This is the transcript of a podcast episode. You can listen to the episode here. The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Katharine Manning: Hello everybody! Today, I’m talking with Lynne Azarchi, who is the founder and executive director of the Kidsbridge Tolerance Center, an immersive small group discussion learning lab for youth and teachers. Lynne has spent the last 18 years creating programs and interactive experiences dealing with anti-bullying, anti-biased empathy, respect, diversity appreciation, and accurate Native American history.

This unique center currently features facilitator led remote social, emotional programs for youth from pre-K through eighth grade, more than 30,000 students and educators have participated in the kids’ bridge learning experience. Lynne also has a new book coming out on November 4th. It’s called The Empathy Advantage. In it, she shares first, that empathy can be taught and second, that any parent caregiver or educator can do it. Lynne, it is so wonderful to have you here. 

Lynne Azarchi: Well, thank you for having me, Katharine. 

Katharine Manning: I have just a few introductory questions for you, just to help people get to know you a little bit better if you don’t mind. So first, where did you grow up, Lynne?

Lynne Azarchi: I actually grew up in this area, in Trenton, New Jersey. I left, I went to college and lived in different places around the country, raised a family. And we sort of backed into this area. My husband worked in New York City. I did not. I did Kidsbridge and other things, so it is a commuter community to New York and Philly. It’s a great place to live and raise kids, an hour to New York, an hour to Philly, and an hour to the shore. We love it here. 

Katharine Manning: That’s great. You have one of my favorite senators, Cory Booker. 

Lynne Azarchi: Yeah. We are blessed in New Jersey. 

Katharine Manning: Yeah. And he’s definitely somebody who models great empathy. 

Lynne Azarchi: He does. He does. And let me tell you, he is an amazing speaker, one of the most amazing speakers I’ve ever heard. I mean, without reading a word, he just can talk about any subject. You know, and go on and, and speak really eloquently. 

Katharine Manning: Yeah. I’ve seen him speak once actually. And I read his book. He has an autobiography. It was just great. So yeah, way to go, New Jersey. Okay. So what was your first job first ever? 

Lynne Azarchi: My first job, like in high school, I think I was a camp counselor actually in the summer. So my first real job is kind of interesting coming out of college, where I went for interviews. And, people would say, how fast can you type?

And I would say, no, you don’t understand. I went to college. I have a mind, like my typing speed is not really an issue important here. And it was really a struggle at that time as a woman coming out of college getting like, hitting the wall where people saw my gender first. So, um, I actually did get my first job at American Trucking Association. I was a reach research analyst, surrounded by men, of course. And it was a great first job. I got to travel the country and did research and proposals. But, God hit by that gender thing pretty early. 

Katharine Manning: [00:03:10] Wow. And I also love that your very first job was a camp counselor. So you were working with kids.

Lynne Azarchi: Oh yeah. Yeah. Always liked kids and always wanted to have kids.

Katharine Manning: [00:03:20] Oh, that’s great. Okay. Lynne, I want to talk about your current job, but I want to give you a sort of fun challenge with that. Can you describe your current job using only three verbs? 

Lynne Azarchi: I’ll take the challenge. So the first thing I would say is teaching because we are teaching, my staff, we’re teaching each other with cultural competency and we’re of course, teaching children. I would say we are listening and learning, you know, active listening, which I can talk about later that the way to learn is really, taking information in and processing it, but we need to listen to others and we need to do that better in society.

That’s part of what’s in my book. And I guess the other verb, if you’ll, excuse me, is empathize. Right? So, the way we express this to children is walking in someone else’s shoes. So that’s an active expression where by empathizing with that person and being that person. I think it makes for a better child, a better parent, a better adult, a better, you know, society and community.

So empathizing is what I’m here to talk about today and what I express in my book. 

Katharine Manning: [00:04:38] That is excellent. Okay. And then the final, uh, get to know you one is just for fun. And that is just, can you tell us something that has been making you happy lately? And it can be just a silly TV show or a movie or a book or some new hobby or something. Just something that you’ve enjoyed lately. 

