What is it called when a child is not able to take the perspective of others?

Empathy is a crucial component to connecting with others and being an active participant in a well-connected and compassionate society. The ability to step outside your own sense of self to understand what another person is experiencing is a core aspect of engaging with other human beings in a meaningful way, and it powerfully enriches your own life. How can you teach this essential skill to children?

Empathy is a skill that is strengthened through life lessons and guidance. One of the steps to teaching empathy is perspective-taking, which is the act of understanding something from someone else’s point of view. Imagining something from another’s perspective can help a child better understand their motives or intentions and allows children to alter their behavior to avoid hurting or offending other people.

Perspective detective

Social and emotional development is a nuanced area of growth that has a significant impact on many different areas of a child’s life and future. The ability to see situations from multiple points of view is a form of social agility that can strengthen relationships, build confidence, and avoid inconsiderate mishaps.

Children who have difficulty understanding how their actions make others feel often experience obstacles in making or maintaining friendships, which can lead to a decreased sense of self-worth. This makes perspective-taking a valuable skill to learn and refine. Here are some activities and suggestions that can help you help the children in your life learn to consider others:

Teach emotions

All too often, adults just assume an understanding of emotions comes naturally. However, although kids have feelings, they can’t communicate them clearly if they lack the language to express their emotions. Often, children do not yet understand how to interpret their own emotions, let alone the emotions happening in others around them.

Make a concerted effort to teach feelings, in the same way you would colors, numbers, or letters. Be honest about your own feelings in simple terms, point out the emotions being experienced by characters in movies and books, and practice drawing and labeling faces with a range of expressions that denote emotions. Talking about feelings can help kids identify similar emotions in themselves and others.

Real-life experience

Once your child has a basic understanding of feelings, help them begin to see how their behavior affects others. If your child causes another child to feel happy or sad, point that out to them and ask why they think the other child reacted in the way they did.

Also, ask your child how they would feel in a situation being experienced by another. “If he had taken the toy out of your hand while you were playing with it, how would that have made you feel? What would have been a better choice?”

Books and movies serve as a great conversational starting point to have your child guess how a certain character feels and why.

Conflict resolution

Once your child has the language and experience to discern how their behavior affects others, encourage them to resolve conflict by asking them to stop and try to see the situation from the perspective of each participant.

If the issue at hand is that each child wants to play with the same toy, how will each of them feel if they don’t get their way? Help your child understand that their desires aren’t more important than those of others and ask how they could compromise. A fair solution may involve sharing, taking turns, or deciding to move onto another activity.

Being able to relate to others, make people feel valued and comfortable, and influence people positively are all essential facets of creating connections with others and experiencing relationships in an authentic way. Teach the children in your life skills that will help them learn perspective-taking and build the foundation for a meaningful future.

The preoperational stage is the second stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development. This stage begins around age two and lasts until approximately age seven. During this period, children are thinking at a symbolic level but are not yet using cognitive operations.

The child's thinking during this stage is pre (before) operations. This means the child cannot use logic or transform, combine or separate ideas (Piaget, 1951, 1952).

The child's development consists of building experiences about the world through adaptation and working towards the (concrete) stage when it can use logical thought. During the end of this stage children can mentally represent events and objects (the semiotic function), and engage in symbolic play.

The key features of the preoperational stage include:

The key features of the preoperational stage include:

Centration is the tendency to focus on only one aspect of a situation at one time. When a child can focus on more than one aspect of a situation at the same time they have the ability to decenter.

During this stage children have difficulties thinking about more than one aspect of any situation at the same time; and they have trouble decentering in social situation just as they do in non-social contexts.

Egocentrism refers to the child's inability to see a situation from another person's point of view. The egocentric child assumes that other people see, hear, and feel exactly the same as the child does. In the developmental theory of Jean Piaget, this is a feature of the preoperational child. Childrens' thoughts and communications are typically egocentric (i.e. about themselves).

At the beginning of this stage you often find children engaging in parallel play. That is to say they often play in the same room as other children but they play next to others rather than with them.

Each child is absorbed in its own private world and speech is egocentric. That is to say the main function of speech at this stage is to externalize the child’s thinking rather than to communicate with others.

As yet the child has not grasped the social function of either language or rules.

The early preoperational period (ages 2-3) is marked by a dramatic increase in children’s use of the symbolic function.

This is the ability to make one thing - a word or an object - stand for something other than itself. Language is perhaps the most obvious form of symbolism that young children display.

However, Piaget (1951) argues that language does not facilitate cognitive development, but merely reflects what the child already knows and contributes little to new knowledge. He believed cognitive development promotes language development, not vice versa.

Pretend (or symbolic) Play

Toddlers often pretend to be people they are not (e.g. superheroes, policeman), and may play these roles with props that symbolize real life objects. Children may also invent an imaginary playmate.

'In symbolic play, young children advance upon their cognitions about people, objects and actions and in this way construct increasingly sophisticated representations of the world' (Bornstein, 1996, p. 293).

As the pre-operational stage develops egocentrism declines and children begin to enjoy the participation of another child in their games and “lets pretend “ play becomes more important.

For this to work there is going to be a need for some way of regulating each child’s relations with the other and out of this need we see the beginnings of an orientation to others in terms of rules.

This is the belief that inanimate objects (such as toys and teddy bears) have human feelings and intentions. By animism Piaget (1929) meant that for the pre-operational child the world of nature is alive, conscious and has a purpose.

Piaget has identified four stages of animism:

1. Up to the ages 4 or 5 years, the child believes that almost everything is alive and has a purpose.
2. During the second stage (5-7 years) only objects that move have a purpose.
3. In the next stage (7-9 years), only objects that move spontaneously are thought to be alive.
4. In the last stage (9-12 years), the child understands that only plants and animals are alive.

This is the belief that certain aspects of the environment are manufactured by people (e.g. clouds in the sky).

This is the inability to reverse the direction of a sequence of events to their starting point.

The Three Mountains Task

The Three Mountains Task

Jean Piaget used the three mountains task (see picture below) to test whether children were egocentric. Egocentric children assume that other people will see the same view of the three mountains as they do.

According to Piaget, at age 7 thinking is no longer egocentric, as the child can see more than their own point of view.

Aim: Piaget and Inhelder (1956) wanted to find out at what age children decenter - i.e. become no longer egocentric.

Method: A child is shown a display of three mountains; the tallest mountain is covered with snow. On top of another are some trees, and on top of the third is a church. The child stands on one side of the display, and there is a doll on the other side of it.

The child was allowed to walk round the model, to look at it, then sit down at one side. A doll is then placed at various positions of the table.

The child is shown pictures of the scene from different viewpoints and asked to select the view that best matched what the doll can “see”.

What is the inability to take another's perspective called?

What is lack of perspective

At what stage is a child unable to see things from anyone else's perspective or viewpoint?

What is egocentrism in a child?