We teach young children to consider the feelings of others in the hopes that they will grow to become empathetic adults. And yet, the glaring absence of empathy among adults is on display every day in news reports and social media feeds.

Psychological research has documented a dramatic decline in self-reported empathy over the past three decades. Researchers suggest this growing empathy deficit may be fueled by several factors, including chronic stress and isolation by social class.

When I think about the experiences that have helped me break down my assumptions and increase my capacity for understanding, I wonder if we have been teaching empathy all wrong. Often, we tell children how another person might feel or react in a given situation, but the most powerful lessons come from listening, witnessing and doing. Perhaps we have to let children experience more of what we want to protect them from. Perhaps those experiences are what make them stronger and kinder.

These are the experiences that have most impacted my ability to empathize:

1. Spending time in a place that unsettled me. As a young reporter, I spent two months in a summer school session observing a gifted teacher trying to help remedial elementary school students learn how to read. The students lived in one of the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods in our metro area. Those months completely changed the way I thought about poverty in this country. It’s one thing to read about extreme poverty in America; it’s another to witness it for longer than a short visit. I’ve often wondered what would happen if every middle class and wealthy American had to spend a few weeks in the same environment as a child born into extreme poverty. How would this change our policy debates?

2. Listening to stories. I’ve met refugee families from all parts of the world. Listening to their stories of the lives they left behind and how they got here made debates about immigration more personal and real.

3. Teaching. It wasn’t until I spent an entire day teaching middle-schoolers that I truly appreciated how difficult that job is. I’m having the same perspective-changing experience by teaching writing to college freshman this semester. I have always admired teachers, but until I experienced their challenges firsthand, I didn’t really know what a toll it takes.

4. Witnessing grief. The hardest days of my job have been when I’ve talked to parents who had lost their children to accidents, illness or criminal acts. I have cried with anguished parents. Hearing and holding another person’s grief teaches you about loss, which teaches you about how to live.

5. Holding a hand. A friend called me after she had been violently raped. I drove her to a hospital, saw her bruises and held her hand. Sometimes all you can do for someone shattered by trauma is to show up -- repeatedly, consistently.

6. Traveling to less developed parts of the world. Before I could afford to travel, I read books that took me into other people’s lives and places. Literature has been shown to increase our empathy.

7. Experiencing profound loss. When you have firsthand experience of what it’s like to lose something precious -- a loved one, a desperately wanted pregnancy, your health, your home -- it inevitably changes you. The people I most admire find a way to channel that pain into compassion. I’ve tried to follow their example.

8. Making it personal. Even when you know something intellectually -- such as the fact that it’s incredibly difficult to leave an abusive relationship -- hearing it from a person who has lived through it adds texture and dimension to your understanding. That’s how I’ve felt when I’ve listened to the experiences of very successful women who stayed in abusive relationships until they were able to get out. Or loved someone brilliant who struggles with addiction. It’s harder to judge when you know people who have walked through the fire.

The more we can do to help ourselves -- and our children -- become more compassionate, aware and thoughtful, the better the world we can create.

Over the past two years, many politically split families have perfected the art of avoidance.

“It’s not worth it,” one woman said. “I don’t hide how I feel, but I don’t openly engage.”

The political divisions that separated Americans two years ago -- some hitting deep within their close, personal relationships -- are still open wounds. In some ways, they’ve gotten worse.

People have largely shed or stepped away from friendships that became strained after the election, but family is trickier. The holidays are a time when many feel obligated to get together with family members with whom they disagree, while trying to avoid confrontation at all costs.

A 2017 Pew Research Center study found that partisan identification has become the biggest wedge between Americans -- more so than race, gender, religion or level of education. A deep political difference reflects more than just a voting preference, the study found. In the minds of many, it reflects your character.

It’s sharpened the tension between who we love and what they believe. So, how best to navigate this?

James Croft, outreach director for the Ethical Society in St. Louis, offers a talk entitled “How and When to Be Civil” that tackles these thorny questions: What’s the difference between being civil and being nice? Is it ethical to uninvite people to Thanksgiving or family gatherings because they have offensive viewpoints? How is the traditional definition of civility used to quiet dissent?

Croft argues that if someone says something derogatory at the dinner table, it would be uncivil and unethical not to strongly challenge that point of view. His ideas might seem counterintuitive to the “be nice” and “avoid conflict” mindset of the Midwest.

“People don’t want to address challenging topics because some kind of tension will be introduced into the relationship, and they are nervous about that,” he said. But “civility is richer and more complex than just being nice.”

Don’t stay silent in the name of harmony.

If a person is unwilling to ignore uncivil views and comments from people they care about, then what is the most effective way to actually have a productive conversation about it?

“People only have their minds open if they feel valued and respected, and not when they are under threat,” he said. I asked him to address a specific scenario: Say a relative makes a racist, homophobic or otherwise bigoted remark. What is an ethical way to respond?

You should first determine whether the person is reachable at all. Some people are unreachable -- they cannot be persuaded by any evidence or logic, and it’s best not to engage with them at all.

But others may be open to the possibility of making a connection.