Lynne Azarchi: Well, I probably from the challenging society and what we have today, you know, in the media. And the political situation, I, a duck and cover and hide in Turner Broadcasting. And I watch old movies from the thirties or the twenties or the forties where no one gets murdered and no one gets hurt.

And, you know, it’s just a silly escape for me or, or reading, but yeah, those movies are, it just, it’s an innocent escape. And sometimes just at the end of the day, I need to like, vacate and rest my mind. 

Katharine Manning: [00:05:31] Oh, that’s great. You know, I never, I never watched those kinds of movies. Do you have a recommendation for a really good one?

Lynne Azarchi: Well, Fred Astaire, ginger Rogers, gene Kelly, Lana Turner. I could go on and on. 

Katharine Manning: So fun, like just dance and escape. 

Lynne Azarchi: And musicals, you know? You have an emotion coming up and you sing about it. 

Katharine Manning: That sounds great.  All right. So now I want to hear a little bit about the book. Tell me about what the book is about and what inspired you to write it and why it’s so important right now.

Lynne Azarchi: So, my journey, I’ve been 18 years with the Kingsbridge Tolerance Center and long story short, I guess. I, you know, empathy seemed very, very important. And then I came to, we were doing primary research with the kids we’re teaching and I felt, and I wasn’t reading this, that empathy to me is job one.

It’s where you need to begin as the foundation for me, for social emotional skills. It’s really what we need to imbue and teach to our children. So I started asking around and in the literature, empathy can’t be taught, you know, you’re born with what you’re born with and you can’t teach empathy.

And I took the dare and looking at the research, there really wasn’t a lot. So we did pre and post surveys with kids coming to the Tolerance Center. And I measured, my staff measured statistically significant improvements in empathy. And I thought, aha, the conversations with people, no, no empathy can’t be taught. So then I was on, you know, a Clarion call to share this information with other people. Yes. Empathy can be taught. Yes, it is to me, to you the most important social, emotional skill. And yes, parents can do a better job. Teachers can do a better job, that they’d be strategic.

Katharine Manning: [00:07:26] Excellent. there’s a lot of what you said that I want to circle back onto first. Can you talk just a little bit more about the research that you did. This is obviously very personally important to me because it’s a subject area that I care about a lot.

And I know that there is this perception that empathy is kind of hardwired. You know, that you are either an empathetic person or not, or at least it’s on a spectrum you’re more empathetic or not, and it’s just kind of the way you were born. So can you talk a little bit about what research you did and what you found?

Lynne Azarchi: So here’s the research that I found that. Everyone is born with an X amount of empathy, sort of following a bell curve. So you’re born with a little bit of empathy or a medium amount of empathy, or a lot of empathy.

I have shown that you can increase that amount of empathy. How did we do it? So all the activities, you know, if you remember back to the time where we had a field trip, kids were come to the Center for four hours. And before they did anything, we sat them down. They would take a pre survey on paper with empathetic questions, you know, asking them if they would walk in someone else’s shoes, asking them if they saw a child sitting alone at lunch, what would they do?

So having those sorts of questions, asking them how they felt. And what they would do. And then they go through the Kidsbridge experience, round robin activities, which are teaching children to walk in other people’s shoes, in terms of bias, prejudice, discrimination, bullying scenarios, exclusion scenarios–four hours goes by, they had a good time.

And then the last thing they do is they take this post survey. These surveys were collected. We worked in tandem with the College of New Jersey, which is a local college, a couple of miles down the road from here and for free, which is a wonderful blessing. The college students would analyze the data. And we found not always, um, statistically significant improvements in attitude for empathy and other things for empowerment, for stereotype knowledge.

We went and we got into mindfulness. So if an activity did not improve the attitudes, we would shake up the activity, change, delete it. So this was a learning process for us. If the activity didn’t merit improvements, then we would have to change the activity. So it taught us how to make our activities more effective. 

Katharine Manning: [00:10:00] Did you follow up later? 

Lynne Azarchi: That’s a really good question. So we were really, Kidsbridge, striving for grants where we can follow these kids for two or three years, but we actually did follow up with some kids in an elementary school to see that the empathy improvements were sustained. Not surprisingly that, you know, we weren’t with them every week or every month, the empathy numbers did drop because they weren’t being reminded. But, there were still improvements, although they weren’t as strong as when they just had left.

