In a recent poll by Amnesty International UK, parents were asked to select the pastime from a list of activities that they believed developed their child’s empathy the most, and reading took the top spot! This will come as no surprise to you readers of course, but the results are quite astonishing with over half of all parents polled saying reading was the best way to learn to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.
A staggering 53% chose reading, adding weight to previous academic findings that reading does in fact increase empathy in children, teaching children about social communication and understanding others.
In the secondary part of the poll, parents were asked to choose books that they believed would help children develop empathy and here’s the list:
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – J. K Rowling
Would you agree with that list? It didn’t include many modern titles such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or Wonder, and is maybe dominated from books popular when each parent was young.
Interestingly we did our own list of books that help children build empathy, and there are many crossover results between this ten from Amnesty and our top 20. Amnesty used over 900 parents for the study, and our own list was created from the answers of almost 1,000 users.
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