There is a test that researchers have been giving college students for decades. It measures empathy. The ability to understand another person’s feelings, to see the world through someone else’s eyes, to care about suffering that is not your own. For years the scores were stable. Then, around the year 2000, they began to drop. Not gradually. Sharply. Today’s college students score forty percent lower in empathy than students thirty years ago. Forty percent. That is not a dip. That is a collapse.
Dr. Michele Borba opens “UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World” with this statistic, and she does not let you look away from it. Because behind that number is a generation of children who are more connected digitally and more isolated emotionally than any generation in history. A generation that can broadcast their lunch to a thousand followers but cannot read the facial expression of the person sitting across from them. A generation drowning in self-focus and starving for the one skill that predicts kindness, resilience, moral courage, and meaningful relationships more reliably than any other.
That skill is empathy. And Borba has written the definitive guide to teaching it.
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The Problem We Made
Before we talk about what Borba prescribes, we need to understand what she diagnoses. And the diagnosis is uncomfortable because it implicates all of us.
We built this. Not maliciously. Not deliberately. But systematically, through a thousand well-intentioned decisions that collectively produced a culture in which the self became the center of everything.
It started with self-esteem. In the 1980s and 1990s, the self-esteem movement swept through schools, homes, and the broader culture with evangelical fervor. The idea was simple and appealing: if children feel good about themselves, they will do good things. So we praised constantly. We gave trophies for participation. We told every child they were special, unique, extraordinary. We removed failure from the equation because failure might damage the precious self-concept.
The intention was noble. The result was catastrophic. Research now shows that inflated self-esteem, praise without substance, confidence without competence, does not produce happier or more successful children. It produces narcissism. Children who were told relentlessly that they were the center of the universe came to believe it. And a child who believes they are the center of the universe has very little reason to consider anyone else’s feelings, perspective, or needs.
Then came the technology. Smartphones, social media, and the attention economy created an ecosystem designed to maximize self-focus. Selfies. Followers. Likes. Personal brands. The entire architecture of digital life is built around the presentation, promotion, and measurement of the self. Children growing up inside this ecosystem are not learning to look outward. They are learning to curate inward. They are not developing the habit of wondering how someone else feels. They are developing the habit of wondering how they look.
Then came the parenting. Helicopter parenting, snowplow parenting, whatever you want to call the impulse to remove every obstacle from your child’s path, taught children that their comfort is someone else’s responsibility. That they should not have to struggle. That the world should accommodate them. This is the opposite of empathy. Empathy requires the recognition that other people have experiences, needs, and suffering that are as real and as important as your own. A child who has been shielded from all discomfort has never had to develop that recognition.
Borba weaves these threads together into a portrait of a culture that has, without meaning to, systematically dismantled the conditions under which empathy develops. And she does it without hysteria or moral panic. She is not wringing her hands. She is rolling up her sleeves. Because the same research that reveals the problem also reveals the solution. Empathy is not a fixed trait. It is a skill. It can be taught. And Borba has spent her career figuring out how.
Who Is Michele Borba
Dr. Michele Borba is an educational psychologist, a former classroom teacher, and the author of more than twenty books on child development and parenting. She has spent over four decades working with children, parents, and educators across the globe. She has consulted with hundreds of schools, appeared on virtually every major news program, and served as a consultant to organizations ranging from the Department of Defense to the Boy Scouts of America.
But what distinguishes Borba from many voices in the parenting space is her commitment to evidence. She is not an ideologue. She does not begin with a philosophy and then search for research to support it. She begins with research and builds practical strategies on top of it. “UnSelfie” is the product of years of reviewing studies in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and education, combined with her own extensive fieldwork observing children and families across diverse cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds.
The result is a book that is both rigorously evidence-based and deeply practical. It does not just tell you empathy matters. It shows you, in specific and actionable detail, how to build it.
The Nine Habits of Empathy
The heart of the book is Borba’s framework of nine essential habits that together comprise the empathetic child. These are not abstract virtues. They are learnable, teachable, practicable skills that can be cultivated deliberately by parents, educators, and communities. Borba organizes them into a developmental sequence, each habit building on the ones before it.
Emotional Literacy
The first habit is the ability to recognize and name emotions, both your own and other people’s. This sounds basic. It is not. Many children, and many adults, lack a functional emotional vocabulary. They can identify happy, sad, and angry. Beyond that, the landscape goes blurry. Frustrated, disappointed, anxious, embarrassed, overwhelmed, envious, lonely, these words represent distinct emotional experiences, and a child who cannot name them cannot understand them in themselves or recognize them in others.
