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Brian H. Smith, PhD is an expert in youth development and has served as a member of Born This Way Foundation’s Research Advisory Board and as a Senior Research Scientist at the Committee for Children.
Empathy and Kindness
Is empathy the key to more kindness? I’m a member of Born This Way Foundation’s Research Advisory Board and part of my work is understanding what science says about how to increase kindness. The bottom line? Empathy matters, but it is not the answer by itself. Sometimes empathy promotes kindness, sometimes it doesn’t, and too often empathy simply breaks down and fails to make a difference.
Kindness doesn’t require overcoming our natural instincts to be selfish and mean- kindness is an essential part of human nature. And empathy can help us be kind by tuning us in to other people, what they’re experiencing and what they need.
Take bullying. It’s tempting think more empathy is the solution to bullying, but it’s not that simple. It seems strange, but what science shows is that having more empathy doesn’t necessarily make people less likely to bully others or more likely to step in when bullying happens. Why not?
First, let’s unpack empathy. Basically, empathy means knowing how someone else feels. There’s two ways that takes place. Let’s say you see someone crying right after someone’s been mean to them. Just seeing them can make you feel sad too – and your sadness tells you that’s how they’re feeling. That’s Affective empathy. But you can also see them crying, see what happened and understand how they’re feeling without feeling the same way yourself. That’s ‘Perspective Taking’ or Cognitive empathy.
There actually is some difference between how affective empathy and perspective taking impact bullying, though not a lot. Research says affective empathy helps reduce bullying, but only a little and not always. Perspective taking on the other hand? If anything, the evidence tends to go the other way.
Why would people who bully others be better at understanding people? It’s because most people bully because they get something out of it. Sure, some people just enjoy being mean. But more often the goal of bullying is to look cool and gain social power and popularity. Which may be why bullying is most common in middle school, just as kids enter adolescence and their lives become hyper-focused on peers.
The sad reality is that too often bullying works by boosting people’s social status even if bullying doesn’t automatically get you more popularity. You actually need the social insight to pick the right victim (someone without powerful friends, someone other people don’t feel too sympathetic for etc.), and you need to bully in a way so people think you’re cool rather than a jerk.
So it’s a mixed bag – good perspective taking skills can help you understand someone else’s pain, but people also need it to get what they want through bullying.
Let’s dig a little deeper into the science around kindness and empathy. Here’s a basic question: are people naturally good or bad, kind or mean? For a long time, the most common view in our culture was that people are basically selfish and to be caring and kind they needed to somehow overcome their natural instincts.
But Darwin actually said that sympathy was our strongest instinct, not self-interest, and new science proves he was right. Research across neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and other fields has shown that kindness and compassion are what really come naturally to people.
Why have humans successfully outcompeted every other species? Because we’re good at making weapons? No! It’s because we are the most socially sophisticated species. Our massive brains evolved to help us get along and live successfully in complicated social groups, not for waging war. Prosocial behavior, caring and even empathy are some of the most natural parts of being human, starting from when we’re babies.
Ok, so if people are naturally prone to being caring and kind, why doesn’t empathy always work? Why is there so much meanness and cruelty? Part of the answer is that there can be a lot of barriers that get in the way of people feeling empathy, and understanding how others feel is sometimes just not enough to get people to be kind.
In my next post I’m going to break down the most common causes of empathic failure and look at what can be done to solve them. I’m also going to talk about how to not only boost kindness through supporting empathy but focus on the importance of directly promoting kindness and compassion- something done so beautifully by Lady Gaga and Born This Way Foundation.
Here’s to Strong Women; May We Know Them May We Be Them May We Raise Them
This sign hangs in my two-year-old daughter’s room, and while she can’t read the words yet – they shape how I talk to her, how I talk about her, how I show up for my community and I lead at Born This Way Foundation. I am grateful to be surrounded by incredible women every day and as we celebrate Women’s History Month and the sixth anniversary of Born This Way Foundation, I’m proud to share the launch of #BTWFHerstory.
