Empathy is the ability to sense, understand, resonate and share to some extent feelings (such as happiness or sadness) experienced by other persons, even if these feelings are not explicitly expressed. Psycologist Martin L. Hoffman (1982) describes four stages of empathy development:

• global empathy – immitating other’s emotions, can be observed as early as one year old
• egocentric empathy – shows on kids between 12 and 18 months – the child can differentiate other’s emotions but presents an egocentric response
• empathy for other’s emotions – shows as the child comes of age – children can make more subtle differentiation of other’s emotions and the response presented is less egocentric
• empathy for the life condition of others – shows in late childhood towards adolescence, when children start to respond to the general condition of others, not just to the immediate emotional state.

Another way of encouraging social interaction is to challenge children to share with others their opinion on certain actions, ideas or concepts. Formulating and expressing an opinion constitutes an important step on building a child’s personality despite the vocabulary limitations imposed by age. Encouraging the little ones to have such initiative gets them involved in community issues and builds their interest for various global topics. Encouraging the child to formulate his own opinion on things, involves also developing the understanding that every person is different and is entitled to his own opinion. An opinion that differs from your own is not automatically a wrong opinion, but a reflection of the variety of filters through which each person may look at the same issues. Children can be exposed to various scenarios based on real life situations and asked to imagine how they think other people feel in the given circumstances. Empathy plays a critical role in making the children learn to give importance to other people’s perspective, in an objective manner. The children at pre-school age need to gradually learn how to accept other people’s perspective and opinion even when this contradicts their own.