Download Roots of Empathy (ROE) The program centres around nine themes

Roots of Empathy (ROE)
The program centres around nine themes:
 meeting the baby
 crying
 caring and planning for baby
 emotions
 sleep
 Safety
 communicating and
 Who Am I?
For each theme there are three lessons: pre-visit, family visit and post-visit.
At the pre-visit, the facilitator provides information and learning about the theme and seeks questions
from the youth to be put to the parent.
At each family visit, we ask what the baby can do now, demonstrate through use of toys the physical
and cognitive development that has occurred and speak with the parent about the theme and ask the
students’ questions.
Post-visits include reflection on what was observed, what this tells us about the baby’s physical,
psychological and emotional development, and is then related to the students’ own relationships and
experiences.
We often use story books selected specifically for the ROE program used at pre and post-visits that talk
about recognizing emotions of oneself and others, expressing feelings, impacts of negative relationship
experiences and how youth can support someone in a challenging situation.
Temperament is also a big part of the curriculum and helping students learn that this is an inborn set of
traits with which we each come into the world and that vary on a continuum. A person’s temperament
will contribute to how they manage new or stressful situations. We look to the baby to identify
temperament traits and then have the youth reflect on their own temperaments.
The traits included in the ROE program include activity level, intensity (degree of energy in response to
positive or negative situations), sensitivity (threshold of responsiveness), first reaction
(approach/withdrawal in novel situations), adaptability (adjustment), mood (disposition), persistence
(response to challenge), distractibility, and rhythm (regularity of biological functions).
The match between caregiver and infant temperament can be a good or poor match and we talk about
adults needing to be the ones to read temperament cues to respond to the baby in a nurturing and
soothing way and how conflicts between temperaments can create parenting struggles and baby
distress.
Along with temperament goes attachment. Bonding is one small part of attachment. Attachment
patterns help the baby develop expectations of the world to meet their needs and are the blueprint for
their relationships through life.
Secure attachment is important for babies to help them remain calm, be able to self-sooth, and know
that an adult will respond to their distress; this eventually leads to their capacity for self-regulation in
stressful situations as they grow and develop and move away from the caregiver to explore the world on
their own.
Neuroscience is also part of the teaching. We explore how the baby’s brain develops through experience
and how neural pathways are formed through repeated exposure to situations. We talk about how their
brains were organized through their own experiences and how this leads to our patterns of interacting
with the world.
When the baby is present in the class, we look for signs that neural development has occurred by seeing
what they can do now that they couldn’t do before, i.e., holding one ball in each hand vs one ball in two
hands - a precursor to activities that cross midline, such as reading.