Born This Way Foundation was a vision and a movement born from the incredible bond of a mother and a daughter, and the fierce urgency of building a kind and brave world. Since our founding in 2012, we’ve made significant strides advocating for kindness and raising awareness about mental wellness. And through it all, we have been surrounded and guided by intelligent, dedicated, and kind women. This month, we’re highlighting some of these special women (including my two-year-old daughter!) who helped grow our work into what it is today.
We are kicking off #BTWFHerstory Month by featuring one of the women who started it all, our co-founder, Cynthia Germanotta. Cynthia is a mentor and friend of mine and to so many, her graceful, selfless leadership and vision for the world guides our work every day. Please join me in celebrating Cynthia for her leadership, her willingness to share her family – the challenges and the successes – with the world, in service to building a kinder and braver world.
Stay tuned throughout the month of March as we share about an inspirational woman every day. We are so excited to honor those who guide our mission and work to build a better world, for and with the mothers, daughters, friends, neighbors and colleagues.
Please use this month – and every other month – as an opportunity to celebrate the special women in your own life! We encourage you to share with friends and family using #BTWFHerstory, and I can’t wait to read more!
Emma is one of the oldest and most treasured members of the BTWF family. On Monday, she gave a speech at her former community college and we thought it was such a special, brave, inspiring, and important story we wanted to share it with you here.
[Note from Emma: I give you full permission to laugh at my inappropriate humor, because I laugh at myself all the time. If I go **there,** you can laugh! My humor is a big part of who I am.]
Hi! I’m Emma! Water is wet, and I’m disabled.
People think disability is inherently bad, or makes life less than. I’ve been through a lot of struggles and I definitely have a body that doesn’t always work the way I want it to, but I’d argue the life I live with disability is way better than a life without.
I know the one question you’re probably all thinking but are too afraid to ask, which is: WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?
Basically, I was born 14 weeks prematurely at two pounds, one ounce, and more or less came out looking like an underdeveloped alien child – my entire head black and blue with bruises, and my hands so small that they literally wrapped around my parents’ fingers. I sustained a brain bleed as well, so both of those factors together basically made for a perfect storm of spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, which is a “non-progressive” brain injury acquired at birth affecting movement (and quite honestly, the “non-progressive” part is super misleading). All four of my limbs as well as my trunk sustained some degree of paralysis due to (very, very) tight muscles and spasticity originating from the brain.
Obviously there’s no rulebook for how to raise a child with a disability, particularly when your parents were expecting a perfectly healthy child one second and then are given a laundry list of things I would never do the next (they may have been right on some things, but I proved them wrong in others). I spent my first three months of my life in the hospital. That wasn’t even taking into consideration the fact that I had two life-saving surgeries on my intestines when I was only days old to remove dying tissue. Between my birth and those surgeries, I was touted around the NICU as the miracle baby. Although it was pretty obvious I wouldn’t walk, other milestones involved the watch-and-wait approach – for instance, my first words were a MASSIVE sigh of relief for my parents.
To break it down a bit more (and with some humor), my CP affects me in many ways. From the bottom up:
Obviously, I use a power wheelchair. I don’t walk (wooo captain obvious), and require a lot of help just to move normally. If I were to face plant onto the floor right now, you’d have to call life alert, or someone who is physically able to move me – FALLEN AND UNABLE TO GET UP. There’s a moral to this story, folks: when your friend is trying to lift you into a car in the Cabella’s parking lot and is very clearly struggling, don’t be that a-hole that literally does nothing but stare out your car window as their car is parked next to yours for an uncomfortable amount of time and drive away. (This actually happened by the way.) By no means am I asking for a complete stranger to physically help, but I would hope that they would have enough common sense to actually do something or ask if I’m okay in the event they witnessed an emergency and no one else was around, so I’m not stuck on the ground for all eternity.
Moving to the trunk/spine, it’s very hard for to lean forward on my own and sit independently. Most of the time, if I were to sit in a regular chair without support, I’d turn into a collapsing jenga tower within ten seconds—also known as a fallen-and-unable-to-get-up situation. Unless I work really hard at it in therapy—and even then, it is very tiring. My entire spine is also filled with titanium, which makes me pretty bionic. For those wondering: no, I’ve never set off metal detectors—how I pulled that off, I have no idea.