Borba argues that emotional literacy is the foundation of empathy because you cannot empathize with a feeling you cannot identify. She provides strategies for building emotional vocabulary from toddlerhood through adolescence: naming feelings in everyday conversation, using books and stories as emotional laboratories, playing emotion guessing games, and modeling emotional articulation as a parent. “I am feeling frustrated right now because I cannot find my keys” teaches a child more about emotional literacy than any worksheet.
Moral Identity
The second habit is the development of a moral identity, a sense of oneself as a person who cares about doing the right thing. Borba distinguishes this from the self-esteem movement’s emphasis on feeling good about yourself. Moral identity is not about feeling good. It is about being good. It is the internalization of values like kindness, fairness, and responsibility into the child’s core sense of who they are.
She argues that children who think of themselves as kind people behave more kindly than children who are simply told to be kind. The identity drives the behavior, not the reverse. Building this identity requires consistent modeling, meaningful conversations about values, and opportunities for children to practice moral action and experience the satisfaction that comes from it.
Perspective Taking
The third habit is the ability to step into someone else’s shoes and see the world from their point of view. This is the cognitive component of empathy, the capacity to understand that other people have thoughts, feelings, and experiences that differ from your own.
Borba provides extensive research showing that perspective taking is one of the strongest predictors of prosocial behavior, conflict resolution skills, and relationship quality. She offers strategies for developing it: asking children “How do you think they felt?” after conflicts, reading literature that features diverse perspectives, engaging in role-playing exercises, and exposing children to people and communities different from their own.
Moral Imagination
The fourth habit is the ability to use literature, stories, and art to develop empathetic understanding. Borba argues that stories are empathy simulators. When a child reads a novel, watches a film, or listens to a story in which a character experiences suffering, joy, fear, or hope, they practice the neural pathways of empathy without leaving their seat.
She cites research showing that children who read fiction regularly score higher on empathy measures than children who do not. The mechanism is rehearsal. Every time a child imagines what a character feels, they strengthen the same brain circuits they will use to understand what a real person feels. Borba encourages parents to read with their children, discuss characters’ emotions and motivations, and choose stories that expose children to experiences different from their own.
Self-Regulation
The fifth habit connects to emotional self-management. A child who is overwhelmed by their own emotions cannot attend to anyone else’s. Self-regulation, the ability to manage impulses, tolerate frustration, and calm oneself down, creates the internal space necessary for empathy to operate.
Borba provides age-appropriate strategies for building self-regulation: breathing techniques for young children, mindfulness practices for older ones, and the consistent modeling of self-regulation by parents. She emphasizes that self-regulation is not suppression. It is management. The goal is not a child who feels nothing but a child who can feel everything without being controlled by it.
Practicing Kindness
The sixth habit moves from internal skill to external action. Borba argues that empathy without action is incomplete. Children need not only to feel for others but to act on that feeling. Kindness, practiced regularly and deliberately, transforms empathy from a passive emotional experience into an active moral habit.
She recommends structured opportunities for kindness: family service projects, classroom kindness initiatives, and the deliberate acknowledgment and celebration of kind behavior when it occurs. She is clear that forced kindness is counterproductive. The goal is to create conditions in which kindness emerges naturally and is reinforced authentically.
Collaboration
The seventh habit is the ability to work with others toward a shared goal. Borba argues that collaboration builds empathy because it requires children to listen, compromise, consider other perspectives, and subordinate individual desire to collective purpose. In a culture that emphasizes individual achievement almost exclusively, collaborative experiences are essential counterweights.
She encourages cooperative games, group projects, team sports that emphasize teamwork over winning, and family activities that require working together. The experience of succeeding together, of contributing to something larger than oneself, builds both empathy and the sense of belonging that makes empathy meaningful.
Moral Courage
The eighth habit is the willingness to stand up for what is right even when it is difficult, unpopular, or frightening. Borba argues that empathy without courage is impotent. A child who feels another person’s pain but is too afraid to intervene has empathy that cannot function in the real world.
She provides strategies for building moral courage: teaching children to recognize injustice, role-playing bystander intervention, discussing real examples of moral courage from history and current events, and creating family cultures in which speaking up is valued and supported. She acknowledges that moral courage is perhaps the hardest of the nine habits to develop because it requires children to risk social disapproval, but she argues it is essential.
