It's Compassion That Gets Stuff Done

We often conflate the words "reason" and "logic," but as psychologist Julian Jaynes put it, "Reasoning and logic are to each other as health is to medicine, or -- better -- as conduct is to morality."

No one, including even the youngest child, does anything without a reason. It may not be logical; indeed, on a day-to-day basis, our reasoning is likely not at all logical. Logic is a product of conscious thought, employed when our goal is objective truth, whereas reasoning, a product of our lower level cognitive processes, is concerned primarily with survival.

Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinkler asserts, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness." In his book The Case Against Reality, another cognitive psychologist, David Hoffman, makes the case, logically, that the world as we perceive it is almost certainly not the world as it actually is. Our eyes take in photons from the world which our minds then construct into what we know as, say, a tree, not as it is, but rather in a way that serves our survival. If one were capable of applying pure logic to day-to-day life, one might well perceive and appreciate the truth of the molecular and biological operations occurring at the base of that tree, but the reason you run away is because there's a freaking tiger crouching there!

When a child, or anyone, is behaving "unreasonably," rest assured that they have their reasons. This is why, if we are to help them, logic generally doesn't get us anywhere. It's why when we say such logical things as, "There's nothing to be afraid of," or "That's nothing to cry about," or even, "You're okay," we are, at best, wasting our breath. At worst, we're expressing doubt about their lived experience, telling them, in effect, that their own reasoning is to not be trusted. We're insisting upon truth when, in fact, their reasoning, which is derived from a stew of emotion, unconscious cognitive processes, and unreliable memory, is perfectly valid. There is something to be afraid of: the evidence is that I'm afraid. There is something to cry about. I'm not okay.

If we hope to help them, we help them best when we first accept their reasoning, even if it doesn't seem logical to us. We say, "You are afraid." "You are sad." "You are hurt." Now, we are at least seeing the same tree, the same tiger. 

This doesn't mean that we ourselves are afraid, sad, or hurt. When this happens, we call it empathy, a powerful perspective that helps us understand what other people are going through by feeling it ourselves. The weakness of empathy, however, is that it involves feeling with other people. As we know, these kinds of negative feelings are exhausting and ultimately incapacitating. I know many early childhood educators who describe themselves as "empaths," which probably explains, in part, why they are always so emotionally drained at the end of the day. When we allow ourselves to feel another person's fear, sadness, or anger, when we try to connect with them by saying things like "That frightens me too," "I'm also sad," or "It hurts me as much as it hurts you," we become as useless to them as we are when we appeal to logic.

They don't need to know that we're in the throes with them any more than they need us to logic them out of their reasons.

What children, or anyone in distress, needs is our compassion, which is feeling for them, rather than with them. "(U)like empathy," write Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind, "compassion doesn't sap our energy." And it's our loving energy that they need: not our logic or our empathy. It's compassion that allows us to be the calming presence they need beside them as they work through their completely reasonable emotions. It's compassion that gives us the energy and insight to know when they need a hug or to be reminded to breathe or when to try getting on with their life of doing.

Logic and empathy are amazing things. They are, in many ways, the crowning achievements of our species. But it's compassion that gets stuff done.

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