My arms is where it becomes a little less obvious. They move, but my arm movement is still limited in places. To name a few things, I can’t lift more than five pounds. The dystonia in my left arm makes it frequently lock up and uncontrollably flail. I don’t write by hand pretty much at all because I don’t have the stamina and I write like a two year old. My fine motor skills are sorely lacking—in other words, don’t trust me with a pair of scissors because it won’t end well. However, I am able to do some things rather well to adapt. I type pretty fast and I’ve made it a goal of mine to write a memoir (in fact, I’ve already started). I’m also pretty awesome at driving my chair!
One area of functioning that came unscathed is my speech and cognitive function, which is totally awesome because it lets me be up here to talk to you all and make a bunch of insensitive jokes about myself.
Now taking all of this into consideration, how did my parents actually raise me?
As normally as possible.
As a kid, I was obsessed with Barbies, Britney Spears, and all things pink. I even got to play in the mud (for real). We took an awesome vacation to Florida when I was five—and they let us cut in line because hello, Cripple benefits. My parents treated me like anyone else (and they still do!). I was sort of taught to laugh at myself from the beginning, and I got my nickname of Cripple after literally being called a Cripple by a Walmart employee for using a scooter when I couldn’t bring my wheelchair (you can’t make this stuff up). I was never in a different school – there was never any doubt that I couldn’t be academically where my peers were.
What was different, though, was the fact that my family’s life pretty much revolved around keeping me healthy—and for that reason everything wasn’t always inclusive.
A lot of the things I remember about my childhood involve the hospital. Clinic days were family affairs. My mom would pull my brother out of school from time to time and he’d get to play the Nintendo in the waiting room, and I would see my doctors. For him, totally the BEST DAY EVER, but for me I was over the whole thing because I’d constantly get poked and prodded—x rays, range, pump refills and other completely boring sounding activities. My surgeon would tell my mom the graphic details of how I was getting cut open next, and I didn’t understand any of those discussions apart from the whole “you get to go to sleep and have a nice nap” at that age.
I still hated it, though. For years I’d have to get held down in the OR so nurses could put that terribly smelling mask over my face and put me out. To date, I’ve gone into the operating room around 30 times and been hospitalized close to 20 times, many of those for long extended periods, which is always fun! (Please note the sarcasm.)
I feel like a lot of people with disabilities or chronic conditions don’t talk about the trauma that can come with their treatment, perhaps because of stigma and the need to “be strong.” My parents made some tough, tough decisions, particularly when it came to my surgical treatment. I hated every one and didn’t understand why I had to go through them, but for the most part there was considerable benefit. While almost every surgery I’ve had has been successful, there was one that was a colossal failure – that was my baclofen pump.
Baclofen is an anti-spasmatic, most commonly prescribed to treat spasticity in cerebral palsy patients. My PM&R at the time convinced us that by surgically implanting this device so that the medication could run through my spinal cord, I’d have less spasticity, less pain, require less surgeries and therefore have a better quality of life as opposed to oral baclofen. My parents made the decision to go through with the surgery, thinking it would be the best thing for me. We released my hamstrings a year later, but all things considered I was doing well.
Until I wasn’t.
I was in second grade, and at first I just started falling asleep in class. I can recall getting incredibly drowsy and thinking to myself, “Why am I tired? I went to bed on time last night.” Eventually it escalated into vomiting that was passed off as the flu. One thing turned into another and I became unresponsive, my pupils so dilated that the ER team thought I had died. My primary doctor suspected overdose but my PM&R was in denial about the whole thing, which led to a longggg rabbit hole of hospitalization as I fought for my life for a couple of months. At one point, it got so bad that doctors told my parents they’d be better off bringing me in their own car to the hospital, because the ambulance wasn’t going to make it in time.
This was TRAUMATIC.
I didn’t even understand what the word overdose meant and yet you could definitely feel the weight of the situation even as an eight year old. Tests showed nothing, and the doctors were dumbfounded. Meanwhile, the catheter inside my body was trying to kill me ‘round the clock. I had become pretty desensitized to hospitals even before this happened, but I absolutely hated that I was so sick. I began to question a lot of things, like “What do other kids think of me?”