So, the net result for this is one, it’d be great if we could, as a society, make a commitment to be that holistic, continual reminder and charter to instill and inspire empathy in our kids and then teachers as well that we can coach teachers to be better at inculcating empathy in their kids.

Katharine Manning: [00:10:58] Yeah. Well, so I would love to hear then, you know, it sounds like there is some real benefit to incorporating this on a more regular basis, on an ongoing basis. So what are the tips or activities or projects that you share with educators, parents, people who love kids, to help build and sustain empathy in kids? And I would also love to hear how that changes depending on the ages of the kids.

Lynne Azarchi: Thank you for asking. So in my book, I encourage parents and teachers to start early. You can start in preschool. Developmentally as they get older the tips and the coaching, of course, changes. But racism starts at three and bullying starts at three, where kids are preferring, you know, in-group biases.

If we start early with preschoolers and then work our way up, and then we’re consistently doing this, we can really inculcate even more empathy. And so the benefits are with more empathy, your children’s people skills will be strengthened. I have research in my book that shows people with empathy make the best leaders. The best team, you know, the best team players. And so this is for the benefit–it really prepares your child to be stronger and more successful in the workplace. In terms of empathy builders, I think that the easiest thing to understand is active listening. Right? So we listen, but what is active listening? So put down your phone and look at your child. In the face. More face-to-face skills. Media is taking away face-to-face time and it really has a detrimental impact on children’s active listening. 

You can practice it, you can do this with your significant others and spouse. I’m encouraging family meetings where you devote some of your time face-to-face to make it empathy, fun time. You know, you start with icebreakers and you can share empathy moments. You know, things they did, that each member did, when they were kind, empathetic. In terms of being out and about in your car, I know with COVID community activities are a little bit more challenging, but you know, in your car, looking at people, walking down the street, “Who is that man? What is his story?” You know, why does he, you know, maybe he’s a homeless person, you know, did he serve in the war? Just trying to get your kids practicing to jump into the shoes of other people that they see. Imagination and creativity are important components for creativity. So, yeah, with COVID now that sort of brought us to a stop, but this over-scheduling of children where they have no play time and no time to play in the backyard or, you know, take a nature walk or something.

So that’s another recommendation. No phones during meals, no phones after 10 o’clock, you know, developmentally adjust that for the age of the kid, but you know, be more mindful of increasing your face-to-face time.

And I have a chart in my book where you can chart for the week how much face time you are spending with each member of your family and also the media time. You know, what movie did you watch? Was it a violent movie? Wasn’t not a violent movie? Right? Did you process the media with your kids? Okay. Let’s say you watch a movie that scares your child.

Okay. So after the movie, instead of thinking, like, Oh, darn it. I shouldn’t have watched that movie with your child, process the movie with your child. Ask them, What did you like? What did you not like? What was scary? And then you can discuss empathy in the movie. What characters were kind and respectful? What characters were not kind and respectful? What would you do in that situation where Bobby takes a toy from his sister, you know, all just more prompts, more conversations, more active listening for movies, for media, for books. And then let me segue into books. Let’s please keep reading books to kids.

For me, my kids growing up, it was always right before they went to bed, we would read a book and there’s so many fun things you can do with empathy and books. So here’s one of my favorites, you know, everybody knows the three little pigs, right? Well, there’s a book and I’m sorry, I don’t have the name, where this guy flips it and he makes the wolf, the nice person. And then three little pigs are mean. So like he had empathy for that wolf. So it’s just, you know, fun to play with literature. I write some questions, you know, in the book, but you can also make your own questions, where you encourage your child or student.

And I think, you know, teachers can do this in school. You encourage them to walk in the shoes of different characters or characters you may not expect. For example, do you remember The Little Engine that Could, that went up the mountain? I think I can. I think I can. Right? So you’re thinking about the little engine and the little engine’s world.

Well, what about the boys and girls who are writing for their toys? What about, how are they feeling? Right. So like, you can really jump into any character in a book, so be creative and have fun with that.

