showing how the baby reacted to novelty.
After the empathy baby's mother put a spoonful of spinach in her daughter's mouth, the infant arched back, gave her mother a look and sprayed everything green within a 2-foot radius in front of her, says Ms. Gordon.
The class's conclusion: The baby's first reaction was to withdraw from new experiences rather than embrace them.
Being exposed to an empathy baby can sometimes backfire, at least from the perspective of some parents. During a recent rough patch, Cari Giles, a mother of four in Paris, Ontario, got some surprise counseling from her son Thomas, a third-grader who attends an empathy class at his school. Ms. Giles was standing in her kitchen, flustered by the persistent crying of her 9-month-old son, Isaac, who is the empathy baby in Thomas's class. Thomas rubbed his mother's back gently and told her not to fret.
"'It's OK, it doesn't mean you're a bad mom,'" she says Thomas told her. "'Babies cry.'"
"He's a bit of a know-it-all to begin with," says Ms. Giles, 32, but the empathy class "gave him a little extra ammo."
Thomas doesn't disagree. The 8-year-old says the class has helped teach him how to understand how his baby brother is feeling. "When his face is pale white, I know he's happy, and when it's bright red, I know he's mad," he says.
Other students can be downright obnoxious in flaunting their newfound expertise. Ms. Gordon says she has heard several accounts of students from empathy classes approaching pregnant merrymakers at parties to tell them they can damage their babies by drinking. Some students sternly remind mothers with crying babies in public places that they can't shake them, no matter how frustrated they get, she adds.
Other empathy students are putting their advice in writing. Waqar Ahmad, a fourth grader at Roxborough Park Elementary School in Hamilton, Ontario, recently wrote an article for a newspaper there in which he described the importance of early brain development for Brennan, the empathy baby in his class.
"Brennan has a lot of neurons in his brain and today we made him get even more neurons by singing to him and letting him play with toys," Waqar wrote. "If you have a baby, maybe you should try these activities at home."
In class, empathy babies don't always live up to expectations. Cathy Macaulay, the Roots of Empathy instructor in Isaac Giles's class, has led discussions with her students about how everyone reacts differently to noise, heat and other stimuli, using fussiness in babies as a springboard for conversation. The only problem: Isaac and the infants in her two other empathy classes aren't fussy enough during their visits.
"Jeepers, creepers, can't I have a monster child here for a minute?" says Ms. Macaulay, a retired elementary-school teacher.
In studies involving more than 2,000 children over the past seven years, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver found a drop in aggressive behavior among students who were in classrooms with empathy babies, while there were typically increases in aggressive acts among comparison groups that didn't take the course. In one study, researchers found 88% of those children who displayed "proactive aggression" -- another term for bullying -- showed less aggressive behavior after taking a Roots of Empathy course.
"I'm a scientist -- I'm very skeptical of things," says Kimberly Schonert-Reichal, the developmental psychologist who conducted the study. "I'm really surprised at how consistently the findings have been positive."
Not everyone is so enthusiastic. Even if Roots of Empathy achieves some of its goals, some skeptics are worried the program and others like it steal time from academics. "We keep expanding the list of goals for schools and expanding their mission to the point where what some of us see as their basic mission is crowded out," says Malkin Dare, president of the Society for Quality Education, a nonprofit Canadian educational reform organization based in Waterloo, Ontario.
Many schools have sought to crack down on playground misbehavior by using everything from mentoring to movies to prevent bullying, while states like Delaware, Iowa and others have passed antibullying laws.
Since the program started, more than 158,000 pupils have participated, along with more than 6,200 empathy babies, Roots of Empathy estimates. In the U.S, the program will likely expand to at least 40 classrooms in the Seattle region by 2009. Schools and other organizations in other U.S. cities, including Tucson, Ariz., and Jacksonville, N.C., have expressed interest in bringing the program to their schools.
Empathy babies have very little to say about their experience in the classroom, since most can't talk. Nolan's mother, Natalie Winecka, a human-resources analyst with the city of Kent, says her son seems intrigued by all the attention.
"As long as he's eaten and is dry, he could care less," she says.