Eventually the straw broke and and my mom drove me to Gillette. I was violently puking in the back of the car, and she carried me through the front doors begging for help. We took the pump out, I still had to go through an extensive inpatient recovery period. I was so traumatized by everything that had happened that I began to hide from everyone: my family when they would visit me, other kids who would try to talk to me, nurses when they would round.
It’s an actual miracle that I survived it and I should absolutely be dead – but it definitely had a lasting impact. I would scream and cry constantly at home especially during therapy sessions, and my parents chalked it up to being “lazy.” The truth was I was just DONE with everything at that moment, was reliving trauma, and I wanted so desperately to be a normal kid. I’d get hit with flashbacks on the way home from school and be in tears, finally realizing the gravity of what I had gone through.
I’ve definitely learned from all my time in the hospital to not take anything for granted, as cheesy as it sounds, and I was forced to grow up faster than most kids. We always made the best of it, though, and laugh at the ridiculousness of the situations I was put in. My brother would mess with me on more minor surgeries, like when he literally brought his leftover pizza and taunted me with it while I was waiting (he got kicked out and the revenge was sweeeet). I’ve been visited by super creepy Easter bunnies, played Mario party while my brother gave me a broken controller (and then blamed it on the meds), and have had laugh attacks from Versed that are phenomenal.
Having opportunities to be like everyone else was one of the few things that made me happy. Anyone here remember how gym class made their lives hell? I actually really enjoyed it at times, particularly in elementary school, because it was inclusive. I got to try almost everything, even if I absolutely sucked (disclaimer: I sucked). I remember actually getting a chance to try to hit a T-ball, which I failed spectacularly at but I would have an absolute blast and all the teachers would woo and coo like I was their own child.
Enter the hell that was middle school.
In middle school gym, all of the opportunities from previous years were taken away. In middle school, it slowly became less about fun and more about brisk exercise. I’ll never forget the day that as 6th graders, my teacher dropped the ultimate bomb that signified, at least in our minds, we weren’t kids anymore: Running the mile around our school gym.
You should have seen all the students shudder. Break out in cold sweats before it even started. Complain to teachers that they couldn’t do it, that it would be too hard. Meanwhile, what was I told to do?
Roll the mile. I kid you not.
While everyone else in the class was in complete agony looking like they were going to drop dead at any moment, all I had to do the entire time was drive around the room. It’s even more ridiculous when you consider the fact that I was being timed. “Look Mr. Smith, I shaved 10 seconds off my time by going full rabbit speed instead of part rabbit speed – I am exhausted!”
Unfortunately after 7th grade, I was pulled out of gym due to the fact that I was having some pretty serious health issues. I never had an opportunity again through my school to participate like I did when I was younger. It’s unfortunate, because I feel like there’s opportunities for everyone—disabled or not.
But summer camp made up for where my school failed. It was a camp for disabled kids, and it was an absolute blast. They had everything you could ever want—a pool, horses, a gym where I could do more than just roll the mile. It was entirely accessible. I went for years, eagerly anticipating when I would be able to get away for a week and be a “normal kid.” My cabin mates would stay up all night, comparing literal scars and stories from our childhoods, and laughing until we cried. I’m still friends with many of them to this day, and those are some of my fondest memories from when I was younger.
As I got older, I went through something a lot of adolescents do—not knowing where I fit in. I basically had a massive epiphany my freshman year filled with repressed memories from childhood and all the #$!% I’ve been through. I started to hate myself, questioning every “what-if” imaginable. How could my family love someone in a wheelchair, who needs constant help from others?!
To this day it’s still one of my biggest struggles, but I have an incredible support system with the best friends anyone could ask for that I can say with utmost certainty would not be in my life if I were able-bodied. Had I not met my closest friends, there’s a lot that would be.. different. Both in my life and theirs.
Just to prove my point, I want to show you all something:
And yes, that was what you thought it was.