Katharine Manning: [00:16:32] I think that was fabulous. And, just to piggyback on your point about reading, I mean, we are big readers in my household. I’ve always been a huge reader, a bookworm. I saw recently, an article, they did a study and found that even in adults, that reading enhanced empathy, Specifically, it had to be literary fiction, that literary fiction tended to enhance empathy. And I think it’s because it makes you see more the world from the perspective of the characters in the book. You know, it’s a deeper immersion in that world. I think it’s so important for all of us to keep reading. And I totally agree, reading with your kids is such a great opportunity to have some of these conversations.

I will never forget, I was reading to my daughter,  you know, the Narnia books, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And so do you remember the moment where Edmund goes into the wardrobe and he’s just been making fun of Lucy, his little sister, for making up this whole world of Narnia. And he goes in, and then is in Narnia and he meets the white witch and afterward, you know, he’s kind of sitting there for a moment. And I said to my daughter, how do you think he’s feeling right now? 

She said, well, he’s probably kind of scared because that, which seemed kind of scary. And he also is probably kinda mad because he was wrong and he’s probably feeling kind of embarrassed because he made fun of his sister and she was right. And also probably his tummy aches because he just ate all of that candy. 

Lynne Azarchi: That is so perfect, what you did, because you’re practicing. And the key to this is practicing empathy in reading this book and discussing it. So then coaching, you know, the parents, adults who are listening, it’s that if you have a half an hour to read, read 25 minutes and spend five minutes with these discussions. How was that character? Just what you did, but, but don’t read and not discuss and process because you know, you’re leaving your child and what do you think your child’s doing when you leave the room? They’re thinking about what you just read to them and discussing it in their own mind alone. Discuss it together.

And maybe, you know, you might have to comfort them. You might have to point out something they didn’t realize. So reading is like the best. 

Katharine Manning: [00:18:54] Yeah. So I would love to hear your thoughts too–I mean, we’re in this challenging time for parents, right? The distance learning, and then, you know, some schools districts are in a hybrid program and kids are being given this message that other people are kind of dangerous right now. And I think some kids I’ve seen, you know, in my neighborhood, some kids are just like, well, I’m just never going to leave the house again. I’m afraid now. And I wonder about how that is affecting their social and emotional development and how that is affecting their empathy. Do you have some thoughts you could share with us on that?

Lynne Azarchi: [Well, sadly I sure do. You know, we’ve never had this social distancing in itself, you know, that you can’t hug and touch and pat is so discomforting. So that’s very stressful, but quarantining and the isolation, you know, all these things are the antipathy of empathy and generating empathy.

That’s the tough part. What a benefit, a silver lining is that families are spending more time together. Not rushing, not over-scheduled. And actually, you know, spending more quality time together, maybe nature walks. So, it is a time to take advantage of that.

You know, parents are working from home, which also is stressful because they have to teach their kids and then, you know, work at home. But the silver lining is more time at home and take advantage of it. So all the things, again that I have in my book–the reading, how to read differently, family meetings, face to face.

Different members can spend time with each other and maybe chart some of this stuff. And you know, like it takes a couple of minutes. It’s not a big thing to really chart your face to face time now during COVID. And then when COVID is over, don’t forget about empathy, you know, and face-to-face time, things you can do talk about the empathy and the compassion– the frontline workers, the doctors, the nurses, I mean, look at the empathy they have, some of them risking their lives for other people. I mean, that’s so wonderful. And, and commendable. Teachers are so stressed now, doing the hybrid model, trying to teach through a computer, through Zoom or Google meets. This is really going to have some challenges where I think after COVID, the kids will be, may not have the best algebra and geometry skills, but where we really need, in my opinion, to pay more attention, are those social emotional skills. So after COVID lifts to be more nurturing, listen, more actively do more things together, you know, don’t over-schedule your kids. Spend time with them even after COVID, that you can use empathy to reduce the stress, reduce the anxiety, and bring the trauma down a little bit.

Mindfulness is something that we use in the Kidsbridge Tolerance Center, because I noticed anxiety and stress levels were rising like five or six years ago. And I think it’s, it’s mostly because of media. So mindfulness, breathing. With the little kids we do belly breathing. Please integrate mindfulness now, during COVID. You can do it five minutes a day. The whole family can do it. You can do it separately. So those are some things you can do to alleviate the stress and anxiety we’re all feeling.  

