Empathy begins developing far earlier than most people expect. The first signs appear in newborns, who cry reflexively when they hear other babies cry. From there, empathy unfolds in stages across childhood and adolescence, with major leaps around 15 months, 2 years, 4 years, and into the teenage years. It’s not a single skill that switches on at one age but a layered set of abilities that build on each other over roughly two decades.
Newborns Through 12 Months: Emotional Contagion
The earliest building block of empathy is emotional contagion, the tendency to “catch” another person’s feelings. Newborns arrive with this wired in. Three distinct emotions are present from birth (anger, joy, and fear), expressed through universal facial expressions that require no conscious thought. When a newborn hears another infant crying, they often begin crying too. This isn’t true empathy yet because the baby doesn’t understand that someone else is in distress. It’s more like an automatic emotional echo.
During the first year, the brain’s mirror neuron system is already active. This network fires both when a baby performs an action and when they watch someone else perform it, essentially letting the brain simulate what another person is doing or feeling. Eye-tracking studies suggest this system is functional before 12 months. It provides the neural scaffolding that later, more sophisticated forms of empathy will build on.
15 to 24 Months: The First Real Empathy
Around 15 months, something important shifts. Children start showing empathy and self-conscious emotions for the first time. A toddler at this age may look visibly upset when they see someone cry, or beam with pride when applauded. This marks a departure from simple contagion because the child is now reacting to another person’s emotional state rather than just mirroring it.
Between 18 and 24 months, a significant increase occurs in both expressions of concern and actual comforting behavior toward others in pain. A toddler might pat a crying friend on the back, offer a toy, or go find an adult to help. Researchers call this “empathic helping,” and it’s notably harder for children than basic goal-directed helping (like handing someone an object they’re reaching for). At 18 months, empathic helping requires more obvious signals from the person in distress. By 30 months, children can make more complex inferences about what someone else needs based on that person’s feelings and internal states, not just their visible goals.
Ages 2 to 5: Understanding Other Minds
A second major type of empathy comes online during the preschool years: cognitive empathy, or the ability to understand that other people have thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge that differ from your own. Developmental psychologists often call this “theory of mind.”
The classic test is the false-belief task. A child watches a puppet named Sally hide a marble in a box, then leave the room. Another puppet moves the marble to a basket. When Sally comes back, the child is asked, “Where will Sally look for her marble?” To answer correctly, the child has to set aside what they know (the marble is in the basket) and think about what Sally believes (it’s still in the box). Most children pass this test around age 4. Younger children typically point to where the marble actually is, as if Sally knows what they know.
That said, the picture is more nuanced than a simple on/off switch at age 4. When researchers simplify the task, children as young as 2.5 years can demonstrate false-belief understanding. In one study, 78% of 30-to-33-month-olds pointed to the correct location when the task’s demands were reduced. This suggests the underlying ability exists earlier than traditional tests reveal, but children need time to develop the mental processing power to use it in complex situations. Even at age 5, understanding of false beliefs can be unstable, particularly when the scenario involves someone’s deliberate choice rather than a physical object.
Children don’t reliably distinguish jokes from lies or understand metaphor and irony until age 6 or 7, both of which require going beyond the literal meaning of what someone says to grasp their actual intent.
Affective Empathy vs. Cognitive Empathy Across Age
It helps to think of empathy as two systems that develop on different timelines. Affective empathy is feeling what another person feels: your stomach drops when you watch someone get hurt. Cognitive empathy is understanding what another person thinks or believes, even when it differs from your own perspective.
A large meta-analysis found that affective empathy dominates in preschool-aged children. This makes intuitive sense: young kids feel others’ emotions intensely but struggle to reason about different perspectives. During middle childhood and into early adulthood, cognitive empathy becomes the stronger component. Puberty marks the period of greatest gap between the two, with cognitive empathy pulling ahead most dramatically. Later in life, in middle and late adulthood, affective empathy again becomes the dominant form.
The Adolescent Dip
Parents of teenagers may notice what feels like a step backward in empathy, and brain imaging research confirms this impression has a biological basis. Both cognitive and emotional empathy scores are significantly lower in adolescents compared to adults.
The reason isn’t that teenagers stop caring. Brain scans reveal that adolescents actually show greater activation in emotion-processing regions during empathy tasks than adults do. Their brains are working harder, not less, to process others’ feelings. Researchers describe this as “compensatory hyperactivation”: because the brain areas responsible for perspective-taking and emotional regulation are still maturing, teens recruit extra neural resources to get the job done, and they still come up short compared to adults.
The prefrontal cortex, which handles emotion regulation, perspective-taking, and executive function, follows an extremely protracted developmental course. Age-related changes continue well into adolescence and even early adulthood. The areas involved in controlling emotional behavior develop relatively early, but the lateral prefrontal regions responsible for higher-level reasoning and self-regulation develop last. This is why a 14-year-old might feel another person’s pain intensely but still respond in ways that seem self-centered or dismissive. The feeling is there, but the sophisticated regulation isn’t.
What Shapes Empathy Along the Way
Biology sets the timetable, but the environment shapes how fully empathy develops within that window. Parenting style has measurable effects, particularly in toddlerhood. Children raised by warm, authoritative parents (those who combine responsiveness with clear expectations and reasoning) show higher levels of empathic behavior. One study found a strong positive relationship between parental warmth and toddler empathy, with warm parenting predicting empathy scores at a statistically significant level.
Temperament plays a moderating role. The warmth-empathy link was strongest for children with low levels of inhibited temperament, meaning outgoing toddlers benefited most from warm parenting when it came to empathy development. For more temperamentally cautious children, the effect of parental warmth on empathy was weaker. This doesn’t mean shy children can’t develop empathy, but it suggests that the pathways through which they develop it may differ.
Signs of Atypical Empathy Development
Because empathy unfolds gradually, there’s a wide range of normal. Still, certain patterns in the first few years can signal that development isn’t following the typical trajectory. Infants who show unusually low social responsiveness, such as limited attention to others’ facial expressions or emotions in the first year of life, may be at higher risk for neurodevelopmental conditions. Infants later diagnosed with autism, for example, often show reduced attention to others’ emotions before their first birthday.
In early childhood, atypically low empathic concern, such as a 3-year-old who consistently shows no reaction when peers are upset, can indicate risk for neurodevelopmental or behavioral difficulties. These associations are correlational rather than definitive, so a single instance of a child ignoring a crying playmate is not cause for alarm. The concern arises when the pattern is persistent and broad, spanning multiple settings and relationships over time.