Croft suggests saying something like: “Grandpa, I love you very much. You are extremely important to me. I don’t agree with what you just said. Would you be willing to hear why I don’t agree?”

It’s important to be able to listen, to hear people’s anxieties and their explanations of what they believe, he said. If you truly want to influence the way a person thinks about an issue, they have to feel heard. For example, consider a divisive and emotional issue like the migrant caravan in Mexico. Croft suggests starting with questions like, “Why do you think they’re coming here?” “What are you worried might happen?” “What have you seen to make you believe that?”

If the person says they fear crime, it can be helpful to agree that you also don’t want crimes to happen, and point out that many crimes are committed by Americans. So, why do they think immigrants would be more likely to commit a crime?

“It requires listening and staying with them, showing that you are on the same team -- not because you agree with them, but because you care about them,” he said. It can be helpful to cite sources who have more credibility with your family members because they share the same belief system, but have spoken out on a particular issue in a way that you can support.

He added that a person from a marginalized community does not have a responsibility to engage with someone saying something harmful. And, it’s also perfectly acceptable to skip the trip home if the experience would be traumatic, and your relatives are not capable of engaging with you in a respectful exchange.

His family found themselves facing a difficult decision recently after his father died. There is a strong difference of opinion between his mother and her sisters. His family decided the potential for tremendous stress was too great, and did not inform his mother’s sisters about the funeral.

“That’s OK,” he said. The true meaning of civility, Croft said, is making sure everyone in society has a place at the table and is treated with respect.

When my youngest sister confided in me three years ago that she was considering a run for public office, her babies were 1 and 2 years old. She was a sleep-deprived working mom whose husband also put in long hours as an attorney.

I encouraged her, because I know how much she has to offer the world, but in my heart, I worried about the toll such a campaign might take on her health and family. Rabeea is nearly a decade younger than me, and I have a maternal kind of protectiveness toward her. I also know how she gets when she puts her mind to a goal. She graduated a year early from our competitive high school in Houston. My parents said the sprawling University of Texas campus in Austin would be too much for a 16-year-old graduate, but she went anyway. She worked her way through high school and college and won a merit scholarship to law school.

My sister doesn’t mess around when it comes to reaching the goals she sets for herself. So when she decided to run for district judge in Houston’s Harris County in 2016, we watched her pour her entire heart into the campaign. My parents and siblings stepped up to help with the kids, but really, it was my sister who found a way to spend every waking hour meeting with voters, fundraising, attending events, speaking to groups, continuing to work as a lawyer and still picking up her kids after school nearly every day. She expanded the definition of what constitutes “waking hours.”

I watched in awe.

Where did she get that energy, that drive?

I wanted that win for her more than anything I have ever wanted for myself. She forced a runoff in a heavily contested primary, but ultimately lost in the special election.

I couldn’t bear to think about all those countless hours and sacrifices she had made when the results came in that night. It’s pretty crushing when someone you believe in so strongly loses.

And that’s when my sister showed her mettle.

She decided to run again in 2018 -- this time, against a well-established incumbent.

My father called me soon after she told us, and asked me why she would put herself through such a grind again. Texas wasn’t ready to elect a judge who looked like her, he said, speaking from the experience of an immigrant who faced his own setbacks despite decades of hard work. I wondered if he was right. The political environment had only worsened since her first attempt.

We kept our doubts to ourselves. And if my sister had any, she didn’t indulge them. Instead, she got to work -- winning endorsements, talking to as many people in the third-largest county in the country as humanly possible. Then, a few months before the election, she was in a catastrophic car accident, which she miraculously survived with a few broken bones.

She resumed campaigning even when it hurt to take a full breath because her ribs were still healing.

I couldn’t sleep the night before the midterm elections. Rabeea sent our family a text that night, which said, in part: “Regardless of the result tomorrow night, I’ve won for having the best family a person could only dream of. There’s no way possible I could have gotten to this point without each of you.”

Her older son, now 5, asked her the morning of the election what would happen if she lost.

“It’s OK to lose, so long as you give your best, because we all have to lose sometimes,” she told him.

Her younger son, 4, piped up: “I know Momma’s gonna win.”

The day of the midterms, there was a knock at my door, and my son called out to me that someone had sent me a fruit bouquet. Turns out that my sister, facing the election of her career, to which she had devoted the past three years of her life, had remembered that my short film was premiering that night in St. Louis. She wrote that she was proud of the work I was doing.

Really, Rabeea?

When I walked out of the Tivoli theater that night, I saw a message in our family group chat that she had won. More than 630,000 people in Harris County voted for her -- electing her by a margin of over 100,000 votes.

“For me, this is the America that I know, love and will fight for until we get back on track,” she wrote to me.

I tried to think of a moment in my life when I had ever felt more proud, and I realized it had been two years ago, when Rabeea told me that she was going to run again.

I called my parents to congratulate them. They were in shock.

“I can’t believe it,” my father said. “I just can’t believe it.”

The country where he arrived nearly 50 years ago with little money and lots of dreams had just made his daughter a judge.