Study suggests empathy is a skill that passes through generations via relationships

Research from the University of Virginia reveals that empathy is more a skill acquired through social relationships than a fixed trait, flowing across family, friends, and parental roles from adolescence into adulthood.

A long-term study from the University of Virginia suggests empathy may be less a fixed trait than a skill that moves through relationships over time. In findings published in Child Development, researchers followed 184 adolescents from age 13 into adulthood and found a chain of empathic care that began with mothers, continued through teenage friendships and later appeared again in the participants’ own parenting.

The project began in 1998 with seventh- and eighth-form students from a public middle school in the mid-Atlantic United States. According to the study description on PubMed, the sample included 184 participants, and the later Child Development paper traces how the researchers observed empathy repeatedly rather than relying only on self-report. At age 13, mothers and teenagers discussed a problem the teenager wanted help with, while trained observers rated whether the mother stayed engaged, understood the issue, validated feelings and offered support.

That early pattern mattered. The researchers found that more empathic maternal care at age 13 predicted greater empathic support towards close friends through adolescence. The teenagers then returned yearly from ages 13 to 19 with a nominated best friend, and observers rated how well they listened, understood and responded when the friend described a problem. The study suggests that friendship may act as a rehearsal space for the emotional give-and-take that later becomes part of caregiving.

The same pattern then appeared again in adulthood. Participants who had shown more empathy towards friends in late adolescence were more likely to report supportive responses to their own children’s distress years later. According to the Child Development paper, that link held even after accounting for the original maternal empathy, gender and family income. The study’s authors describe this as a prospective pathway rather than proof of causation, but they argue it is notable because it connects observed behaviour across three generations.

The final step in the chain was smaller and more cautious. Among 70 families with 114 children aged three to eight, parents who described themselves as more supportive also tended to rate their children as more empathic. The indirect route from adolescent friendship empathy to child empathy through supportive parenting was statistically significant, but only just. The authors treated that last test as exploratory, and the parenting and child measures were collected at the same time, which limits how firmly cause and effect can be separated.

That caution fits the wider literature on intergenerational transmission. Research in Developmental Psychology has shown that attachment security can pass from one generation to the next, while earlier work in Family Process and the Journal of Family Psychology explored how intimacy, individuation and relationship functioning may also travel through family life. Taken together, these studies point to the same broad idea: children do not simply inherit relationships; they practise them, absorb them and often repeat them.

For parents and caregivers, the practical message is encouraging. In this study, empathy did not mean fixing every problem or agreeing with every feeling. It meant staying present, understanding accurately, and offering the kind of support that fits the moment. That is a pattern adults can model, and teenagers can learn from friends as well as family.