When I was younger, I truly thought that I had no one to call a friend – no one that had my back. I had no idea what I was going to college for and I had no idea what was in store for me as far as my health. Although there’s been many, many, MANY bumps in the road and I’ll continue to go through things like surgeries, I wouldn’t imagine my life any other way. I couldn’t imagine it any other way. Next year, I’ll have my BSW and hopefully, my dream job.
This diagnosis brought me friends. It brought me my passion for this field. It’s showed me what it means to laugh at yourself, what it means to persevere, and what it means to find joy in every moment.
Even if you don’t have cerebral palsy, I challenge you to do the same.
Hi everyone! My name is Shadille, I’m a Program Associate at Born This Way Foundation, and I had the pleasure of reviewing the thousands of photos and hours of video we collected over the last year to create the video below. In a minute and forty-eight seconds it shares some of our favorite moments from 2017 – where we’ve gone, what we’ve done, the people we’ve met, and, most importantly, the impact we’ve made.
In this collection, there were so many special moments to choose from. From school visits in my hometown of Miami, to hours spent volunteering in Texas and Oklahoma, to community discussions at Maya’s house in California, our team had a very busy year and did our best along the way to capture it, so we could share it with all of you!
The video highlights the three projects we’re most proud of in 2017:
Channel Kindness: Last March we formally launched Channel Kindness, a program we’ve been dreaming about for nearly as long as there’s been a Born This Way Foundation. We recruited and trained 50 incredible youth reporters who used their eyes, ears, and – most importantly – their hearts to document nearly 150 stories of kindness.
Our partnership with DonorsChoose.org: We believe that there is an urgent need for more mental health education. Additionally, we know that teachers and students best know what their classrooms need. In 2017, we partnered with DonorsChoose.org to invite teachers and students to create mental and emotional wellness projects and provided $150,000 in matching funds to bring these projects to life. In all, 668 projects were fully funded, helping more than 72,000 students and supporting 486 teachers.
The Channel Kindness Tour: Taking advantage of the incredible opportunity to hit the road with Lady Gaga, we visited 30 cities across the US and Canada, connecting with more than 40,000 people along the way. We were in concert venues – joined nightly by our phenomenal grassroots partners. We were in communities – organizing conversations about mental health with parents and students and serving alongside 65 non-profits. We were with young people – hearing their stories, discussing their needs, and recognizing their leadership through 8 Channel Kindness Awards. And, most of all, we were doing everything that we could to be kind and be of service – listening, volunteering, and donating. It was the privilege of a lifetime and what we learned and the relationships that we built will help guide our work for years to come.
Sometimes, however, my favorite moments were the more intimate ones that only spring up when the cameras were off. It’s the face of the young person who, after a conversation on mental wellness, summons the courage to lightly whisper to me that they’re gay and that their unaccepting parents don’t know. The teen who was struggling with their gender identity who hides in the back of a photo but comes alive in conversation. The student who has the opportunity to learn and talk about their mental wellness for the first time, thanks to a teacher that went the extra mile and the generosity of a handful of people they’ll never meet.
Truthfully, if I had an image for every one of those moments, my free storage space would run out because in the past year our work has reached nearly every state (and Canada!) and touched tens of thousands of young people from coast to coast. We aren’t everywhere all at once, but we’ve invited youth – and people of any age! – to help us make the world a kinder, braver place starting in their own communities. Every. Single. Day.
With your help, we aim to create more positive environments, continue to break down the stigma of mental health, and revive the notion that kindness is cool. No matter your race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, age, veteran status, disability – if you practice kindness, compassion, and acceptance – you are part of this mission and should take as much pride in our accomplishments as my colleagues and I do! When I say “our,” I hope you know I’m totally and 100% including you (yes, YOU) because it is only together that we will continue to build a kinder and braver world.
While I edited this video, I dove into and reflected on all that we as a foundation and as a community of extraordinary kindness warriors accomplished in 2017! Now, as I finish up this blog post, I am reminded of the new opportunities, partnerships, and programs that lie ahead.
Will you help us making this year even better than the last?
At Born This Way Foundation, we’re proud to shine the light on organizations that are helping make the world a kinder, braver place. This month, we are thrilled to feature with OneLove, an organization that works to ensure that everyone understands the difference between a healthy and unhealthy relationship.
