I have eagerly waited years for the exciting time when I would be able to re-read the Harry Potter series with my children. During the fall of 2024, that moment finally arrived. We have flown through the books, about one per month, with a notable lag around the holiday season. At the end of book two, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, my nearly 8 year old son was listening on the edge of the book nook cushion to how in the world Harry was going to get around He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named again. When I began reading the last chapter, after all of our reader anxiety was quelled when Harry, yet again, escapes the near clutches of Voldemort, my son said, "can you imagine how scared he is in the castle? He's locked in that castle with something chasing them and they don't know what it is. I bet that is so scary."
In my reading performance, bringing as much cliff hanging drama to their Harry Potter experience as I can possibly muster, I, of course, had not been expecting to hear such *empathy* from my son. It caught me off guard in the absolute best way, and I smiled to myself, completely blessed by this other, totally significant byproduct of reading.
Of course, reading teaches all kinds of things -- new words, new sentence structures, not to mention cultures and histories, but does any of this beat the importance of learning empathy!
Empathy is so important because it is our ability to place ourselves in someone else's shoes. In TKAM, Atticus Finch has this really great line: "you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." Reading not only teaches us to do this, but it teaches this at great breadth if we read widely. Reading can take us to farther places, to distant, long past times, and into people's lives and situations that we would otherwise never experience. And different than feeling sympathy, empathy allows us to *share* another person's feelings, not just merely feel sorry or sympathetic towards them or their circumstances.
My son has struggled with fear and anxiety for years. He had a regular ol' daycare experience that escalated into panic attacks and severe fear of being abandoned, a small child trapped at a school, unsure if or when we were coming. He knew exactly how Harry felt (barring the giant basilisk and eternal moral wizard enemy). The interesting thing though, is that despite the fantasy of the wizarding world Rowling creates, I have always felt that what really resonates with readers is how, or maybe despite, the reader's escape from our muggle world, we recognize love, loyalty, and, in this case, fear in the characters in the book. We chuckle to ourselves as Ron and Harry grapple with crushes and remember the familiar pang of disappointing heartbreak, and it is so important!
Reading teaches and connects us to characters and other readers, and it also teaches us how to just simply be there for one another and sit together in a shared feeling, empathy.
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