Some Final Thoughts on Perspective Taking

This very cool child is Jong, who is now obviously old enough to be in college (but undoubtedly still cool!), and is the author of our final entry on chapter 2. Happy reading!

The second chapter in Galinsky’s book addressed perspective taking skills in children. In this chapter, the author presented nine suggestions to help parents teach and understand their children. The majority of the nine suggestions were simply commonsense to parents. Galinsky stated that perspective taking is important because it helps children to make sense of their own and others’ experiences. After reading this chapter, I found that some of the suggestions were similar to what my parents taught me when I was younger. However, Galinsky’s suggestions helped me to further understand things that could be beneficial towards my work in the field of Child Development.

Of all the suggestions that the author offered in the second chapter, the ones that most stood out to me were suggestions five and seven. Suggestion five talked about the feelings between parents and their children. This suggestion caused me to think back on my younger years and made me realize I had learned perspective taking from my parents. I found that I like putting myself in other people’s shoes. I want to experience the feelings and reactions that others have towards a certain situation. As long as I can remember, my mom has always explained her feelings to me and also wanted me to do the same. This behavior became so ingrained that now whenever I am mad at someone, I have to explain the reason why I am angry. She advised me that the best way to cope with anger was to act as if everything was fine, and then isolate myself by going into my bedroom to scream out loud.

Galinsky’s seventh suggestion was about pretend play and is very important in perspective taking. Children have to pretend in order to experience what others lives are like. The example that was given for suggestion seven was pretending to be mommies and daddies. This example reminded me of my younger years when my siblings and I used to play house together. I remember that my older brother John played the dad, my sister Mai played the mom, my other sister Bee was the grandmother, while the rest of us were either the children or the pretend store owner. Our pretend play would always take place outside in the garden. We would make-believe that the sand, water, grass, and everything else we could find was the food; we pretended to cook and eat it. It was just a part of being a kid, but I remember we would get in trouble all the time because we never cleaned up after ourselves. However, in today’s society, things are different because you hardly see any children playing house outside anymore. In this generation, I tend to see more boys into video games and girls into make-up.

In conclusion, perspective taking will always be a part of daily life, no matter the age of the person, because we continue to use these skills throughout life. In other words, we must learn perspective taking ourselves in order to understand it and teach it to our children. Reading the chapter about perspective taking has led me to conclude that it will be beneficial for me when working with children in the future.