The Compassionate Instinct

It is enormously powerful to say things like this to our kids, to teach them that we need not respond to an individual who acts unpleasantly by getting angry—or, for that matter, by blaming ourselves. Rather, we can attempt to enter the world of that other person. It’s our choice: Every day our children can watch us as we imagine someone else’s point of view—or they can watch us remain self-centered. Every day they can witness our efforts to see strangers as human beings—or they can witness our failure to do so.

Besides setting an example, we can also encourage perspective taking by discussing books and television shows with our kids in a way that highlights the characters’ diverse perspectives. (“We’re seeing all of this through the eyes of the doctor, aren’t we? But what do you think the little girl is feeling about what just happened?”) We can even use perspective taking as a tool to help siblings resolve their conflicts. “Okay,” we might say, after a blowup. “Tell me what just happened, but pretend you’re your brother and describe how things might have seemed to him.”

Finally, we can help younger children become more sensitive to others’ emotions by gently directing their attention to someone’s tone of voice, posture, or facial expression and by inviting them to reflect on what that person might be thinking and how he or she might be feeling. The point here is to build a skill (learning how to read other people), but also to promote a disposition (wanting to know how others are feeling and being willing to figure it out): “I know Grandma said it would be okay to go on another walk with you, but I noticed that she paused a few seconds before agreeing. And did you see how tired she seemed when she sat down just now?”

The very act of teaching kids to pick up on such cues can help them to develop the habit of seeing more deeply into others. It will encourage them to experience the world as another person does and perhaps to get a feel for what it’s like to be that other person. This is a major step toward wanting to help rather than to hurt—and, ultimately, toward becoming a better person oneself.

CAN I TRUST YOU? A CONVERSATION BETWEEN PAUL EKMAN AND HIS DAUGHTER EVE

Jason Marsh

GROWING UP IN SAN FRANCISCO, a city renowned for its hedonism, Eve Ekman faced more than her fair share of temptations, especially when she got involved in the local punk scene as a teenager. Like most adolescents, she felt the urge to do some things she knew her parents wouldn’t approve of—go to clubs on weeknights, dabble with alcohol and marijuana—and which would require lying about where she was going and what she planned to do once she got there.

But unlike those other kids, Eve has a father who is one of the world’s leading experts on detecting lies. Paul Ekman, a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, pioneered the scientific study of facial expressions and body language. For more than 50 years, his research has identified how emotions are subtly expressed through nonverbal cues; for much of that time, he has devoted special attention to how and why people tell lies and how others can catch those lies. His work has been used by police departments, teachers, and even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In 2001, the American Psychological Association named Ekman one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century.

It sounds like every kid’s worst nightmare: the parent who always knows whether you’re telling the truth. But when it came down to it, Paul Ekman’s scientific expertise on lying was of limited usefulness to Paul Ekman the parent.

“I have been studying lying professionally for more than 20 years, but it was not easy to deal with it as a parent,” he wrote in his 1989 book, Why Kids Lie: How Parents Can Encourage Truthfulness, which includes chapters by his wife, Mary Ann Mason, a professor and former dean at the University of California, Berkeley, and his son Tom, Eve’s older brother. Indeed, as that book makes clear, it is one thing to be able to catch a kid in a lie; it’s something very different to be able to raise a trustworthy child.

So how does an expert on lying, deception, and truthfulness try to foster trust and trustworthiness? Paul and Eve, who is now 28, recently sat down with Greater Good’s editor-in-chief, Jason Marsh, to discuss the benefits of trusting your kids (even when it’s nerve-wracking to do so), how to encourage trustworthy behavior, and what it takes to build trust between parents and children.

EVE EKMAN: Do you ever remember catching me for anything when I broke your trust, or a time you caught me dead in a lie?