Daily Inspiration Quote by Louise J. Kaplan

Kaplan draws a sharp developmental line that flatters no one: babies can feel with you, but it takes a grown-up mind to feel for you. The provocation is in the distinction. “Sympathy” here reads as an instinctive mirroring response - the infant who cries when another infant cries, the child who recoils at a parent’s pain. It’s immediate, contagious, and often self-protective: I’m upset because your upset disrupts my world.

“Compassion,” in Kaplan’s framing, is less reflex than achievement. It implies perspective-taking, emotional regulation, and a tolerance for ambiguity - capacities that adolescence (and what psychoanalysis would call ego development) helps consolidate. Compassion asks you to stay present with someone’s suffering without collapsing into it, making it about you, or rushing to fix it for your own relief. That’s why she places it “only after adolescence”: not because teenagers are uniquely heartless, but because the adolescent project is still self-definition. When identity is under construction, other people’s pain easily becomes material for comparison, threat, or performance.

The subtext carries a quiet critique of our culture’s demand for instant empathy. We often celebrate raw sensitivity as moral virtue, yet Kaplan suggests maturity is the real ethical milestone: the ability to hold another person’s experience as separate from your own, while remaining accountable to it. In an era of viral outrage and curated caring, she’s arguing that compassion is slower, less flashy, and harder to counterfeit.