Empathy and love aren’t things children stumble into on their own. They’re skills. And like any skill, they grow stronger with exposure and practice. Below, you’ll find simple activities to teach empathy and love that fit into everyday family life.
You don’t need a curriculum or a perfect plan to help kids develop empathy. Some of the most powerful lessons happen in ordinary moments: over dishes, during a car ride, or while reading a bedtime story.
Why Social Emotional Learning Is Essential
Before we jump into the activities, let’s talk about why this matters. As a therapist, I feel like I can’t stress this enough: teaching social emotional intelligence is essential for raising great humans.
Social emotional learning gives children the tools to understand what they feel and what others feel, and to know what to do with both. That ability will help them navigate complex emotions and relationships later in life and grow into the people that others can count on.
Although we want kids to learn about all the necessary social skills, this list focuses on empathy and love.
What Is Empathy?
Empathy is essentially perspective-taking in practice. It’s what allows us to notice someone else’s feelings, not just observe that someone is upset, but actually try to understand what that might feel like from the inside.
It’s different from sympathy, which is feeling sorry for someone from the outside. Empathy asks a child to step, even briefly, into someone else’s shoes.
What Is Love?
If empathy is noticing, love is what moves us to respond to what we notice. It’s the part that turns understanding into action.
A child can recognize that a friend is sad and stop there. Love is what closes that gap. It’s what makes a child sit down next to that friend, share something, or simply ask, “Are you okay?” Without love, kindness stays theoretical instead of becoming something children actually practice.
Love, like empathy, isn’t only a feeling. It’s something children learn to act on.
Why Empathy and Love Belong Together
When we teach children to notice and respond together, we’re not just raising kind kids. We’re raising kids who know how to show up for the people around them, even when it’s hard. We are teaching them to do the right thing even when it isn’t the easy thing.
That’s the real work of social emotional learning: equipping kids to become great humans. That doesn’t happen in one lesson plan, a few empathy worksheets, or a single conversation. It happens little by little, one small, intentional, empathy-filled choice at a time.
Simple Activities to Teach Empathy and Love at Home
The activities below are simple on purpose. Each one gives your child a small chance to practice noticing someone else’s feelings and responding to them, so empathy and love can become habits, not just ideas.
1. Ask “Where Do You See Love?”
Start simple. Ask your child where they notice love in their everyday life:
- At home
- At school
- Out in the world
You can share where you see love, too. This small simple practice reminds us that love is all around us. It can often be found in the simple and ordinary moments of life if we slow down long enough to see it. I explore that idea in the very first book I wrote, Love Is….
2. Do Small Acts of Kindness on Purpose
Something as ordinary as washing dishes can become a lesson in love and connection, if you name it that way.
Working alongside someone, even in silence, teaches children that love often looks like noticing someone needs help and showing up to meet the need. You can encourage them to help a neighbor, a sibling, or even say out loud: “One way we show love in our family is by helping each other, even with the boring stuff.”
3. Welcome Others
This seems so simple and obvious, but teaching your kids how to open up your home, the backyard, or even their lunch table is a valuable and under-used way to show love and empathy.
If you have a new friend you’d like to get to know better, let your kids watch you invite them over and help you get the home ready to welcome them in.
If you hear about a new kid at school or a new family in the neighborhood, talk with your child about what it might feel like to be in a new, unfamiliar place. Ask them: What could you say or do to help someone new feel like they belong? Then, encourage them to take action.
One of the best ways to promote empathy is to encourage perspective-taking as often as you can.
4. Care for Something or Someone Else
Empathy grows when children learn to care for something or someone beyond themselves. That could be a pet, a plant, or the planet itself.
In the book This Is the Earth, we discuss how the Earth belongs to all of us. It shows the language of empathy in action. After reading it, talk with your child about specific ways you can show love to the earth together. That could mean:
- Picking up litter on a walk
- Planting something and caring for it as it grows
- Turning off lights or water when they’re not needed
- Talking about why the earth deserves care, just like people do
5. Read Stories That Model Empathy and Connection
Books can open doors that direct conversation sometimes can’t.
