"Use your words" is easy advice to give and hard advice to follow when you're six and overwhelmed. Empathy — recognizing what someone else might be feeling — is the skill underneath that advice, and like most skills, it responds to practice.
Recognition comes before response
Before a child can respond kindly to a friend's sadness, they need to first recognize it. Games that show a facial expression or a scenario and ask "how might they be feeling?" — like Emotions Learning — build that recognition step in a low-stakes way, with no real friendship on the line while they're still learning.
Why this matters long-term
The Child Mind Institute links early social-emotional skill-building to better peer relationships and emotional regulation well into adolescence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also frames social-emotional development as a core childhood milestone worth actively nurturing, not something that simply happens on its own.
Try this at home
- Narrate your own feelings out loud ("I'm a little frustrated the traffic is slow").
- After a disagreement, ask "what do you think they were feeling?" before "who was right?"
- Praise the attempt to comfort someone, even if it's clumsy.
Our Social & Life Skills category has more games built around exactly this kind of practice — friendship-building, kindness, and reading social cues.