Changemaking
The ninth and final habit is the capacity to identify problems in the world and take action to address them. Borba calls this changemaking, and she argues it is the culmination of all the other habits. A child who is emotionally literate, morally grounded, capable of perspective taking, self-regulated, kind, collaborative, and courageous is a child who can look at the world, see what needs to be different, and do something about it.
She provides examples of children and adolescents who have become changemakers in their communities and offers strategies for parents who want to nurture this capacity. The key, she argues, is giving children real problems to solve, not manufactured ones. When children experience the agency of making a genuine difference, however small, they develop a sense of purpose that transcends self-interest and feeds back into every other empathetic habit.
Build all nine habits of empathy in your child: Search for “UnSelfie Michele Borba” on Amazon
What the Book Does Exceptionally Well
The scope is remarkable. Borba does not offer a single technique or a narrow slice of the empathy problem. She provides a comprehensive, developmentally sequenced framework that covers the full range of empathetic skills from emotional recognition to social action. The nine habits feel both complete and coherent, each one building logically on the ones before it.
The research integration is masterful. Every recommendation is grounded in cited studies, but Borba never buries the reader in academic language. The science is present as a foundation, not a barrier. You feel confident that the advice is evidence-based without feeling like you are reading a journal article.
The cultural analysis is sharp and honest. Borba does not blame parents, children, or technology individually. She identifies a systemic cultural problem, the worship of self at the expense of other, and traces its roots through multiple interconnected causes. This broader perspective makes the book feel important rather than merely useful.
The practical strategies are genuinely actionable. For each habit, Borba provides specific activities, conversation starters, and implementation suggestions organized by age group. A parent can finish a chapter and do something different that same evening. This immediacy of application is rare in books that deal with concepts as large as empathy.
The writing is clear, energetic, and accessible. Borba writes with the confidence of someone who has spent decades in the field and the warmth of someone who genuinely cares about children. Her voice is authoritative without being cold, urgent without being alarmist.
The Honest Critique
The book covers so much ground that some habits receive less depth than they deserve. The chapters on moral courage and changemaking, in particular, could benefit from more extensive treatment. These are arguably the most complex and challenging of the nine habits, and they feel slightly compressed compared to the earlier chapters.
Some readers may find the cultural analysis in the opening chapters heavy-handed or overly focused on American middle-class parenting norms. The critique of social media and trophy culture, while valid, has become familiar territory. Parents who are already aware of these issues may feel impatient to get to the solutions.
The book is primarily oriented toward neurotypical children in mainstream educational settings. Parents of children with autism spectrum differences or other conditions that affect social cognition and emotional processing may find the framework aspirational but will likely need additional, specialized resources.
The age-specific recommendations, while helpful, occasionally feel generic. Parents looking for highly detailed guidance for a specific developmental stage may need to supplement with more targeted resources.
Who Needs This Book
Parents who worry that their child is growing up in a culture that rewards self-focus and punishes vulnerability need this book. It provides both the diagnosis and the treatment plan.
Teachers and school administrators looking for a research-based framework for social-emotional learning will find this an invaluable resource. The nine habits map naturally onto classroom practices and school culture initiatives.
Parents who have noticed that their child struggles with kindness, perspective taking, or emotional awareness will find specific, practical strategies for addressing those gaps.
Anyone who believes that the world needs more compassion, more courage, and more willingness to see the humanity in others will find in this book a roadmap for raising the generation that delivers it.
And parents who lie awake at night worrying not just about whether their child will succeed but about whether their child will be good, this book is for you.
The Bottom Line
“UnSelfie” is not a book about making your child nicer. It is a book about making your child stronger. Because empathy is not weakness. It is the foundation of every meaningful relationship, every act of moral courage, every collaborative achievement, and every society that functions with even a minimum of decency and care.
Michele Borba has written a book that is both a warning and a promise. The warning is that empathy is eroding and the consequences are already visible. The promise is that empathy can be rebuilt, one habit at a time, one child at a time, one family at a time.
The selfie generation did not choose the culture they were born into. But with the right guidance, they can choose to become something more than it asks them to be. Borba shows you how.
Raise an UnSelfie. The world is waiting.
Start building empathy today: Search for “UnSelfie Michele Borba” on Amazon
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