In Kayla: A Modern-Day Princess: Dishes, Dancing, and Dreams, we meet a young girl whose first instinct is to judge the person she notices climbing a tree outside her window. Through their conversation she learns about the other person’s life and is able to show compassion and practice empathy instead.
What could have been a negative interaction turns into a long-lasting friendship. This helps kids see that love and empathy aren’t reserved for big moments. They live in the small, daily ones too.
If you’d like some great questions to help you raise empathetic readers, these empathy-focused questions for after reading are a great place to start. They help parents and teachers alike discuss how empathy shows up in stories and the importance of taking action when we notice someone else needs help.
6. Practice Naming Feelings, Not Just Behaviors
It’s easy to focus on behavior. A sibling slammed a door. A friend went quiet at recess. A classmate snapped at someone during a game. Behavior is what we see first, so it’s often what we talk about first, too.
But behavior is only the surface. Underneath it is almost always a feeling: frustration, embarrassment, disappointment, fear.
When your child notices that someone else is upset, try asking: “What do you think they might be feeling right now?” instead of jumping straight to what they did or didn’t do.
This simple shift, from “what did they do” to “what might they feel,” is one of the most direct ways to build empathy over time. It teaches children to pause before they judge, and to look for the feeling behind the behavior rather than reacting to the behavior alone.
A few ways to practice noticing how another person feels:
- When a sibling has a meltdown, ask, “What do you think made them feel that way?” instead of, “Why are they acting like that?”
- After a disagreement with a friend, ask your child what they think the other person might have been feeling, before asking what they think should happen next.
- When you see someone being unkind, wonder out loud together: “I wonder what’s going on for them today.”
Over time, this becomes a habit your child carries into every relationship. They’ll start to ask themselves, almost automatically, “What might this person be feeling?” before they decide how to respond.
That question, more than any rule or lecture, is what empathy is built on.
A Tip for Using Empathy Activities to Foster Emotional Intelligence
None of these activities require a perfect script or a certain amount of time. They’re meant to fit into the life you’re already living, not add one more thing to your plate.
Some days, you might only manage one small moment: a single question in the car, one conversation over dishes. That’s enough. Empathy and love aren’t built in a single conversation or a single day. They’re built one small, hopeful choice at a time, repeated again and again until they become part of who your child is.
You don’t have to get it right every time. You just have to keep showing up. That’s exactly what Make A Way Media is dedicated to helping you do: creating the tools and resources parents and educators need to raise great humans, not perfect ones.
If you’re looking for more support along the way, we have two free resources to help.
Free Resources for Parents and Educators
The K Club is full of social emotional learning guides designed to make these conversations easier, whether you’re at home or in the classroom. And our Hoping Skills Workbook gives kids hands-on tools to build hope, resilience, and emotional awareness, one page at a time.
Both are free, and both are built to meet you exactly where you are. Just click the bolded letters to sign up.
FAQs About Teaching Empathy and Love
At what age can I start teaching empathy?
You can start fostering empathy as early as the toddler years using simple language like naming feelings and modeling care for others.
For elementary-age children, many of the activities listed above work well. Kids at this age can start connecting feelings to actions, imagining how someone else might feel, and practicing small responses like checking in on a friend or including someone who’s left out.
For middle schoolers and teens, empathy conversations often work better as ongoing dialogue than direct instruction. At this age, kids can grasp more nuanced perspective-taking, are starting to understand conflicting feelings, and social dynamics. Teens may also push back on advice, so modeling empathy through your own actions often teaches more than any conversation could.
Empathy isn’t something children master at a certain age and move past. It’s a skill that grows as kids do, which means the conversations are never really finished. They just keep evolving.
What’s the difference between empathy and sympathy?
Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone. Empathy is trying to understand and share in what someone else is feeling. Teaching empathy helps children connect, not just observe.
My child seems disinterested in these conversations. What should I do?
That’s normal, especially with older kids. Sometimes the most effective conversations happen sideways, in the car or during a shared task, etc. Empathy activities don’t need to be announced lessons. Let them slide into your everyday life.