Can You Teach Perspective Taking?

Can you teach perspective taking? It’s like teaching someone how to imagine being someone else.

Imagine you have a toy box full of blocks. You know exactly how they fit together because you see them every day. But if your friend hasn’t played with the blocks before, they might not know which block goes where, that's perspective taking in action! It means seeing things from someone else’s point of view.

Perspective taking is when you try to understand how someone else feels or thinks about something. Like when you and your friend are both trying to fit the blocks into the box, but you see it differently, that's because you're using perspective taking to guess what your friend might be thinking.

When you learn to take another person’s perspective, you can be a better friend or teammate. You’ll know when someone is sad or happy without them telling you, just by seeing the world through their eyes, like looking at the blocks from their side of the box!