For the past week, we have heard and read many people testifying to their pain, their anger, their incomprehension in the face of the tragedy that occurred at the Sainte-Rose daycare center in Laval. Like them, I experience a deep malaise linked to the helplessness and incomprehension that inhabit me in the face of this situation. For me, they are already difficult to tolerate. They are even more so in the face of stolen childhood.
I think a lot about families. I think a lot about children. That we educate.
Marie Laberge, in her book Thirteen verbs for living, gives us the gift of this quote: “I believe in the power of children who seek the truth without masks and who know how to create, imagine, float, fly, even in the heart of disaster. »
At the heart of the disaster, I think of the children. I think of the children and wonder what we should tell them about this event. At the heart of the disaster, I wonder if all truth is good to tell children. The answers to these questions are complex to develop and I think it is important that we build them collectively.
For my part, I build them, among other things, from my research on the development of empathy in children: they lead me to suggest that we create moments of truth for children about this drama by empathy.
Not by encouraging them to empathize with what is incomprehensible, irreparable and intolerable. The impossible no one is bound. Rather, momentarily inviting them to feel and realize that this event brings up feelings and thoughts that are truly painful and difficult.
Support children’s empathy
Empathy, in its definition and conceptualization developed by Martin Hoffman, involves two dimensions, one affective and the other cognitive. Its affective dimension engages a person to momentarily substitute their emotional state to place themselves in an emotional state that is more suited to the situation of another person. Its cognitive dimension corresponds to the understanding of the interior states of another person, for example his thoughts, his feelings, his perceptions and his intentions.
The development of empathy during infancy and childhood implies that children gradually acquire the ability to mentally represent events without necessarily having experienced them. This development also implies that children manage to imagine themselves in the place of another person. These mental representations have the power to arouse their empathy. These mental representations ensure that empathy can be activated when children read or listen to a story.
I therefore think that one of the ways that could currently be favored by parents, educators or teachers who would like to approach the event that occurred at the Sainte-Rose daycare with children is to do so through a story.
Indeed, one of the researchers whose works I have read a lot in the context of my research, Natalia Kucirkova, suggests that we support empathy by having children immerse themselves in stories that tell different realities from the one they know in order to arouse their identification with the characters who live these realities.
History can be written. We can draw it. You can tell it out loud.
You can also choose which details to add to it, ie those you choose to leave to adults and those you think can be handled by children.
I think that’s part of what we can do right now: arouse empathy in children by telling them a story that takes into account the reality experienced on the morning of February 8th.
At the heart of the disaster, I believe that this is how we can convey to them part of the truth in connection with the tragedy that occurred at the Sainte-Rose daycare center in Laval.
P.S. Minister of Education Bernard Drainville, at the time of the big announcements, I would like to make a special mention to you in the context of this article, if I may allow myself: I dream of the day when empathy will be prescribed as a learning object in our Quebec school training program.