Katharine Manning: [00:22:31] Yeah, thank you. That’s really helpful. And I think there is also maybe a message that we can be gleaning right now about the importance of empathy with, you know, we are wearing masks to protect each other.

Lynne Azarchi: Yeah. Good point. Right. So it’s really important and yes, it is an act of empathy. 

Katharine Manning: [00:22:49] Yeah. And can you talk a little bit too about, you know, we’re in this time of a real national conversation and reckoning with institutional racism. I see in my teens that they are very aware of this and concerned about it.

And I know a lot of people are across the country are and it’s a challenging issue, for adults to wrap their minds around, let alone for kids to. Do you have any advice about talking to kids about that? 

Lynne Azarchi: I sure do. And that would be using empathy again. So this is where we, we walk in the shoes of other people and it can create empathy because we can do so much a better job in terms of diversity appreciation. So what is diversity appreciation? We understand diversity, we welcome diversity. We embrace it. You know, this one, this child has this for lunch. This child wears, you know, a hijab. This child, you know, wears these particular kinds of clothes. So for children and adults, if we’re all the same, you know, it would be so, so boring.

Again, developmentally from kids to adults, that we walk in the shoes of others. I said to you before, Kidsbridge starts at four and five years old because that’s really the time where kids, they see color, they see differences. A lot of parents and teachers are uncomfortable to have these discussions and then we have them too late, you know, like we’re having these conversations as adults.

Let’s look five, 10, 15 years down the road. Let’s have these conversations now, so with kids that they expect the conversations and there’s no tenseness or anxiety because they’re used to having these conversations. Jumping to adults, you know, here let’s jump in the shoes of an African-American mother. A woman I know has two Black sons, they’re in their twenties and they’re afraid to leave the house. So let’s walk in her shoes. I mean, these are not little kids–these are adults, from what is all going on, you know, in our world today, these are two young boys in their twenties are afraid to leave in the house.

What does it feel like to be them? Let’s jump in the shoes of a Native American on a reservation in Arizona during COVID time. You have this reservation, but you don’t have running water, and you can’t wash your hands and the foods are not coming as fast. So we can walk in the shoes as adults or kids to be an Asian person where people are screaming at Asian teenagers that COVID is their fault.

So what does that feel like to be a person walking down the street to hear that? So I could go on and on—LGBT, Latinx, the epithets, you know, of people from Mexico. Why are we taking the time to make other people feel so bad? We’re all human. We were all born on this beautiful planet. So, there’s just so much more we can do in terms of learning to embrace and appreciate others.

Katharine Manning: [00:26:00] Yeah. Thank you for that. And it sounds like, you know, you, you were saying like, let’s jump in the shoes of this person. It sounds like part of what you would recommend is almost a role-playing, like, let me just try to think about what it would feel like to be, as you’ve said, walking in this person’s shoes. Like, what does the world look like? What is my experience like? And so that sort of dovetails with the imaginative play we were talking about earlier. Do I have that right? 

Lynne Azarchi: You absolutely have it right. So the most effective tools actually, we have at the Tolerance Center are role-plays, skit scenarios.

And for the little ones we have puppet shows. So let me start with the puppet shows. Cause they’re fun. And parents can do this in their homes. Everyone makes, you know, a stick puppet. And then you put the puppets in the scenario of, I’m a girl being excluded for some reason, maybe they don’t like her lunch or her dress, or she’s a new girl to school and she’s sitting alone in a classroom. Let your family act out how they welcome that child. Typically we do a lot of bullying scenarios. So a scenario where a child is being bullied, let’s break that up. Let’s tell an adult. You know, what is the right behavior to show?

So puppet shows, then as the kids get older, we do role play. Here’s the scenario. And, and typically we get the scenarios from the teachers, because they say, we’re having a problem with this clique. We’re having a problem with that. So families can do this in their homes. They can role play, What did you hear last week that bothered you?

