Teaching Empathy to Teens: What an Astronaut’s View of Earth Can Teach Us

Lately, I have found myself deeply moved by the interviews that followed the Artemis mission around the moon. There was something about hearing the astronauts speak after seeing Earth from that distance that stayed with me in a way I did not expect. Out of all the reflections I listened to, the one that struck me most was Christina Koch’s description of what it felt like to look back at Earth. She spoke not only about the beauty of the planet itself, but about the vast darkness surrounding it. In that context, Earth did not seem large and all powerful. It seemed fragile, precious, and shared. She described it almost like a lifeboat in the middle of an immense darkness, and she referred to all of us on Earth as one crew.

I have not been able to stop thinking about that.

Because here we are, on this one shared lifeboat, and yet so much of human life is spent drawing lines. We divide ourselves by religion, nationality, politics, race, status, language, belief systems, and ideologies. In families, we divide ourselves over who is right and who is wrong. In schools, children divide themselves through labels, groups, and subtle hierarchies. Internationally, nations divide themselves over land, power, and resources. Everywhere we look, we are sorting, separating, defending, and comparing. And yet from that distance, from the view of someone who had the rare privilege of seeing us all at once, Earth did not appear divided. It appeared as one whole, one home, one crew.

Seeing Earth This Way Changes the Way We See Ourselves

There is something deeply humbling about that perspective. It makes our differences feel smaller, not because they do not exist, but because they are no longer the most important thing. It makes me wonder what would change if we lived with a greater awareness of our shared humanity. What would shift if we spent less time obsessing over the categories that separate us and more time remembering that all of us are trying to live, cope, belong, love, protect ourselves, and find meaning while riding together on this tiny lifeboat for a limited number of years?

Teaching Empathy to Teens Starts with Seeing Our Shared Humanity

This is where my mind went almost immediately to empathy.

When I think about teaching empathy to teens, I do not think of it as a soft social skill that simply helps them be polite or well liked. I think of it as a way of helping them live more truthfully in the world. If oneness is the larger truth, empathy is one of the clearest ways we practice it. Empathy is what helps a young person remember that the person in front of them is not just a behavior, a label, an opinion, a tone, or a social identity. They are a whole human being carrying an inner world we cannot fully see. Empathy reminds us that while our lives look different from the outside, there is something profoundly shared underneath all of it.

How I Teach This Idea Through a Simple Story

This is something I try very intentionally to teach in our communication classes. One of the ways I introduce the idea is through a children’s picture book called Enemy Pie. My teens always find it amusing when I pull out a picture book, but I do it anyway because the lesson is so simple and so enduring. In the story, a little boy thinks another child is his enemy, only to discover after spending a day with him that he actually likes him. The beauty of the story lies in how quickly an enemy begins to look different once he becomes a person.

Of course, real life is not always that neat. We do not always spend a whole day with the people we struggle with, and not every difficult relationship turns into friendship. But I tell my teens that the deeper lesson still holds. We usually dislike people most when we know them least. What we react to is often only a fragment. A person’s sharpness, awkwardness, arrogance, silence, defensiveness, or behavior in one specific moment becomes the entire story in our minds. We take one visible slice of them and decide we understand the whole.

But we rarely do.

Why We So Often Reduce People Too Quickly

I remember one of my mentors once saying something to me that I have never forgotten. We judge others by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions. That line has stayed with me because of how painfully true it is. We want people to understand our motives, our pressures, our context, our wounds, our exhaustion, and the reasons behind our mistakes. We hope they will give us the benefit of the doubt. Yet we are often far less generous with others. We see what they did, not what they carried. We react to the action, while quietly reserving compassion for our own intention.

We Rarely See the Whole Person

That is why empathy matters so much. It interrupts that pattern. It helps us remember that another person’s behavior may be the surface of something deeper, something we may never fully know. It does not ask us to excuse harmful behavior, erase boundaries, or abandon discernment. It simply asks us to resist reducing a whole human being to a single moment. It asks us to stay open to the possibility that there is more to the story than what is immediately visible.

This also makes empathy incredibly important for teenagers growing up in today’s world, because so much of their environment trains them in the opposite direction. Social media, especially, has made fast judgment feel normal. Young people are constantly surrounded by carefully edited fragments of other people’s lives, images without context, opinions without nuance, reactions without reflection, and endless opportunities to compare. They are invited every day to assess who is doing life better, who looks better, who belongs, who is admired, who is falling behind, and who is worth paying attention to. That kind of environment can quietly make difference feel threatening. It can make another person’s success feel like your failure. It can make somebody else’s identity, style, opinion, or way of moving through the world feel strangely personal.

And this is where I think we need to give our teens a much deeper message. Other people are allowed to be who they are, and you are still allowed to be who you are.

That idea sounds simple, but it is deeply freeing. When a young person understands this, they no longer have to react so intensely to every difference around them. They no longer have to feel diminished because someone else is louder, prettier, more popular, more confident, more outspoken, more reserved, more artistic, more athletic, or simply different. They begin to realize that someone else’s existence does not threaten their own. Another person’s way of being in the world is not automatically a judgment on theirs.

This, to me, is one of the most practical forms of empathy we can teach. It is not just about feeling sorry for someone or being kind in the obvious moments. It is about teaching our children to remain steady in themselves while allowing space for others to be fully themselves too. It is about teaching them that not every difference requires judgment, and not every irritation requires a conclusion. Sometimes another person’s behavior is not a personal attack. Sometimes it is simply a reflection of a different story, a different set of wounds, a different temperament, a different fear, or a different way of coping.

This is why I keep coming back to that image of Earth as a lifeboat. If we truly saw ourselves as one crew, empathy would stop looking optional. It would begin to feel essential. Not because we must all agree, and not because we should become naïve about human behavior, but because oneness asks something deeper of us. It asks us to remember that before people are categories, they are human beings. Before they are positions, they are people. Before they are difficult, disappointing, offensive, or confusing, they are still part of the same fragile human family trying to find their way through life.

And perhaps that is one of the most important things we can teach our teens now. We can teach them to think critically, communicate clearly, and hold strong values, while also teaching them not to lose sight of our shared humanity. We can teach them that empathy is not weakness. It is not passivity. It is not the erasure of self. It is the discipline of remembering connection in a world that constantly rewards division. It is the choice to see a fuller picture when it would be easier to settle for a partial one.

If oneness is the truth we forget, then empathy is the practice that helps us remember.

And maybe that is the kind of leadership the world needs most.