Babies begin showing the earliest building blocks of empathy from birth, but true empathic responses don’t emerge until around 15 months of age. The process unfolds gradually over the first several years of life, moving from simple reflexive reactions to a genuine ability to understand and share another person’s feelings.
Emotional Contagion: The Starting Point
You’ve probably noticed that when one newborn starts crying in a hospital nursery, others often follow. This “contagious crying” was long debated: maybe babies just find the sound unpleasant, not emotionally meaningful. But recent research using thermal imaging to track physiological stress responses found that infants within the first year genuinely experience emotional contagion in response to another baby’s distress, not just irritation at a loud noise. This sensitivity to others’ emotional signals appears to provide the core building blocks for empathy.
At this stage, though, a newborn has no sense of self versus other. They can’t distinguish between their own distress and someone else’s. Three basic emotions are present from birth (anger, joy, and fear), and these don’t require any thinking or reasoning. A newborn who cries when another baby cries isn’t feeling sorry for that baby. They’re simply absorbing the emotion automatically.
Social Smiling and Emotional Mirroring
By 1 to 2 months, babies hit their first measurable social milestone: they begin smiling in response to a parent’s voice or facial expression. This is more than just a cute moment. It signals the beginning of emotional back-and-forth, where a baby starts matching their emotional state to someone else’s. They’re not yet understanding what another person feels, but they’re learning to read and respond to emotional cues.
Throughout the first year, babies move beyond this passive resonance. By around 12 months, infants show rudimentary empathic responses, looking concerned when someone appears upset or reaching toward a crying person. They’re still not fully grasping what’s happening inside another person’s mind, but the shift from absorbing emotions to reacting to them is significant.
15 Months: When Real Empathy Appears
Around 15 months, empathy and self-conscious emotions emerge together. A child at this age will look visibly upset when they see someone cry, or beam with pride when applauded for completing a task. This timing isn’t coincidental. It lines up with a major cognitive leap: self-recognition.
Researchers have long noted that the ability to recognize yourself in a mirror and the capacity for sympathetic concern tend to show up at roughly the same point in development. The connection makes intuitive sense. To feel empathy for someone else, you first need to understand that you and that other person are separate beings with separate experiences. Once a toddler grasps “that’s me in the mirror,” they can begin to understand “that person over there is feeling something different from what I’m feeling.”
18 to 24 Months: Empathy You Can See
Between 18 and 24 months, toddlers start translating their emotional awareness into action. This is when parents often notice clear prosocial behaviors: patting or kissing someone who’s hurt, offering calming words, bringing a favorite toy to a crying sibling, or even trying to recruit another adult to help someone in distress. Researchers call this “compassionate helping,” and it’s one of the most reliable visible signs that empathy is developing on track.
Sharing also begins to appear during this window, though it’s more inconsistent. In one well-known experimental setup, a researcher pretends to discover her snack bag is empty while giving the child a full bowl. Many toddlers at this age will offer some of their own snack in response to the adult’s visible disappointment. They’re not just mirroring an emotion anymore. They’re identifying a problem and trying to fix it.
Toddlers in this age range also begin implicitly predicting other people’s actions based on what those people have or haven’t seen. If a toddler watches someone leave the room before an object is moved, they show an early understanding that the person doesn’t know the object has been relocated. This is a precursor to what psychologists call “theory of mind,” and it dramatically expands what empathy can look like in practice.
Preschool Years and Beyond
Between ages 3 and 5, children make major strides in understanding that other people have feelings, desires, and perspectives that are genuinely independent of their own. Most children can grasp that someone else might hold a belief that differs from their own by around age 4. This is when empathy becomes more sophisticated: children can now not only “feel with” others but also imagine what’s going on inside someone else’s head.
This ability keeps maturing well into adolescence. During middle childhood, kids begin understanding more complex emotional landscapes, like the idea that someone can feel sad and angry at the same time, or that two people might view the same conflict very differently. Full maturity of perspective-taking, including the ability to understand sarcasm, ambiguity, and others’ internal conflicts, doesn’t arrive until the teenage years.
The Brain’s Empathy System
The brain has a built-in mechanism that helps make empathy possible. When you watch someone make a facial expression, a network of brain cells fires in a pattern similar to what would happen if you were making that expression yourself. This internal simulation happens automatically and supports the “I feel what you feel” dimension of empathy. In children, activity in this network correlates with both empathic behavior and interpersonal skills, meaning kids with stronger neural mirroring responses tend to show more empathy in real-world interactions.
The more cognitive side of empathy, the ability to step into someone else’s shoes and reason about their perspective, relies on different brain regions that mature later. This is why the feeling component of empathy shows up in infancy while the thinking component takes years to fully develop.
Do Girls Develop Empathy Earlier Than Boys?
The popular belief that girls are naturally more empathic than boys from birth doesn’t hold up well under scrutiny. A systematic review of 31 studies covering nearly 2,000 newborns found no significant gender difference in how much babies looked at human faces, and no gender difference in contagious crying. A separate meta-analysis of the “still-face” paradigm, which measures how babies react when an adult suddenly becomes unresponsive, found no consistent gender effect across 39 studies from birth to 10 months.
One earlier review had reported a small gender difference favoring girls across infancy, but closer examination revealed that among the youngest infants studied (under 5 months), only one out of nine studies found a significant difference, and that one actually favored boys. The most current conclusion from researchers is that there may be a slight maturational difference in general development, but no specific social or empathic advantage for girls at birth. Existing infant studies do not support a gender difference before 12 to 18 months.
How Parents Shape Empathy Development
While empathy follows a biological timetable, the family environment plays a meaningful role in how fully it develops. Parents who are warm, responsive, and supportive tend to model empathic behavior naturally, and their children show stronger empathy development. But warmth alone isn’t the whole picture. Parents who use reasoning with their children, explaining why someone might feel a certain way or encouraging them to consider another person’s perspective, may be doing even more to build empathic thinking than general warmth provides. In one study of preschoolers, parents’ use of explanations predicted more independent and stable empathic behaviors.
Interestingly, the same parenting approach doesn’t work equally well for every child. For toddlers with an outgoing, uninhibited temperament, parental warmth is a strong predictor of higher empathy. But for more cautious, inhibited children, the picture is different. Reasoning and perspective-taking prompts can actually be counterproductive for highly inhibited kids, possibly because the emotional weight of focusing on others’ distress overwhelms them before they have the skills to manage it. For these children, more concrete strategies like direct teaching, more social opportunities with peers, and supportive encouragement tend to work better. Helping them first learn to regulate their own emotional reactions gives them the capacity to extend that awareness outward.