“We’re really just trying to help people learn to love each other better, right?” asked a student in the back of the room at a Team One Love club meeting last fall. The simplicity of his question struck us in a really powerful way, reflecting both the aspirational energy that drives our work and the powerful way young people are engaging with our program and our call to action. The comment made us think, and has proved to be the spark that is behind a new campaign that we will launch this Valentine’s Day…but let me tell you first how we got there.
Since our national campaign to educate young people about the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships launched in early 2015, One Love has focused on ensuring that the next generation understands the signs of unhealthy and abusive relationships that Yeardley Love and so many others have missed.
Our Escalation Workshop and our #ThatsNotLove campaign are designed for exactly this, and we are thrilled to see the positive response from young people in every community that uses our tools. Over and over, we hear how relatable our content is, and we hear young people ask for advice on how they can help their friends. These issues are more relevant than they ever realized and once exposed to knowledge, they want to make sure their friends have it too. Young people are stepping up and leading this discussion, and we know their efforts are not just building stronger communities, they are saving lives. In just 3 years, we have educated 200,000 people in person and over 85 million online, spreading critical information and advice that we know could have saved Yeardley’s life and that is helping – and yes, even saving – others every day.
Over and over again, though, as we do our work, young people ask a follow-on question that we know is equally important to answer: What does healthy look like? Understanding now that so much of what they see in their lives and in the media is unhealthy, they are eager to build their knowledge about what healthy is and to pursue healthier relationships in their lives. They are as eager to share this information with their friends and communities as they are to share the message about unhealthy, and that is where #LoveBetter comes in.
The #LoveBetter campaign is designed to help each of us learn more about healthy relationship behaviors and commit to being healthier in our relationships with the people we love. It reflects the reality that while not all of us experience abuse, 100% of us will be in unhealthy relationships or do unhealthy things in our lifetimes. Why? Well to state the obvious, relationships are complicated and none of us are perfect! The truth is though, that none of us have ever been taught about healthy relationships and maybe – just maybe – that can be part of the answer.
So, what’s the goal of the #LoveBetter campaign? Improve our knowledge about healthy relationships, and enhance our ability to bring healthy behaviors to our relationships with the people we love – not just our romantic partners, but our friends and family too. Our team at One Love is so excited about the potential of #LoveBetter because as people who do this work every day, we are incredibly cognizant of how increasing our focus on relationship health has improved each and every one of our lives.
#LoveBetter is a campaign designed to make us more mindful and intentional. It is a campaign designed to inspire each of us to be better and to insist on better from our partners. It is a campaign that suggests that two partners committed to bringing healthier behaviors into their relationship can make major strides forward in ways that significantly impact their lives. Imagine if we all took this challenge on, how much better the world could be. And as a launching pad for this new campaign, we wanted to do something unexpected and disruptive to bring awareness to the ways in which we can all #LoveBetter, so we set out to create a Valentine’s Day #LoveBetter store. This experiential popup shop will not only bring to light some of the most common unhealthy relationship habits, but also provide a clear pathway for anyone to turn these unhealthy behaviors into healthy.
As important as understanding what #LoveBetter is, though, is understanding what it isn’t. #LoveBetter is not a campaign that proposes that if you are in an unhealthy or abusive relationship that by somehow loving better you can fix it. It is not a campaign intended to blame someone for their partner’s own unhealthy and abusive behavior, a common tactic called gaslighting. It is not a campaign designed to oversimplify the complexities of an unhealthy and abusive relationship. We hope it is a campaign that will make you think twice about the behaviors you see in your relationships and reach out to us or others if you need help.
If you see the value in these approaches, please join us in learning more and being part of this campaign. You can sign the #LoveBetter Pledge or visit our Take Action page to learn more about the Escalation Workshop and the #ThatsNotLove campaign. Unhealthy and abusive behaviors have become so normalized in our world today, and we believe strongly that each one of us has a role to play in changing these norms, and ultimately, the stats around abuse forever.
If you want to learn more about how to get involved with #LoveBetter or to join the One Love team check out our website.
Hi! I’m Emma! Water is wet, and I’m disabled.