Play that out because typically, as you know, Katharine, as adults, something happens and we go, Oh, I wish I had done that. I wish I had said that. We’re not practiced and ready. So the underlying theme for the role-play and the puppet shows is practice, so that when you are called a name, tomorrow, next week, when you’re excluded in a month, when you hear somebody say a stereotype, you stop that. You’re ready and prepared to say something. So it’s practice, practice, practice.  

Katharine Manning: [00:28:07] This is really teaching you how to be a person in the world.  For sure there are a lot of challenges around teasing and bullying in elementary school and middle school and high school, but it’s not like once you’re an adult, Thank goodness, we don’t have to deal with that anymore. I mean, there’s always going to be challenges around people who are not treating you appropriately. And if we can teach kids the self-compassion, the confidence early on, that’s going to carry them through life. 

Lynne Azarchi: [00:28:37] Amen. And then it’s like, it’s their nature. I mean, there are more strategies in my book that, you can tell an adult, you can walk out, walk a victim away, you can, you know, all these different strategies. So be aware that your child can pick six or seven things to do. It’s not like when someone does X to you, you do Y. There are choices and considerations. And then your child may pick the wrong strategy, and then you discuss that at home. Then you say, okay, let’s try a different strategy when you get called a name. So it’s just the power of options and knowledge and information that parents can be more strategic, more powerful, teaching their children to be self-advocates, and to advocate for others ultimately. And I think empathy is the springboard to all of these things

Katharine Manning: [00:29:30] Fantastic. I could not agree more. All right, Lynne, I am so excited for your book because I think it is going to make such a difference in the world. How do people find you find the book, learn more about Kidsbridge?

Lynne Azarchi: Well, thank you for asking that because the purpose of this book is to help adults, because I really think children, especially now, are suffering. I know, you know, bullying is up and a lack of diversity is up and the media is going crazy and we really need to help each other and definitely help our kids more. And our students–shout out to teachers. So, I have a website and, it is, um, you can just search Lynne Azarchi or the title of the book is the Empathy Advantage: Coaching Kids to be Kind, Respectful, and Successful. I’m on social media. The book is being published by Roman and Littlefield and you can buy from Roman and Littlefield and you can also buy it from independent book sellers, which we want to help at these times. Right? They’re small businesses we want to support. Also Barnes and noble. 

Katharine Manning: [00:30:39] I’m thinking now about, I want to make a gift of the book to each of my kids’ schools. 

Lynne Azarchi: Oh, that’s so nice. 

Katharine Manning: [00:30:47] Yeah. I think it’s really important for this to be available to the teachers. Absolutely. All right.

So we will include in the notes for the episode links to your website, links to Kidsbridge. Are you doing distance activities through Kidsbridge right now?

Lynne Azarchi: We got shut down, so we pivoted quickly to create, and I invite people, to see, Kidsbridge at Home. There’s 70 interactive face-to-face activities that you can do with your kids and they’re free, free, free on the Kidsbridge website. And that’s kidsbridgecenter.org. So please take advantage of that. Then in the summer we realized we’re not going to be in the schools and we had to pivot again.

So yes, we created a remote virtual program. It’s called Kidsbridge Connects for Schools and starting a, we’re actually looking for a grant to do a preschool now because you know, again, social emotional skills, not ideal over the computer, but it’s what we have. And so now we are in Trenton, which is our closest city doing third and fifth grade, teaching social, emotional skills through Zoom and Google meets in our local schools. And we’re going to roll that out in January so we can do that, like anywhere in the country. So we’re busy you know, teaching diversity appreciation, kindness, respect of course, empathy, and empowerment. 

Katharine Manning: [00:32:10] Absolutely. Thank you so much, Lynne. Thank you for this conversation. Thank you for everything you are doing out in the world. 

Lynne Azarchi: Well, we’re trying, and I’m blessed with a wonderful board of directors and staff, and a supportive family that allowed me to take the time to write this book. And good luck to you. I’m looking forward to your book. It sounds very, very interesting. 

Katharine Manning: [00:32:30] Thank you. Thank you so much. And, as I said, we’re going to include in the episode notes, links to all of that. I hope that more people connect with you find you and go buy that book. 

Lynne Azarchi: Okay. All right. You be well, thank you.

Katharine Manning: You too. Take care.